Brave new girl

Life is hectic, admits Hannah Harding, better known these days by her stage name of Aldous. Hectic, strange and intense. Grant Smithies hears more.

“I’m in Spokane right now,” she says via cellphone from the middle of a scorching summer afternoon on her American tour. have no idea where that is, to be honest.” Washington. You must be in Washington. “Yeah, I think you’re right. A few hours from Seattle. We’re playing a show here tonight, then heading to Portland. It all blurs together after a while.”

This, I would venture, is a considerable understatement. Aldous Harding is officially a Very Big Deal right now, and there’s little time for rest.

Recorded with long-time PJ Harvey collaborator John Parish and released on influential UK indie label 4AD, Harding’s second album, Party, has made her a must-see live proposition from Berlin to Baltimore, New York to Newcastle, London to Lisbon.

Even Spokane gets a look-in. The former Lyttelton folkie has been packing out live shows wherever she plays and receiving rapturous reviews.

She is, quite suddenly, a star, blazing bright. How does that feel?

“You know, I really don’t think about it like that. I’m just focused on getting to the end of each show and feeling like we’ve done a good job when we walk off stage. And a perfect show isn’t necessarily about making the audience feel good. I know I’ve done my job well if I’ve made people feel… interesting. I like to leave them a little stunned.”

I last talked to Harding a year ago, before all this drama kicked off. She was based in Bristol at the time, and had just gotten home after an epic nine-hour recording session with “a choir of screaming women”.

Ex-boyfriend Marlon Williams had just taken her out for dinner. She was knackered, and planned to lie on her bed, listening to Bach, until sleep claimed her. But first, we had a long, rambling conversation that touched on many things.

Now 26, the daughter of expat Canadian folk singer Lorina Harding, she spoke of feeling “frail and wary and anxious and unstable” for much of her late teens/early 20s, and how this had fed into her self-titled 2014 debut album – a collection of winningly weird southern gothic songs recorded in Lyttelton and delivered in a tremulous warble so soft, it seemed almost apologetic.

She spoke of her tendency to get manic on too much Red Bull before going on stage, the caffeine overload helping her access the right sort of tense, blasted headspace to deliver that album’s “cursed and witchy” ballads.

She spoke of her surprise when that record became something of an underground hit, and she was suddenly faced with interviewers who expected her to be very hard work indeed. The morbid murder ballads and dark symbolism of that album led many people to imagine her as some humourless, permafrowning goth.

“I’m actually hilarious,” she told me at the time, and she was – her wit plainly evident as she ranged around far and wide between yawns, cracking jokes about past troubles with drugs, alcohol and shaky mental health, no topic off limits.

Harding struck me as a tough nut with a soft centre; a survivor who’d come through some hard times and emerged with a renewed faith in her own ability to take on difficult challenges.

Six months later, I heard the song she’d been working on that day with that screeching choir – the new album’s title track, Party. It was a straight-up brain melter, starting out in a clearing in the woods where you thought bad things were certain to

happen, but ending up as some sort of declaration of undying love.

Somewhere along the way, Harding notes that “stones smell good when you cuddle them”.

The song was compellingly peculiar, and surrounded by others that were equally potent. Her sound had evolved hugely. It was richer, less bleak, more nuanced and confident. No wonder so many reviewers lost their minds.

“Nothing less than amazing,” trumpeted The

Observer. “An instant classic. An arresting vocalist whose mannered delivery and intense themes defy obvious influence.”

“Extraordinary,” reckoned The Guardian. “Her performances strike that rare balance between fragility and full-blown possession. Her album creates a very particular headspace of desire, paranoia and possibility.”

The New York Times noted: “Her live shows started with curious audiences and ended with rapt ones.”

Social media cranked out a glowing commentary, too. Lorde tweeted to her 4.8 million followers that Harding’s song Imagining My Man was a “soft flurry of gut punches. I think Aldous is the most interesting musician around.”

What does Harding herself make of all this praise? Does she read her own reviews?

“Not really, no,” she says. “I read the ones that my manager sends though and says, ‘You’ll like this one.’ And it’s not like I enjoy just the positive reviews, either. I like reading things where someone’s looked at what I do with some honesty, and maybe been challenged by it, and they have something to say that shows they’ve thought about it, even if they don’t necessarily like it.”

Those who didn’t like it, for some strange reason, seemed to be mostly middle-aged blokes from Harding’s homeland. Indeed, the contrast between off-shore adulation and a more conflicted response here in New Zealand couldn’t have been more striking.

The flashpoint came in May, when she appeared live on British TV before an audience of millions on

Later… With Jools Holland. Harding’s performance of the song Horizon was bold, challenging, deliberately uncomfortable.

Dressed all in white, face contorted in fury, she was a musical method actor, the emotional turmoil at the heart of the song amplified by her posture and facial expressions.

It was as dramatic as a car crash, genuinely unsettling, pretentious in the best sense of the word.

Offshore, the performance was mostly celebrated as a triumph. But here at home, many seemed embarrassed that one of our own had been witnessed behaving so strangely on the world stage.

Around the same time, a high-profile local critic, Simon Sweetman, deemed Harding “the Florence Foster Jenkins of Folk”, a reference to an American socialite notorious for her terrible opera singing. Rather than offer any considered opinion of her

album, he posted a YouTube clip entitled “Funny Goats Screaming Like Humans”.

Social media flared up with other detractors, most of them conservative male trad-rock fans of a certain age. Then Harding’s defenders waded in, many of them women and/or fellow musicians who noted how tiresomely sexist and provincial the whole debate seemed.

Ultimately, who cares, right? Haters gonna hate. But it must have been a strange business for Harding to witness unfolding from afar.

“To be honest, I didn’t know about that for ages after it happened. But let’s get one thing straight, Grant. I don’t need people to like me. I clearly believe in myself enough to be doing this as relentlessly as I am, and even if I sometimes have no f…ing idea where I’m headed, that doesn’t make what I do any less important to me. If people don’t like it, I don’t feel wronged by that. We don’t all like the same things, and also, I didn’t make a commitment to those people. I made a commitment to myself that I’d stick at this and not let weakness in too quickly, that I’d do the best shows I could and make the best songs I can make. People have a right to feel whatever way they want to feel, but I’m just trying to move forward on my own path.”

Her early steps along that path have been well documented elsewhere. Harding played with Christchurch string band The Eastern, spent time in a duo alongside Port Chalmers folk singer Nadia Reid, was eventually “discovered” by Anika Moa busking in Geraldine and offered a support slot on stage.

Her debut solo album and the overseas showcase tours that followed generated multiple offers from offshore record labels. Harding decided to go with venerated UK indie 4AD – past and current home to a host of musical luminaries, from Bauhaus, Pixies and Cocteau Twins to Bon Iver, Grimes, Future Islands and The National.

Deeply impressed by the musical game-changer that was PJ Harvey’s 2011 album Let England Shake, she approached Bristol-based producer John Parish and sent through some demos.

He said yes. And now here we are, with Party, which strikes me as a diverse and gripping musical exploration of Harding’s unusual personality.

The best songs are as spare as they are compelling, floating impressionistic lyrical phrases over minimal arrangements built from a few piano chords, some finger-picked guitar, a few deep thuds of bass, simple beats from a drum machine and burnished honks of saxophone.

Harding’s vocal tone can be fragile and childlike, as airy as Astrud Gilberto, slippery like a jazz singer, fearsome as a bad dream. You can hear the ghosts of other polarising singers – Nico, Joanna Newsom, Bjork, Vashti Bunyan, Linda Perhacs, Nina Simone – flitting through her uneasy love songs.

And she’s still hilarious. Witness the video for her single Blend, in which Harding gyrates in a teensy cowgirl outfit, firing plastic six-shooters, the mood jammed midway between sexy and awkward, the whole shebang a knowing remake of the famous

scene in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 film Apocalypse

Now, where strippers pile out of helicopters to entertain the troops.

The song was written the night before it was recorded, in that Bristol Airbnb where I’d phoned her last year.

“Blend was funny, right? I’m glad you noticed that. I came up with the idea pretty swiftly, based on that bit in Apocalypse Now, which is my favourite movie. Then I got the outfit made and spent, like, eight hours dancing on a Lazy Susan.”

I imagine it was good practice for the rigours of such a relentless touring schedule. Have her songs evolved, I wonder, after all these live shows?

“We’ll change the tempo, you know, and other little stuff, though I’m very particular. But when you’re touring in this heat, six days a week, you have to let yourself get a bit looser. The intensity backs off a little. Like, I used to be obsessed with keeping all of my white stage clothes really white and ironed. Laundry was my thing. But now I’m like, you know what – it’s just impossible! I don’t wear makeup on stage any more. I wear T-shirts. I sweat all through my stuff. I only care about one thing right now, and that’s serving the songs. That, and making the next record.”

She’s managed to write a few songs while on tour, and hopes to write more when the American tour finishes and she moves on to Europe.

“Most of the next album’s already written, and I’ll probably try to record early next year. I’ve pulled together a lot of half-arsed references of what I’d like to achieve, but I’m not going to tell you about any of that, in case I change direction entirely. And you’d rather wait and see, right?”

Right. I have no doubt the next record will be worth the wait. In the meantime, there’s no let-up in her live schedule. After her US and European appearances, Harding returns home in late November for a short New Zealand tour.

She is also nominated for four gongs at the Vodafone New Zealand Music Awards (November 16) – Album of the Year, Best Solo Artist, Breakthrough Artist of the Year and Best Alternative Artist – and has been confirmed as a headliner for the NZ, Australia and Singapore legs of the upcoming Laneway Festival.

It’s relentless, but Harding soldiers on, winning over audiences wherever she plays. I admire her courage, her determination, her resolve. It’s a tough thing she’s doing, and it must be exhausting.

“Yeah, well… given some of the reviews back in New Zealand, it seems like just watching me do it is pretty tiring for some people.”

She laughs, and I do too. “Really, I’m gonna make the music I’m making, and people will say whatever they want to say. I can’t be worrying too much what other people think. There’s a lot still to do and I just need to crack on.”