ANGELICA MODE
Dublin, Los Angeles and… Dunfermline – two cities and one town perhaps not previously connected, until through the music of Brian Hughes, aka Angelica Mode. The young Irishman – who swapped his native country for Scotland aged 17, first living in Edinburgh then Fife – only properly began writing songs under his new solo alter-ego at the start of the pandemic last year. “I didn’t want to rest on my laurels not knowing how long the lockdown would last,” he says. Hughes’ previous project, indie-rock band Screamin’ Whisper, had wound down naturally by March 2020. “Surprisingly nothing at all to do with Covid-19,” he explains, “we just did a tour and left it at that.
“I had some songs that had never fitted in with Screamin’ Whisper,” Hughes goes on, “so I directed my focus there, towards what became Angelicamode.ithasalotmoreelectronic elements like synthesisers than other things I’d done up until that point, but it’s gone down really well so far. I selfreleased a single in July 2020
called Your Love Is All the Rage, which subsequently got me signed to a label in LA”
An EP for his new Californian label Sound X 3 is in the works for later in the year. His next single Don’t Make Me Wait comes out before that, at the end of April. It’ll cap what’s been a surprisingly very productive year in lockdown, and first 12 months for Angelica Mode, which has also seen Hughes reach the semi-finals of the International Songwriting Com
petition and become one of 25 acts across the UK selected for a mentoring programme run by the Ivors Academy, which represents songwriters and composers as well as hosting the prestigious Ivor Novello Awards.
For his Scotsman Session, Hughes chose an older Angelica Mode song which he thinks offers the best introduction to his music. “I wrote Porcelain after a bit of a dry patch in my songwriting,” he recalls. “I can still remember the feeling of relief when I finished it.”