The strange world of Aldous Harding: ‘I’ve always been driven by fear’
Look into Aldous Harding’s eyes. It’s hard not to. To be fixed by her gaze is to be profoundly unnerved. This is a large part of the appeal of this New Zealand musician, whose music is as disquietingly beautiful and unsettling as her image.
On stage and in videos, the strangeness of Harding is intensified. Take the video for her new single, Zoo Eyes: she’s dressed like an overpainted clown from a Jodorowsky film. At festivals this summer, she wore burnt-orange workmen’s clothes and a porkpie hat, her eyes twitching, her mouth gurning like a silent film comedian. If felt like watching the deeply peculiar child of Patti Smith and Buster Keaton or a wayward musical niece of Kristin Hersh and PJ Harvey.
Despite the avant-garde approach, Harding is popular: she’s sold out shows for her tour and headlines London’s Roundhouse next month. Young women who present themselves as she does, daring you to turn away, are rare these days. She’s also a discombobulating, impressive presence one-onone, as I discover.
Terra Nova in Roath Park, Cardiff, is a lakeside cafe, noisy with mamgus (Welsh grandmas) entertaining their grandchildren. Harding is moving seats when I arrive to meet her: kindly giving up her big table for a couple. I’m rain-soaked and I apologise for looking damply unprofessional. “Oh no, you look perfect,” she says. The phrase sounds sweet in her mouth, but also slightly sinister.
Harding lives nearby with her boyfriend, Huw Evans, AKA H Hawkline. (Before dating Harding, Evans went out, for 10 years, with Welsh musician
Cate Le Bon; the two women share band members these days, which must make arranging tours interesting.) But Harding doesn’t know what the local scene’s like, she says – just as she didn’t in New Zealand: “I spend… too much time… in my own head.”
She talks very slowly, deliberately, precisely. She’s learning Welsh, she adds (she says it in the Welsh language, word by word, thinking her way through the sentence). “I’m very interested in how things sound. The details. Yes.”
Born in 1990, Harding began life as Hannah Sian Topp. Harding is her stepfather’s surname; he married her Canadian folk singer and puppeteer mum, Lorina, when Hannah was a teenager. A question about her stepfather’s influence on her life, which she has mentioned elsewhere, is rebuffed, as are others; she doesn’t like to answer questions “if I don’t feel like the answer’s going to come out in a natural, musical way”.
Her mother remains a huge part of her life. She was the martial arts master twirling sticks in the video to Harding’s breakthrough 2017 single, Horizon; her daughter appears in the video wearing black, eyes red-rimmed, possibly reaching out to her mother (although, as always with Harding’s lyrics, the clues suggesting this are undone by other riddles and red herrings).
A clip from 2009 is also online, of Harding singing with her mother in a Wellington bar. The song, Exactly What to Say, is one they cowrote about a typically fraught mother-teenage daughter relationship. “You think that I don’t listen, that I don’t have a clue,” Lorina sings, tenderly, “but the things that happened to me back then/ I don’t want them to happen to you.” Harding duets, a ponytailed, hoodie-wearing 19-year-old, singing towards the floor about wanting to learn from her own mistakes. Aldous arrived a few years later. “The name Hannah Harding sounded so much like a country singer. And Aldous…” She gurns. “It may have been me seeing an Aldous Huxley book, but there was no deep association. I just thought it was interesting and looked good written down. And I just slipped into her and didn’t look back, as corny as that sounds.”
Harding hints at darker moments during her early 20s: times when she was “drinking too much” and when things felt overwhelming; early interviews mention her taking acid at church and the songs on her eponymous debut are full of cries for help. That album certainly begins joltingly, with Stop Your Tears, which she sang then like a long-lost, broken folk singer. “I will never marry, my love,” it begins. “I will die waiting for the bells/ Death, come pull me under water/ I have nothing left to fear from hell.”
“I’ve always been, like a lot of people, driven by fear,” Harding says of that time. “Always focusing on the fire on the rope, as opposed to what the rope is coming from.” She feels she’s changing now. And by 2017’s Party (which documented her breakup with New Zealand singer-songwriter Marlon Williams, albeit abstractly), Aldous was getting bolder. Her performance of Horizon on Later… With JoolsHolland saw her wild-eyed, gesticulating theatrically, practically spitting into the camera. “It felt as if someone was like, ‘Can I have a bite of you?’ and I was like, ‘Have it all, then. Is that what you want?’ And then, that feeling just went on and on.” She was pleasantly surprised people responded to her, she says, “but also I wasn’t surprised”.
Then came bolder artistic choices. In the video to Blend (2017), she dances in turquoise hotpants and bra, the camera objectifying her body as she glares at the viewer (comments on her YouTube page are, wisely, switched off). I recognised this as an outfit inspired by the Playboy Bunny scene from Apocalypse Now, I say, and she suddenly beams like a child. “Do you love Apocalypse Now? I took to that film like a child with a toy! I felt like it was speaking to me and only me. It was like a puzzle. And a comfort.”
Why a comfort? Maybe it was the presence of Kurtz at the end of the river, she suggests. “The idea they were moving towards dread.” And that was a comfort? “Yes! Do you ever have dread? Do you ever look at your life and go, ‘Oh, God, there’s so much more time to go!’?”
I’m the opposite, I say – worried about life going too fast.
“But are you open? I’m all, ‘Oh, my God, there’s so many hours in the day. So many years in my life left.” She says later: “There are very few things in the world that make me feel a feeling, really.”
We discuss music that’s made her feel things. Meat Loaf, she says: “I love how the poetry and the strength of his voice made up for how ridiculous it was.” Neil Young: “If I’m feeling confused, I always listen to him, and go, ‘That’s how things should sound. In the sense that it’s music that leaves me hopelessly baffled by his intentions, his secrets.” She was also a huge fan of Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes from TLC. “She was so weird, so strange and so cute, but she was not vulnerable. I also realised I dance the way I do because of her: the arms up, the hips forward.” She shows me, jutting out her chin.
Her recent album,Designer, also has a foot twisting gently in the realm of pop, although its catchy songs still have