Music

Music Becky Hill: The Powerhouse at LCR

by phoebe lucas

Becky Hill is one of the top pop artists of the century. With hit after hit in the charts, it’s no wonder her gig at UEA’s LCR was sold out. With a voice like hers, the LCR was an ideal venue that truly showcased her vocal talent and stage presence.

Before Becky took to the stage on October 15th, we had a set from R&B soul singer Richard Fairlie. A charismatic singer-songwriter, Richard intertwines the sounds of hip-hop and R&B in his music.

After his set, Fairlie came down into the crowd to take photos and chat to his fans. With reactions like “Richard signed my hand, I’m never going to wash again!”, I’m sure Norwich will be a gig he remembers.

About half an hour later, Becky Hill walked on stage and opened with the classic, Heaven on my Mind. Immediately the crowd were singing along and in the mood for the next hour and a half of Becky Hill bangers!

She then dove straight into Afterglow, an unexpected surprise as I assumed she’d close the gig with this single. An excellent choice from her nonetheless, as her engagement with the crowd heightened.

Hill goes on to talk about her debut album, Only Honest On The Weekend, released this year that she encouraged everyone to go home and listen to. Becky spoke of how proud she was to finally have her own album and proceeded to share the vulnerability she felt writing particular songs like lessons and perfect people. The latter being an especially emotional rendition, stripped back to its acoustic form with just Becky, her guitar, and honest lyricism.

It’s also worth highlighting how

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Becky mentioned the exhaustion of doing 17 shows in 3 weeks, as well as on this particular night having an ear infection in her left ear. Considering she didn’t feel 100%, there’s no doubt she absolutely gave it her all.

There was a good mix of new songs off the album as well as playing all her well-known hits, so no one was disappointed. Before explaining how she doesn’t do encores, Becky ended her set with Wish You Well, a perfect final choice in my opinion.

Often branded as a ‘singles’ singer, it was clear Becky was determined to prove those wrong and that she can in fact write her own album. With questions like “why release a debut album now, after being in the industry for ten years?” Hill had high expectations to meet which she absolutely smashed at the LCR.

Why Bands like Jungle are Important in 2021

By finlay porter

When Tom McFarland and Josh Lloyd-Watson burst onto the scene under the name Jungle in 2014, it seemed that the UK’s electronic scene had a new pioneer. A few years later, they returned with their second album For Ever, a slow, melancholic affair largely inspired by both members of the duo’s recent breakups. That was 2018. Now, in 2021, after the past eighteen months of lethargy, they are back with a powerful message.

Loving In Stereo (2021) is Jungle’s latest studio album, and is a punchy and vibrant collection of grooves dedicated to positivity. Gone is the mournful self-indulgence of For Ever, replaced with funky beats and a broader soundscape, with accompanying strings, choirs, and even guitars all adding to the blend of genres. While the album is still unmistakably Jungle, it is clear they are developing their sound through collaboration with other artists. Bas and Priya Ragu accentuate Jungle’s influences of hip-hop and soul respectively. And they have broadened their group into a mysterious collective of passionate musicians which likens them to upand-coming group SAULT (whose producer Inflo worked with Jungle on this album).

Jungle’s passion for innovation and collaboration has extended beyond their music into their music videos – having produced one for each song on the album. The videos, set in an old fort in Dover, are each shot in one take. The choreography is above all else free and contemporary, and it’s inspiring to see Jungle showcasing some of the UK’s finest in physical theatre and cinematography – an industry which was hit exceptionally hard during the pandemic.

Besides continuing to drive innovation in their scene, and collaborating with other artists, Jungle’s latest album is chiefly important due to its message of positivity. The album was forecasted by singles Keep Moving and Talk About it. Both are upbeat dancehall records, embodying the therapeutic aspects of music whilst conveying a serious message about overcoming sadness and conflict in our relationships. Jungle have found their groove again and have packed this record with upbeat tracks that are bound to get your foot tapping.

Positivity is in high demand in 2021, and Jungle have delivered just that in a package which reaffirms the collective’s position as innovators in the UK music scene.

18 Music Newton Faulkner at The Waterfront, with Support Acts Nati Dreddd and Sam Brookes

By sam gardham

Nati Dreddd played lively, strummed pop songs and two covers. She seemed nervous but belted rowdily in her own Scottish accent, which is a welcome thing in a world of bland transatlantic voices.

Her best-performed song was her last, an old Gaeliclanguage stomper. She said, “It’s really fast, I cannae breathe when I sing it so I might pass out.”

Sam Brookes: pensive-sounding, drifty singersongwriter. He had a massive voice – in falsetto he went part theremin, part whale song, and part Thom Yorke.

His earnestness was impressive. Singing a long high note with his eyes closed and his mouth hanging open, he looked unguarded and animalistic. He said he completely forgot where he was.

Then Newton Faulkner – who stood amid a semicircular one-man band setup of electronic drum pad, two guitars, three microphone stands, two keyboards, and foot pedalboards.

His twenty-one song set was drawn from across his seven albums. Aside from a cover of Teardrop by Massive Attack, it was all self-written – mostly pop anthems with big choruses, energetically performed throughout.

This sound is endorphin sugar for people who listen to him. Tonight’s stage-to-back-wall audience called out requests and a couple of declarations of love. The words to old cigarette-lighters-in-the-air hits like Dream Catch Me were chanted out. At times the atmosphere was of a cosy campfire singalong transplanted to a sevenhundred-capacity venue, and he encouraged this by separating the audience into three for parts of some songs, giving each group a different repeating phrase to sing.

‘Cosy’ is a word very applicable to Newton Faulkner. He’s never radically changed his music. You know what to expect from him, he’s reliable. And yet he’s mindful to try to avoid monotony: tonight, using live loops played on his drum pads and/or keyboards, he varied the textures of many songs. Sometimes this went well, as in the several instances when he layered intricate guitar loops, but it also threatened to bring its own sameyness: the pounding four-to-the-floor bass drum and tambourine hits used to invigorating effect on opener Smoked Ice Cream later got reused too often. Perhaps he would be better-served by a band.

These ornamentations aside, his guitar playing speaks for itself. His tapping on I Need Something was how Eddie Van Halen might have sounded if he’d played on a Damien Rice album. And with Hit the Ground Running, Faulkner gave an acrobatic justification of his singing, which has grown in skill over the years.

Despite his affableness, he seemed slightly wary of the audience: at first he played with his eyes fixed leftof-centre on the far wall, and he later told a cautionary story about meeting an unnerving fan. But he must know most of them are a benign bunch. A striking moment came toward the hushed end of I Need Something when much of the crowd unexpectedly sang along, ‘I need something to believe in / because I don’t believe in myself’.

Interview with Newton Faulkner

By sam gardham

Newton Faulkner - English singer, guitarist, and songwrite - and I are talking about the song Killing Time from his new album. It’s a cathartic, hopeful anthem about the difficulty of last year’s lockdowns.

“I think I take the responsibility of putting things out into the world quite seriously,” he says. “It definitely intensified when I had a child – my son’s ten. And also just generally in life, I think the stuff that you put out into the world tends to loop back around. It’s a mixture of the butterfly effect and just generally wanting to make people around me happy. So I believe that if you hold the door open for someone they’ll be nicer to everyone else for the rest of the day, and it’s a ripple that runs through everything.”

This remark is characteristic of him. He’s a very pleasant chap – a fact clear as he speaks over Zoom from his home recording studio where, emblematic of his boyish enthusiasm, a toy Optimus Prime helmet is mounted on the wall.

“But then,” he continues, “there’s a song on [the previous album] called Alright, and the main tagline is ‘What if it’s not going to be alright?’”And in fact, it hasn’t been.

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EDITOR: Tom manning

“Now, I don’t want to go too deep into this, but after the [new] album was finished I basically had a small mental breakdown. There was a huge amount of intense personal stuff that happened just before the lockdowns and during the first few there were some fairly horrendous things going on. It was bad, a bad time. And all of that was while I was making this record. A running theme of the record is acceptance, which now seems ironic because it’s turned out that the reason I was singing about it was because I knew it was actually what I needed to do. I thought I was already doing it – but wasn’t. It turned out what I was actually doing was locking it in a small box and just being like right, it’s only going to open if I get totally pushed over the edge. It was very much an old-school British stiff upper lip ‘Oh, carry on, let’s keep going, moooove’. And then when I’d finished making this record suddenly two, maybe even three years’ worth of emotional baggage hit me like an absolute brick and I totally broke.”

He’s candid about what seems to have been both a fundamental difficulty in his life and an integral part of his identity, for years:

“You have an album that does ridiculously well in your early 20s, you just get thrown out into a whole tornado of a world that didn’t slow down for such a long time. And I think I didn’t really have to think about much other than just keeping going for like a really long time. I remember when it stopped and I was like, what is this thing. Don’t I have to be somewhere? No you don’t, you’ve been working solidly for six or seven years, so we want you to take a break. It really panicked me, I was like no I can’t … Entertainment in general is such a strange way to spend your time. You can really dig yourself some holes. Most people tend to go mad at one point or another.”

He mentions that, for a long while, he excessively relied on performing as a source of personal validation. The absence of live music last year meant he had to deal with this.

The opening track of the new album Sinking Sand is troubled in tone but aside from some introspective moments, the other songs mostly don’t convey the darker state of mind he had while recording them – at least, not musically. Repeatedly, there is sumptuous production and colourfully outsized choruses – a friendly, extroverted personality translated into sound. It’s clear that music is a positive force for him, a way of usefully repurposing personal difficulty. And, while we’re still talking about his gigging experience, he makes sure to emphasise why he lives this vocation in the first place: “I absolutely fucking love it.”

I ask him about his favourite gigs he’s done – one of which, he says, was the Albert Hall in Manchester three years ago, where “something magical happened”: “I almost felt like I was watching it … I think there’s an element of outof-body experience with gigs, because you have to try to put yourself in the minds of people watching and try and work out where you should go next … And it’s those moments. It’s definitely that that drives me more.”

“As a conduit for connection?” I ask.

“Yeah, music as a form of communication.” So, I ask why is the new album called Interference (of Light)?

“I started just digging around and found this scientific principle of the interference of light, which is when light hits oil on water – and it’s these colours that appear, these kind of swirls. And I got really excited by the idea of trying to recreate that musically. Because it’s a general lack of rules in terms of the ways that the colours are: they’re not geometric patterns – they’re very loose and swirly. And they’re very intense. Which I really like the idea of musically, because it definitely filtered through the whole album in how I approached the instrumentation. Because, normally I’m like, well we don’t have brass on anything else, so we can’t suddenly have loads of brass on one track, it would be weird. But with this I was like, do you know what, it’s just another bold splash of colour … Like Sinking Sand – loads of the tracks are out on their own stylistically and sonically.”

Faulkner is discernibly in a different phase of his musical career to when he started out. He says that with this album he’s moved past the need to centre his songwriting around the acoustic guitar, and that the more accessible, homemade aspect of modern music production has been creatively liberating. And yet the public only gets to hear a narrow sliver of his growing eclecticism: when I ask if he would consider going completely left-field with future music, he explains that there’s plenty of things he’s recorded “with weird little instruments” which he hasn’t shared with the world because they’re “just really weird”. Intriguing – I hope he releases them one day.

Photo: Wikimedia Commons