Madam - Interview

  by John Clarkson

published: 1 / 12 / 2009

intro

Madam, who recently played a Pennyblackmusic Bands Night, is the project of London-based singer/songwriter and producer, Sukie Smith. John Clarkson speaks to her about Madam's debut album, 'In Case of Emergency', and her future plans for the group.

Madam is the project of Southend-born and now London-based singer/songwriter and producer, Sukie Smith. Madam was formed seven years ago by Smith primarily as a solo act, who played gigs initially with a fluctuating roll call of other musicians depending on their availability. In just recent months it has, however, expanded into a regular band that consists, as well as Smith on vocals and nylon string guitar, of Sarah Gill (cello, keyboards); John Robertson (guitars); Nick Bergin (bass); Jeff Townsin (drums) and latest recruit John Mercedo (laptop sounds). ‘In Case of Emergency’, Madam’s debut album, came out on Reveal Records in 2008, and, featuring cameo appearances from fifteen other musicians including former Rockingbird Sean Reed, uses an inventive artillery of instruments that, alongside guitars and drums, includes a cello, a stand-up bass, an organ, a piano and even wine glasses, bed springs and windscreen wipers. At one level delicately fragile, at another cinematic in tone, it is an album of smouldering, brooding late night tensions. Both wistfully beautiful and claustrophobically dark, it combines spooky and echoing atmospherics with sections of sultry elegance and other moments of sudden nerve-jangling discordance. Smith’s lyrics are bruised and obsessive, telling often of relationships having gone sour, but which are still relentlessly picked over and unable to be forgotten. ”I’ve spent so long without you/but I remember your skin,” she tells an ex-lover on the opening track, ‘Fall on Your Knees’. The whole album is enshrouded with a sense of insomniac restlessness, yet, while Smith is often the one who has been abandoned, she holds herse;f far from blameless for a lot of what has gone wrong. “I always knew that there were three/a ghost, you and me/I still see him as the air fills/the space behind you’ve been,” she confesses about a romance gone to the bad on ‘Superfast Highway’, while on the self-loathing ‘Dirty that Makes Me’ she admits, “How can I ask for promises/I never keep?” For all the introspection of ‘In Case of Emergency’, Sukie Smith is lively and extrovert and very funny in person. In an interview that took place a few days after Madam had played the first Pennyblackmusic Bands Night in two years at the Brixton Windmill in London, we spoke to her about ‘In Case of Emergency’ and where she hopes to take things next with Madam. PB : How long have you been involved in music? Is it something that you have been doing for years or something that you have come to more recently? SS: I have been making music for years, but until recently it has been my secret life. I am also an actress and nobody amongst my music friends knew that I was an actress, and nobody from the acting world knew that I was making music. I have always kept my two lives apart. I remember one night doing a gig in a pub and they had a TV playing in the corner and I made my whole band turn and look at something else so that they didn’t notice that I was in some stupid Lemsip commercial (Laughs). PB: You were in a play this summer, ‘Garage Band’, in Nottingham this summer, but you seem to have been concentrating less over the last two or three years on acting and more on making music. Is that the case? SS: Totally. There was a crossover where I got to write a soundtrack for a film called ‘Hush Your Mouth’ in 2006 for somebody that I had worked for as an actress. I broke my vow of silence (Laughs) and we ended up talking about what I had been really doing which was writing a lot of music. That was the transition really. I was able to use the songs that I had written for the soundtrack as demos to send out around record companies, and to get signed with Reveal. After that music and everything that comes with it –recording the album, promoting it and organising gigs and tours -has been completely all consuming. Everything else has had to take a back seat. PB: Were you in any bands before Madam or is this the first band that you have fronted? SS: I was in bedroom bands and rehearsal bands that never got anywhere, and little projects that I sang backing vocals for or played bass for, but nothing massive. PB: Why do you think in light of that Madam has taken off while your other bands didn’t? SS: Because I wasn’t in charge of the other bands (Laughs). I take responsibility for everything with Madam, so things get done. I am not waiting for anybody else to do it. I have been lucky that it has taken off as well as it has done. The other stuff was just me helping someone else. It was a bit like being an actor in a way where you just serve somebody else’s vision. Madam has always felt purer and more concentrated, but having said I don’t really feel that Madam is just a concentration on me or a huge ego thing. It is more sort of a sharing of something that has come out of my mind. Ultimately it is about the songs I guess. PB: On the subject of the songs you have obviously had to project yourself into the personalities and lives of others in your acting career. Are your music and lyrics entirely autobiographical or is some of it inspired by what you have observed? SS: None of it is inspired by what I have observed. I also think that is a misconception of what an actor does in some ways. The two aren’t comparable. The only thing that I think is worth taking from being an actor is the amount of discipline that you have and the understanding that there is a process. Say that something doesn’t work immediately it is not a disaster. You can still achieve something and get somewhere that is worthwhile. I definitely know that from rehearsing a play or something else that you can work at something until you can have a satisfying experience with it. When it comes to writing, unless it has a complete and utter integrity, it is as the person who has created it of no interest to me whatsoever. Anything else would feel repugnant to me. I was reading this interview the other day with another musician and he was saying that he had just written this album about this girl prostitute, and I wondered when reading if I could ever start to think in terms of stories or metaphors more. At the moment, however, I can’t bear the idea (Laughs). PB: One of the things that comes across from listening to ‘In Case of Emergency’ is not just how frankly honest it is, but also how refreshingly free it is of self pity. SS: Thank you for saying that. Sometimes I think that people think that is a bleeding heart album, but it is the opposite. It is a real like spotlight in my own face of how vile and stupid and twisted I sometimes think I am. I was keen on it to expose stuff that is never normally said. I see a lot of it as coming from a shadowy bit of the brain that is never quite allowed to come to the forefront. PB: Yet having said that you have a statement on the front page of your website which says that it is easier “to tell secrets when you are sometimes in disguise.” What did you mean by that SS: That was more due to the fact that I wouldn’t tell people that I was making music. Now that I have an album out and that is has been reviewed, I am quite happy to talk about who I am. I was thinking nobody will know who it is. I’ll hide behind the name of the band. No one will know that it is me. I will be completely honest, but without having to stand by it in some way because it will be disguised within the name of the band. PB: Why did you want to keep it in disguise who you were for years? SS: Because I thought that it might get corrupted in some ways by the idea that I am an actress. There is a lot of prejudice against actresses becoming musicians and vice versa. I didn’t want people thinking that it might be just some kind of ego thing. I have done of stuff that I am really proud of, but I have done a lot of shit TV as well and I always seem to end up apologising when someone says, “Are you an actress?” I am like, “I know. I am sorry” (Laughs). There are some people who have a nice pedigree in both like Tom Waits. I would like to think of myself as being ideally as someone like Mary Margaret O’Hara who always seems to do whatever they have to do at the time. She’s made films. She’s made an album. She’s collaborated with people on other things as well. It is her exploration of whatever it is that makes her creative that I relate to. PB: The critics had a very hard time pigeonholing you with ‘In Case of Emergency’ and putting you into a category. You have drawn comparisons with everyone from Kate Bush and Hope Sandoval to Nick Cave and Lou Reed. Your sound is quite unique. Do you think that is because you have come to prominence as a songwriter later in life, and you haven’t had to go through that thing which many 18 or 19 years olds starting out bands do in which they have to sound like someone? SS: I don’t know. That might be part of it. I think that it was primarily though because I made the album in isolation. As there was this secrecy around it I wasn’t part of a scene. I didn’t, however, set out trying to deliberately sound like somebody else. When I talk to people when they have started to make an album and they have an overall sound in mind, I find that very odd. When I approach a song, I usually instead have a vision for the way it should affect you or what you should experience from it. PB: You also self-produce your own music. How much experience did you have of production before you did the album. SS: None at all (Laughs). I started getting obsessive though about sound before I went into the studio and did a lot of reading about different producers and types of production work. I had all this theory in my head. I had seen the way in which a lot of people work on a film set or with a play and the deconstruction that happens before something comes together, so I had the bravery of vision which comes with that. I was probably a like a nerdy nine year old in the studio though, and I must have driven Chris Clarke who recorded and helped me to mix the album crazy (Laughs) . PB: How much of your music is conceived beforehand and how much of it is developed in the studio? SS: It is all conceived beforehand. There are accidents and inspiration that happens in the studio. I would say though that most of it is preconceived. It is changing now that I have got a band, but what I did for ‘In Case of Emergency’ was I would bring a musician in specifically to record a certain amount of material. No one else would be there. It would just be and them and I would sort of drip feed stuff out of them. PB: ‘In Case of Emergency’ is an album which involves a lot of instrumentation, yet at the same it is fairly minimalist in the sense you can hear clearly every single instrument involved in the recording. Was that something which you worked hard upon? SS: Yes. I had this rule that every instrument had to answer something else. The arrangements also answer the lyrics in a lot of ways. If the lyrics, for example, were lying as they do at a couple of points, I might make them sweet, but I would put some kind of shuddering horror underneath it on purpose, so that you would understand that there was a lie and a deception going on in the emotional content of the song. PB: You play sometimes as a solo act and a duo and as well as a group. Why do you do that? Is that just to keep things fresh and exciting for yourself or do you do that out of necessity as well? Sometimes it can be really difficult getting all the members of a group together. SS: I would out of preference play as a band always because I think that serves the songs better. For a while I played with a cello, just a cello and two vocals and that was very, very sweet and. It was practically very good for us as well because it was just cheaper for us to go around the country. It was me and another girl. We could stay in the same hotel rooms as a result of that and out of economics it made sense to do that. I have only played solo a couple of times and I quite liked that. I am not a very good guitarist and it was absolutely fucking terrifying, but also really liberating. There are more places open to you playing as a solo act or a duo, but you can do more with a band and I really prefer that. PB: You play unusually a nylon-string guitar. Why do you do that? SS: Because I really like the sound of it, much more than a steel string. I would quite like not to play guitar at all, but there is a side of me which can’t imagine not being there from the start of every song. It also seems to fit with my voice better. There is a kind of symmetry to it and the nylon string. PB: Only a few members of your current regular band appeared on ‘In Case of Emergency’ and often they only made brief appearances. How long has this line up of the group been playing together? SS: Not very long. Only a couple of months. I played a bit with Jeff Townsin who plays drums before I did the album and then did ‘In Case of Emergency’ largely without him, but he has now come back to play live. He brought Nick Bergin in on bass, who is absolutely brilliant. I have been playing together for about a year and a half. I have also been playing with our guitarist John Robertson for a while. We have also just expanded it slightly with John Mercedo from Queen of Swords, who is helping soundscape stuff with his laptop and who has become entirely essential as well. I really like what we sound like at the moment. It has melded together brilliantly. PB: ‘In Case of Emergency’ is an old-fashioned album in the sense that a lot of the work has gone into the packaging and the sleeve. How involved were you in that SS: Entirely I found this girl, Holly Bliss, who had done a website for this band called Pete and the Pirates and I really liked her work. I thought that she was quite illustrative in the way that she put things together. We sat and talked about what I wanted, and we came up with this idea of some kind of notebook or journal, so I put together a load of stuff that was in my room and gave her this huge packet of jewellery and pictures and belts and other things that seemed significant. We also typed us some of the lyrics and hand wrote others, and then she put the whole thing together. PB: It gives this impression both lyrically but in some of the photos on the sleeve of something that was spawned out of bedsit culture and alienation. Was that what you were aiming for? SS: It wasn’t what I was aiming for, but I recognised that is what it is. I didn’t have to go very far to look for inspiration as it all came from my room (Laughs), but it was very important to me that it was so personal. In some ways I thought that this was the only thing that I would ever get to do, and I wanted to tie it in with the album and for it to be as much an impression of stuff that goes unsaid for me as I could make it. PB: Are you working on a second album now? SS: In some ways we have done a second album, but not for Reveal. We did this thing for Bowers and Wilkins who are a speaker company. They commission twelve albums a year for which they pay for you to go to Real World Studios, Peter Gabriel’s studios, in Bath. You go there and you produce an album in a week which was a total fucking mind fuck to do so quickly, as ‘In Case of Emergency’ had taken months (Laughs). That really hurt. That, really, really hurt . We did it, rehearsed it live, played it live as much as possible and then for four days the engineer there and I mixed it PB: What are you going to do with that? SS: I don’t know what to do with that album. It existed for the month of that project, but I am not sure what to with it now. I thought that some of it might appear on a third album for Reveal, but I quite like the way things are moving forwards with the stuff I have written since then. Some of it is on MySpace site. I think that I might release some of the tracks on it as B sides or as an EP. It is beautifully recorded. I might self-release it as an album as well. PB: When do you see the next album coming out for Reveal? SS: I don’t know. Next year maybe. PB: Will it be recorded with your regular live band? SS: That will form the absolute core of it. So much effort has gone into explaining what I want there with them that I have now got a bit of a short cut when we come to recording it which is fantastic. We are also expanding a lot and there is real energy there. John Robertson is an animation director and artist. There is a whole visual element to the band which at the moment is unexplored, but which we really want to get into. Madam is becoming an increasingly bigger and larger project. I am really excited about where we are going with it. PB: Thank you.

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