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July 29, 2019
The Independent on Beatie Wolfe's Montagu Square #tbt
Beatie Wolfe interview: Musician explains why she's selling new album Montagu Square on a shirt, but not in record shops
John Walsh meets a pioneering songwriter Beatie Wolfe
Montagu Square, the second album by the Anglo-American singer-songwriter Beatie Wolfe, is out this week, but you won’t find it on the shelves in HMV. You can download it from iTunes, Amazon and Google Play, you can buy a lyric book with a CD insert from her website, and you can get the tracks on a deck of “intelligent” cards provided you’ve got an Android phone on which to play them. Oh, and it’s also available as a shirt.
Ms Wolfe, 27, takes an unusual approach to the dissemination of music. Though her songs of love, yearning and regret are bouncily melodic in a nicely old-fashioned, verse-and-chorus way, and her inspirations are 20th-century – Beatles, Nina Simone, Otis Redding – her productions are crazily techno-futuristic. Her first album, 8ight, for example, was available as a 3D interactive album mobile app, available on iPhone.
“People ask why I’m so technically innovative, but I don’t think I am,” the elfin Wolfe told me when we met, “I just have a fondness for bringing together things that enhance each other.”
Her new album’s titular address is a rock’n’ roll shrine. Ringo Starr leased the ground floor of No 34 Montagu Square in 1965, when The Beatles were two years into their world-conquering career, and sub-let it to Paul McCartney, who wrote “Eleanor Rigby” there. When Paul left, Ringo sub-let it to Jimi Hendrix who wrote “The Wind Cries Mary” there – but he and his manager, Chas Chandler, were kicked out for painting the walls black, while tripping. In 1968, John Lennon and Yoko Ono moved in, after Lennon had split from his family home. Remember the couple’s naked bottoms on the cover of the Two Virgins album? They were photographed at No 34. As I say: a shrine.
Wolfe decided to record a live single at the flat after meeting its owner, David Mason, who runs Anthony Sinclair, the Mayfair tailors who supplied James Bond’s suits in the early 007 films: another Sixties connection. In a further elaboration, Wolfe linked up with a textile label called Beatwoven who use audio technology to transfer sound patterns to textiles.
Last month, veteran music hacks and young whippersnappers from Wired and BBC6 stood in Mason’s flat, surrounded by photos of Lennon, McCartney and Hendrix, and watched Ms Wolfe record her gorgeous new single, “Take Me Home”, and have it transferred sonically on to a fabric that will become a shirt, sold by Mason to gentlemen clients, and a silk gown worn by Wolfe herself. “Everything worked together that night,” she recalled. “The live recording, the history of the room, the collective memories of everyone there, the clapping – it’s all in the geometrical pattern that’s being woven in silk.”
She grew up in London surrounded by counterculture luminaries. Her father, Rick Watson, an antiquarian bookseller from Portland, Oregon, moved to California and, through his contacts with Lawrence Ferlinghetti and the Beat poets, befriended the Rolling Stones. “I found out about the Stones connection only a few years ago,” says Wolfe. “I thought my father was just a dry old bookseller, but ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ came on the car radio one day and he said, ‘There’s a line about me in this song.’ It was, ‘And I laid traps for troubadours/ To get killed before they reached Bombay.’ When Dad and Chris Jagger tagged along with the Stones in India, the band played pranks on them because they were annoying whimsical poets.” Her mother, Virginia Boston, was a journalist, who co-wrote a study of punk with Danny Baker.
It wasn’t surprising that Wolfe embraced music precociously early. She wrote her first song, the sapphically titled “You Can’t Get Away from Me, Girl,” at eight. At 15, she sang in a grunge band called Aurum. “Very dark, very angsty stuff, with titles like ‘Troubled,’ ‘Misery,’ ‘Asylum’ and ‘Let it Boil’ – I remember thinking, ‘When I’m older, will I look back and think this was my best contribution to the world?’”
Studying English at Goldsmiths College, London, she wrote her third-year dissertation on the poetry of Leonard Cohen, in the teeth of teacherly dispproval. It was posted online, where it came to the attention of Cohen’s agent, Robert Cory. With his encouragement, Wolfe set the singer’s poem “A Thousand Kisses Deep” to music; she’s still waiting for Cohen’s reaction, but her dearest wish is to open for the Montreal Miserablist on his next tour.
A striking woman with a confident guitar style and a voice that can carry off husky intros and belting climaxes, she doesn’t appear much on the summer festival circuit. Why not? “I like festivals provided you can have control of the sound, that you can feel a sense of intimacy with the audience, and that the lyrics can be heard. They’re fundamental to me. I don’t want the words to be lost in the white noise.”
What does she most want to happen to her? A No 1 single? “I don’t care about that stuff,” she says pertly. “I’ve always wanted to make music for generations to come, to leave behind a great catalogue. And on the entrepreneurial side, to open people’s eyes to what music can do.”
Beatie Wolfe at the Saatchi Gallery w/ CRAFT Magazine
Great to be Crafts magazine¹s first-ever Music Club interviewee. I'm looking forward to speaking at the Saatchi Gallery with CRAFT Magazine's Editor Grant Gibson about 'The Art of Music' and singing some songs
"Friday 3 February at 17.30 In the Art of Music Crafts magazine¹s first-ever Music Club will feature singer songwriter and innovator Beatie Wolfe talking to editor Grant Gibson about her relationship with technology and making. And she'll be playing a few tunes from her new album too. " -- Craft Magazine
This interview is part of COLLECT (Collect: The International Art Fair for Contemporary Objects) which is now in its 13th edition click to buy tickets or email enquires
Music Ally profile Beatie Wolfe in thier end of year review
DECEMBER 22, 2016: BEATIE WOLFE ON BRINGING BACK ‘THE ART OF MUSIC IN THE DIGITAL AGE’
Beatie Wolfe (@beatiewolfe) on bringing back 'the art of music in the digital age’ https://t.co/XWVFIxZrsa pic.twitter.com/QgMvlNV2M5
— MusicAlly (@MusicAlly) 22 December 2016
or highlights below...
“I had no plans to make a musical jacket or do a deck of cards. Or even make an album! But then I was at an event and met this rock-star tailor who’d just moved into Yoko and Lennon’s first home…”
Beatie Wolfe is telling Music Ally about the train of events that led to her most recent album Montagu Square, which was released as a deck of cards with integrated NFC chips, before being transformed into a wearable jacket.
The British singer/songwriter is an example of an artist who found 2016 to be fertile territory for partnership with technology companies to find new ways to get her music heard and talked about – without detracting from the songs.
“When you do something that’s a gimmick, people see through it. When there’s a really great narrative, a reason for doing what you’re doing, it can be so strong,” says Wolfe, whose exploration of tech led to her nomination as best digital artist in Music Ally’s awards in November.
“I never saw my musical career as being something limited to writing songs, being in the studio and performing. I saw it as a 360-degree artistic vision. I really wanted to extend the music into other spaces, but only with the right partnerships and the right fits,” she adds.
“It’s a way of trying to bring back some of the art of music in the digital age. That’s been the intention with everything I’ve done. When music has become quite compressed, both literally and creatively, how do you bring back some of the stuff that gives it that emotional charge?”
Wolfe is one of several artists this year to have talked about digital music in the context of vinyl – or rather, of the “ceremony” of playing a vinyl record.
“You’d open the record and think about the world of the album. You’d put yourself in a frame of mind where you’d create time to listen to it, without tons of things going on in the background,” she says.
“So how do you bring tangibility, storytelling and ceremony into a digital music experience so that people want to switch things off and make time for it?”
2016 was also the year when Wolfe forged a partnership with Bell Labs, the Nokia-owned research company with a storied tradition of technological inventions.
She used its “human-digital orchestra” platform to incorporate crowds into her live performances, and is plotting a new project with the company for her next album in 2017.
“We are creating an entirely new way to experience an album, that will be streamed out of one of the quietest rooms in the world – the anechoic chamber in Bell Labs. They will be inventing new technology for the release: it will be a complete world-first! But the music still comes first,” she says.
“The music for me is the heart of everything, but that’s actually why I’m doing a lot of these weird and wonderful things. I want people to be excited about music, as I am.”
“The words, the music, the production: that for me is so important and should never be compromised in any way. The music comes first, and the tech stuff I see as presentation: an extension of the music.”
Wolfe has been following the debates around artist and songwriter royalties from streaming services, but says her main concern is less about whether to stream or not to stream, but rather how to build up a body of work that fans will want to stream in the first place.
“I’m putting a lot of time into this new record, even though a lot of people are saying I shouldn’t. ‘Everyone will just listen to the one track that gets picked up for that popular playlist’. But it’s more important than ever to put together that catalogue of work,” says Wolfe.
“People who hear the song on the playlist can then go and discover the rest in their own time. The only worry I have about the generation that we’re living in at the moment is whether in 15 years time there will be really great albums made – if there’s not so much reason to make great albums?”
KCRW Radio interviews Beatie Wolfe
Awesome hanging with @kcrw's @kcrwkramer after featuring on his kickass show... #KCRW
Beats 1 & Apple Music Global HQ Showcase
It was awesome to be invited in by Beats President Luke Wood to share the story & music of Montagu Square at the Apple Music + Beats HQ in LA
MIC interviews Beatie Wolfe
Millennials news outlet MIC's Tom Barnes interviews me at a very hot SXSW'16. The full interview went out on Snapchat.
Fast Company on Beatie Wolfe & SXSW
"Roll out the red carpet for Beatie Wolfe" -- Mark Wilson, Fast Company