Artist Of The Week #175 - Becky Hill
This week’s Artist of the Week is hit making songwriter and Queen of modern dance music Becky Hill - who has just released her debut studio album Only Honest On The Weekend via Eko Records / Polydor. Becky has written or co-written every track on the album and enlisted the production skills of a broad and eclectic range of producers from Lost Boy and Billen Ted to MK, MJ Cole and MNEK. She took a moment to talk to us about how the album came together.
Hey there Becky, how are you? So your debut album is finally here! How does it feel to finally have it out there in the world?
It feels amazing to have an album coming out and a real big milestone for me as an artist. I’ve been working my whole career to put out an album and I, hopefully there will be plenty more albums coming out as well. I feel like people have waited just as patiently for me to receive a body of work and I feel like I’ve proved myself enough now to show people that I am worthy of releasing an album and that I’ve worked really, really hard on it and I hope other people love it as much as I do.
It is titled ‘Only Honest On The Weekend’ - what is the meaning behind that?
It’s called ‘Only Honest On The Weekend’ because it’s the first line of a single I released called ‘Space’. ‘Space’ didn’t necessarily do that well in the charts but I thought it was one of my best tunes that I’d written and was the most personal to me and I felt like it hadn’t been done justice by the chart position that it received so I thought I’d name my album after the first line of the song. It kind of encapsulated everything I wanted to in the song itself and kind of gave the party theme but with more of an emotional feel.
Where was it recorded? Any behind the scenes stories from the creative process?
It has been recorded all over the place really, from LA to London. I have spent 10 years writing it more or less, 9 years writing it, and I’ve worked with so many different people and it was really interesting to go from being 18 and never to have written a song before with anybody else apart from myself in my bedroom in my hometown of Bewdley, to go to writing songs everyday with different people that I’d never met before and I got quite close to a lot of people and made, formed bonds with lots of different songwriters and I feel like I would not have been able to have made this album the way that I have done if it wasn’t for those people. I am really lucky and grateful to have met so many incredible songwriters along the way. I’ve had such a fun time getting to know people and making music with them and have them be completely opened up to my world. I always try to go in to sessions with the most amount of honesty so I can get the most personal music from the sessions.
What are the key themes and influences on the album?
I’d have said that the main influence is love, falling in it, falling out of it. A lot of, obviously I had written songs before I got into my long-term relationship but I got in to quite a serious relationship when I was 22. I’m still in it so it’s been about 5 and a half years and I kind of think the more emotional stuff has come from that last 5 and a half years of my life. But even before then I used to write a lot about being lonely, about finding the person I was going to spend the rest of my life with. You know, I spent a lot of time writing music about love and that was even when I was a teenager, when I was 13 and started writing music it was all about love and relationships.
There are some older songs on the album that date back to before you signed with Polydor Records. How does it feel to combine an older version of yourself with the new on this album?
I love the fact that a lot of this music predates Polydor, I don’t really see it as an older version of myself. I see it as the same person. I am the same person that I’ve always been. I’ve just grown through my 20’s and gone through quite a crazy journey but I wouldn’t say that that’s an older version and this is a new version, I would definitely say that it’s the same person, and what I love about the album is that it’s grown up with me and there are songs there that I’d written when I was 18, there are songs written there when I was 26, you know it’s got a really broad range of songs that I’ve written throughout my, a really pivotal part of my life and that’s what I love about it.
Do you have a favorite lyric on the album? If so, which one and why?
I think my favourite lyric on the album would be ‘one day of silence, I knew what you’d done, you fucked your final chance with me just to fuck someone’. I love this lyric because this is from a song called ‘Lessons’ which I had written about finding out that my boyfriend, we weren’t together at the time, but finding out that he had slept with somebody else. And I think that was a very poignant time and the lyric explains the situation perfectly. I went out raving on the weekend and we’d been speaking everyday and then on the Friday he went completely quiet and didn’t speak to me until Monday and I knew he’d slept with somebody else and I said ‘somethings happened hasn’t it?’ And he went ‘yeah’ (laughs), and therefore ‘Lessons’ was born.
During lockdown, you started a podcast called ‘The Art of Rave’, where you spoke to the likes of Pete Tong and Basement Jaxx. What made you decide to do the podcast? Do you feel it got to show a different side to you? Also more importantly - what makes a great rave?
‘The Art of Rave’ wasn’t made during lockdown, it was started I think late 2019 and I remember this because I was actually having physical podcasts with people, I would sit in a little recording booth in Kings Cross talking to my heroes about rave culture. I decided to do the podcast, I think it was an idea from my boyfriend. He gave me the idea of basically teaching my generation and the generations to come about the history of rave culture. I used to sit with my boy and talk to him a lot about how he started up his own label and how he went DJing and stuff like that and a lot of the things we had in common was the taste of music that we had and how different it was for that generation of producers to find and make music. I wanted to show my generation that it wasn’t just a production programme on a laptop, that everything was done analogue, that you needed synths, you needed a dap? tape, you needed you know, to vinyl being pressed, you couldn’t go on Spotify to find the song, you had to listen to pirate radio and then ring the radio station up and ask what song they played 3 songs ago and go to the record store and sing the song that you’d heard on the radio (laughs) to them to see if they recognised it. And I thought there was something quite magical about that, about how much passion it took to make music and find music and that was something that I wanted to explore as opposed to having a passion nowadays of music when everything is kind of handed to you and whether that has changed the dancefloor, whether people filming sets at raves and whether the drugs changing and culture generally in terms of, you know, getting all dressed up and putting you going to a rave on Instagram had changed, you know, the kind of care free, fun side of a rave. It was fascinating for me, I don’t know if it necessarily gave people a different side to me, but it definitely exercised something within me that I am so glad that I did. I got to interview some of my heroes growing up, in fact all of my heroes growing up and I was just completely enthralled by everything that they had to tell me, so I’m very, very grateful that I got to do that. What makes a great rave? I would definitely say the people you’re with, the type of music you go to, has to be something that you like and something that you could even go sober to. Some of my best raves have been when I’ve just been drinking water all night and it’s been the people that I’ve gone with and the music that I’ve been listening to.
Like many people in the industry, live music came to a halt when the pandemic hit, however do you feel that gave you the time to finally finish the album?
I wouldn’t say that the Pandemic gave me time to finish off the album because I didn’t go to a studio, I didn’t work with an engineer, I didn’t, in fact, if anything the Pandemic made finishing off the album a million times harder. As well as not being able to play live and not being able to pay my team and not being able to raise awareness in Europe about my projects and what I’m doing and the music that I do. It made everything infinitely harder and I think the music industry was hit the hardest, even up until the point where sports had all returned, yet nightclubs and festivals were still not allowed to go ahead with, at the time, no support from the Government. And I’m really glad that the Government have kind of stepped up now and allowed festivals to go ahead. I had nothing to do and I really wanted to write music and I wrote two songs for the album, one called ‘Distance’, funnily enough, and another one called ‘Through the Night’. But it was hard not doing those sessions in person and only doing them on Zoom or on Facetime. It was very, very difficult but I’m glad that I did those sessions while I was back in Bewdley and I’m glad that I had a really good connection with the two writers that I worked with, Adam Argyle and MNEK, so that I could sit with them on the phone and write a song with them.
You came into the Spotlight when you auditioned for the Voice at the age of seventeen, you are now twenty-seven. Ten years have passed. What has kept you driven when it comes to your music and what struggles have you encountered? If you could go back and say anything to that seventeen year old version of you. What would you say?
What kept me driven? I can’t do anything else. I am rubbish at everything apart from singing and writing music. I’m not interested in doing anything else other than this and I knew I’d been as unhappy as I could be in the downs of the music industry. The ups definitely outweigh the happiness levels and I. knew that even if I tried to find a new job to do, I would never be happy, truly happy doing it. So definitely that, and the fact that I was always writing music, and music has always consistently been coming out for the past 10 years. I don’t think there was really a year when I didn’t put music out. And I suppose seeing the chart success I was having with, you know, as a feature artist, like the songs that I was writing was going to producers and I was the featured vocalist and, you know, whereas I wasn’t getting much recognition for that, the music definitely was. And I could see that there was a successful, you know, a success rate in the music which always made me believe that I would be able to have that success for myself one day. I’ve been through two record deals. I got dropped from my first deal which was incredibly devastating. I set up my own record label. I released my own music, using my own money on my own label, put on my shows, I got my own band around me and I just went for it. And I loved doing it and this is the only thing I want to do and that’s kind of what’s kept me going. If I could say anything to the 17 year old coming off The Voice would be ‘you think your patience is your worst attribute but you will find out that your patience is the best thing that you have, because you’ll have to wait 10 years, a decade, to release your first album and you will have so much work to do to get people to believe in you and your debut album but it will all be worth it and it will only happen when you are properly, truly ready, so have patience and let it happen’.
Now the album is out there - what next for you?
Now the album is done I, I’ve got the rest of the festivals that have been pushed back due to Covid coming up throughout September. I’ve got shows that will promote the album and then I’ve got my headline tour and then I’m going on a fucking holiday. And I’m going to go somewhere abroad and nice and hot. And then I will go, November will be spent writing album 2! And I will go back in to writing with my favourite people and my favourite producers and I will begin the process for album 2 all over again. I can’t wait.