Inspired #388 - Alice Low
Due to headline her London show this week at The Social, Alice Low has just released her new single ‘Show Business’.
Alice’s avant-garde performance, unhinged energy, and emotional lyrics have carved a niche that suggests an artist doing things entirely on their own terms. Alice also recently toured with the iconic Cate Le Bon and made her bow at Green Man Festival, where her set was certainly one to remember. Show Business is a testament to performance, the search for adoration and a eulogy to hooks (there are many hooks in this song). It also sounds like a Sparks single remixed, broken down and then reworked into an unrecognisable monster hit.
On Show Business Alice says, "I hadn’t yet started hormone therapy, but I was going through the process. I was scared. You can hear that. The song is full of fear. Mostly of expectation. Expectation projected at myself; my music, my transition, my social life, my sex life. Mummy, Daddy, sorta stuff. I have issues with authority. How to know when to negotiate and when to listen. I think part of me was rejecting the idea that I “had to write singles”, which I didn’t. I didn’t “have to” do anything, but I definitely wanted to, deep down.
Success is difficult for me, I’m glad I’ve had this much time to build a strong relationship with my work, that it can be uncompromising. However, I will always be the boy, standing in-front of the mirror singing Blink 182 into his hairbrush, feeling idolized, feeling that music, and “rock star reverence” could be an escape from the bullying, and torment of childhood. But as you get older you shed that stuff, and find other things to focus on. I found ways to validate myself, through art, sex, love. For years I thought that was enough, and barely released any of the mountain of music I had made. But now I am here, at the foot of a new mountain, looking up and wondering if I even want to climb. Do I have the energy? The desire?"
She took a moment to talk to us about the inspirations behind her music.
Who are your top three musical inspirations and why?
Kate Bush. She is my number one, and will always be my number one. When making Show Business I was listening to The Dreaming every day. Prince too. I love Dirty Mind and Sign o’ the Times. I listen mostly to solo artists, I like the singular vision. Todd Rundgren. The way these three take authorship over their work. I love that.
They all dive deep into their creativity and pull out the maddest shit, but also really beautiful and universal stuff too. Like on The Dreaming, there’s Get Out of My House next to a song like Suspended in Gaffa, or the difference between A Wizard, A True Star and Something / Anything. It’s permission to be free and authentic with one’s weirdness, but it’s never unreachable.
Is there a certain film that inspires you and why?
I watch a lot of movies, especially in the winter, so it’s coming up movie season! In relation to Show Business, I don’t really know. I watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer every day when writing these songs. I blitzed the whole thing in like a month. I find for writing songs, television has so much empty space, that you can just zip it on, and zone out. It’s fishing, Elvis style.
Maybe Frances Ha, the Greta Gerwig movie. I watched that a lot in 2020. She’s off dancing around New York all the time, and there’s a few songs, like Everyone’s a Winner by Hot Chocolate, that inspired Cry-Baby, my earlier single. If you listen to the coda, I’m doing an impression of Hot Chocolate. His voice is great.
What city do you find the most inspiring and why?
I moved to Cardiff quite recently. No city has quite shaken me like Cardiff. It’s sticky. I’m stuck here now. Me and everyone I know. We’re all stuck to it’s sticky substance.
Before that I lived in Brighton, my experiences there kickstarted my songwriting again, after a few years in a pretentious ditch. I had become so soppy and serious, and being in Brighton, around people who were also soppy and serious really helped me move on.
Who is the most inspiring person to you and why?
Eartha Kitt. Compromise? For what!?
What were your inspirations when writing your new track?
I have been obsessed with Aldous Harding’s Designer since it came out. For me, on Show Business, and the songs surrounding it, I was drawing from that album. It’s confidence, the presidential energy. It is boss stuff. Designer. Even the title. It’s one of the most human albums I’ve heard, funny, heartbreaking, all of it. The song Damn especially. “When you jump up and down, the chains almost sound like a tambourine.” It hits like a line in a Pinter play or something, cutting any humour dead in it’s tracks.
There’s also some production stuff from other places, the demo sounded like a Kate Bush song. That line “I’ve got so many ideas, but I ain’t got the time.” when sung without the full strength of my voice, sounds exactly like Kate Bush. As I said, I was watching a lot of Buffy, so maybe the bridge is my version of the intro theme? An opportunity to slay.
I wanted Show Business to sound like a song that was once lush, fighting against the limitations of technology and failing. An old Hollywood kinda feeling. The glow of it against the grain. Like my body was then, fighting against my male-ness. The song contains a lot, sex, ambition, family, identity, but for me, it is mostly about the battles we face to reach peace with those things, to find pleasure in them, and how validation can get in the way. Mummy, Daddy, look, I’m singing.
How would you like to inspire people?
By flashing my breasts for passing commuters. No. Well, yes, but also, maybe in the uncompromising authenticity of my work I can show people that there is more to transgender people than debate. That we are not a question. That we are as complex and multi-faceted as anyone.
It’s a tough question, because I work in a spontaneous, unquestioning way. My work has a social purpose because I am a transgender woman, and the work contains me, but I never think about it. Before I came out I made music all the time, and I continue to do that. The only difference is that my nipples itch, and my lyrics are more honest.
Alice Low will headline the Social in London on the 4th October.
