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Social media has repopularised your song Headlock, but how did it feel 20 years ago when you had to create, advertise and market the Speak For Yourself album almost entirely solo? Samgams
Back then if you were lucky you got into NME or i-D magazine. The only real coverage I got was in the techie music mags, but then Hide and Seek was in The OC, Headlock got on the radio and I started getting recognition. If only we could have had TikTok and all this free promotion 20 years ago … but if I’d received then the kind of attention I get now, I might have made different life choices, so I wouldn’t have changed anything.
Did you really remortgage your flat to finance Speak For Yourself? AD2023
I spent four years making an album in [the electronic duo] Frou Frou on Island Records, but it never recouped so I never saw a penny. Making another album with that label would have felt like taking your best dress back to the dry cleaners after they burned it. After I got out of that deal, no bank would lend me any money. Then I realised that my two-bedroom flat in Waterloo I’d bought for £120,000 was worth a hundred grand more a year later. I remortgaged it to make the album and never looked back. Funnily enough, after all the attention on TikTok recently I’ve just received my first royalties from Frou Frou after 25 years.
More than 20 years ago, you recorded and toured with Jeff Beck. How did the collaboration come about? Ben1976
I met Jeff when I was 19 at a songwriting camp in [the Police manager] Miles Copeland’s castle in the Dordogne. I was much younger than everybody else and socially awkward so I got pretty drunk. I was sitting outside playing guitar very badly to myself and Jeff said: “Let me show you some shapes.” I said: “Wow, you’re good!” Later that night I ended up drunkenly driving a golf caddy around the estate and crashing into Miles’s mum’s prized terracotta pots. A week later I got a message from my manager asking: “Did you meet Jeff Beck?” He told me he was this really famous, legendary guitarist – I had no idea! – who wanted me to sing on his record. I sang his gorgeous Nadia as best I could and did some shows with him. He was a sweet man and I loved him so much. A lot of people from that generation are just so grateful to have been able to do what they loved all those years, and their egos are very small in comparison to the amount of fame they had.
The Listening Chair is a unique, autobiographical song, intended to update [with an added minute] every seven years. How hard was it to distill a seven-year period into one minute? Coopertapes
I don’t know if I did it very effectively, but I sat in a physical listening chair and asked audiences: “What’s the song that you feel still needs to be written?” There were hundreds and hundreds of different answers, but all relating to their ages. For anyone aged 0-7 it was single word answers like “cat” or “piano”, from 7-14 it was fun, 14-21 was about wanting to be themselves and 28-35 “I’m in the wrong job and that maybe I shouldn’t be with my partner.” I never got around to 35-42 because my sister died in my 42nd year and I just couldn’t do it, but I’m about to release the final piece, a 13-minute fiesta called I Am, about who I am now. The Listening Chair is all true. The line “Wonderbra thrown around the German classroom … I’ll never live it down” is about the time my best friend – who wasn’t then – took my stupid padded bra out of my drawer and threw it through the German classroom window. Then everyone threw it around. I was mortified.
How did you get the idea for The Happy Song? It reliably cheers my one-year-old whenever I put it on, so thank you. Madi22
The baby milk company Cow & Gate wanted to create a piece of music that would make babies happier, so they put me in a room with scientists, psychologists and 50 babies. I iterated various bits of music depending on their reactions. My two-year-old daughter Scout started some of the melodies. We’d taken her to the Transport Museum so that’s where “bing bing on the bicycle, beep beep in the car” comes from. The sound at the beginning is her laughing at my friend’s cat. Kids love The Happy Song, but it calms stressed-out parents, too.
Were you really a rebel at school and if so what were you rebelling against? k4ren123
I feel awful now for some of the things I did. The last straw came when I told the matron to F-off and they expelled me, but they still needed me to be the jewel in the crown for the end-of-term concert, so I ended up living in the headmistress’s house and she was really kind to me. I just found boarding school insanely boring. I was recently diagnosed with ADHD and autism, which might explain why I’ve always wanted to shake it up and do new things.
How many hair colours have you had? toniaaa
Probably more recently, actually, all kinds of green and stuff. When I was younger I had issues around my body, so like I’d wear leg warmers to make my legs not look so skinny or wear over-the-top costumes with feathers. For the longest time I’d back comb my hair into a huge bush because I felt my head was too small. It’s only in the past six years I’ve realised I actually like my hair – I just needed to stick some layers in it.
It’s been 11 years since your last proper album. Will we ever get a new one? Paula485
Well, I did the Harry Potter album [The Music of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child – in Four Contemporary Suites], and a couple of years ago I made the music to an Audible podcast called Climate of Change with my zoologist/film-maker friend Dan O’Neill, who gave me a bunch of sounds like insects croaking underground, which we turned into a double album. I just got bored of the song structure, but now I’m really excited about freestyling and making up lyrics in the moment. I’ve spent thousands of hours caged up in the studio and I’ve missed a lot of life. There will be a record shortly which will be the final piece of that old world but I’m more excited about creating music in real time.
In 2014, Taylor Swift invited fans to her Rhode Island home to hear her new album 1989 while she plied them with cookies. It seemed a very Imogen Heap thing to do. Had you discussed audience engagement when you collaborated on the closing track, Clean? McScootikins
No. I think, like me, she just appreciates the reactions of strangers. I’m constantly dragging people to the studio going: “Can I play this?” It’s touching to see if something you’ve just finished resonates with others. I’ve had lots of fans round to events at my house and I’m sure her fans are as nice as mine.
Last year, the Guardian published a piece about your ambition to use AI to enhance your live performances. Fans expressed concerns. Is it still ongoing? trev_trev
A hundred percent. When people think of AI they maybe think of this conscious brain making all the music while I’m sitting there being a puppet. I see it as a collaboration. Say I’m in a park and there’s dog sounds and a bus going by. AI might identify the key or some natural rhythm that’s happening and potentially shape the music, which will help me have more time to be human. At the moment, with what’s going on in the States and the Middle East, we’re making such a horrendous job of existing, so maybe AI is like the next stage of evolution to help us make sense of everything. It’s not the devil. I’m still gonna make music and it’s gonna be great.
Michael Caine famously said of his role in Jaws: The Revenge, “I have never seen the film, but by all accounts it was terrible. However, I have seen the house it built, and it’s terrific.” Is that how you feel about Jason Derulo sampling Hide and Seek on the multimillion selling Whatcha Say? McScootikins
I’m not possessive over my tracks and I love it when people give them a new lease of life. I wouldn’t put that song on to listen to but I don’t find it offensive and it helped pay for my mortgage. I’ve had strange successes … I’ve never had a direct hit, but I’ve had tentacles into hits. My music gets played in all kinds of places and I feel so lucky because I can still walk down the street unrecognised, having a great time.
