Well the whole thing was supposed to tie in with Helen's new limited edition electronica album, Voxpop Puella, which is only available through http://mccookerybook.blogspot.co.uk/ but, as always happens when Helen and I start chatting, the whole thing got out of hand and will be run over the next four days. I hope that you enjoy it as much as I did...
JON: Tell me about the new album
HELEN: Well, in about 2000 or something, I’d been writing a lot of
music for friends’ films and we’d always sort of say, well you haven’t got any
money but one day you can make a film for me, and one day I kind of decided to
take them up on it and I had this idea of doing a show that was a film of the
seven ages of women, with seven songs to go between them that kind of went with
all the different ages of women. It was
amazing because everybody I asked to make a film not only said yes but they
also told me what age they wanted to make a film of and Gina Birch was one of
the people who did it, and Joan Ashworth who is now Head of Animation at the
Royal College of Art, and a woman called Jane Profit who’s quite a famous
kind of artist now and so I had lovely films and I got a grant from the Arts
Council – I went on tour with the Film and Music Show with Gina – she had a
show as well.
And just recently I was clearing out some old DAT tapes and I
found the backing tracks, and I’d actually sung over some of them and recorded
them, and I listened to them and thought, well they are quite different from
what I do now, but it would be quite nice to do a sort of limited edition
release of them and two of them I did new vocals for because I wasn’t too happy
with them, and I sent them up to Stirling to get them remastered...so yes I am
releasing it and my eldest daughter’s just graduated from Brighton Art College
in graphics so she’s done the cover so it’s a real kind of homemade family kind
of thing, but the music itself is erm,
it’s electronic – I programmed it in my lunch hours when I was working in the
University of Westminster. I had a really good piece of technology called a
JV1080 which is a sort of Roland sampler really... well no it’s not a sampler,
it’s got a lot of different sounds on it and I sort of wrote everything from
scratch on to that – the drums, the bass; some of it’s got horn arrangements,
some of it’s semi-psychedelic so it’s not like my other stuff at all, but it’s
still sort of songs and I thought, well I’ll release that and see what happens.
JON: Sounds wonderful
HELEN: I was definitely quite proud of it at the time and it was
quite an unusual sort of show, and we went out and did workshops and things and
funnily enough, the people who liked it best
were teenagers – a bunch of drunken teenagers from Cornwall and the
people who I thought would like it most
– sort of older women – some of them absolutely
hated it so it was quite interesting, you know.
JON: Well it sounds absolutely wonderful and I’m looking forward
to it. What about the films? Are they still in existence?
HELEN: Well I’ve still got the films, but getting permission would
be a nightmare. If I do take it any
further, for instance if I do ask Rob to release it or something, then I would
get permission for the films and put the films with the music, and do it as a
whole thing, because it is an interesting... the films are fantastic, I have to
say they are really, really interesting – all really interesting in themselves,
you know. One of the filmmakers who did
the teenage age, she’s a Japanese filmmaker called Akiko and she lives
in Germany, but she filmed it in Iceland, and another woman, Charlotte Worthington,
she filmed her 102-year-old granny talking about being a mill-worker in
Manchester. They are just really, really
interesting films. Because I did the
book, I had to get lots of permissions for that and I did the Chefs CD and I had
to get a lot of permissions for that, and actually getting all the permissions
is quite time-consuming and exhausting, and I just thought I would start off
with the music and see how that goes and then maybe do more later, you know.
JON: Well it sounds a fascinating project. The sort of thing I love anyways.
HELEN: Well I hope you like the music anyway. It was funny because I did it in all sorts of
different – as I said these boys and girls in Cornwall and a group of over-60s
ladies’ Theatre Group in Newcastle-upon-Tyne and also it finished off in the
Edinburgh fringe and it was featured on Radio 4 as the show that sold the least
tickets <laughs>
JON: I really like art projects like that. I am not denigrating it – I love silly art
projects. Somebody like you who does that because it is a good thing to do,
that’s what I love most...
HELEN: Well everybody that did it with me was 100% into it and the
very first performances were at a big warehouse down next to the River Thames
and it was called the Museum of Emotions and they offered me two nights
there. Now it’s been converted into
expensive houses. It was a fantastic
place because it had a red plush carpet, and I projected the films on to this
massive gilt frame and there were feathered lights, you know, and people sat on
huge bean bags and even the security guard liked it there...but you do these
things and people just like them. It
started off completely unfunded and it was only the tour that was funded,
everybody just did it to repay their debts to me for music, or just for fun,
you know it was a combination, it was just done for the sake of doing it and it
actually lived for quite a long time so in a way, you know, releasing the
tracks now is a kind of thing of saying well yeah, it was there. It happened
and it’s quite nice actually to have my daughter to do the artwork because when
I did the tour, my girls – I have two daughters – they were both really young
and they used to come to every gig and I used to slick my hair back and they’d
tell me that I looked like a tramp <laughS> so that now she has graduated it’s really nice to have her doing
the design for it and everything.
I am actually waiting to receive them. I am on tenterhooks and she is really excited
as well because it is her first professional thing. It takes a while for things to turn up. I ‘phoned them and I think they are coming on
Thursday, but I’ve got a copy of the
cover, I can definitely send you a copy of the cover artwork....
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