Notes On ‘Hiding Place’
In 2018, I collaborated with two of my favourite musicians; Ailsa Tully and Hana Stretton. Four years later, we’re releasing the demos to aid flood relief in Pakistan.
Hana’s studio was hidden in an alcove at the bottom of her leafy, overgrown garden, and I still remember the first time I entered. It was as any art studio should be; a canvas of ideas, a splash of drum heads here, a lick of assorted microphones there. The centrepiece, an upright piano, was torn from gumtree and carried lovingly into the studio to never quite be pulled into tune, as the tale of all South East London gumtree pianos goes.
We admired each other at gigs, played for each other but never properly collaborated. I still remember the first time I saw them both perform. Ailsa sang as if she was a whole choir over a cello, in constant harmony with it, a siren of metaphors about the natural world, always singing of a place and nature as if she embodied it. And then when she picked up a bass and wrote ‘Highly Strung’ and ‘Parasite’, her iconic rage, hidden for so long, was laid plain bare in a pool of confidence and authority. “No, you deal with it.” She always managed to say out loud what I wanted to in my head.
Hana wrote a song called ‘Miss Nomer’ back then with a full band and gorgeous, chorusey electric guitar, but there was nothing wrong about her as a musician; it was like she was born to make music, always singing seamlessly of the ubiquitous experience of human-hood, as if she could be anybody on that stage, as if she was everyone. She split in so many directions, but finally settled on a nylon guitar and a cassette machine currently under the moniker ‘Nora’s Bin’ on sound-cloud (to be officially released soon as ‘Hana Stretton’). Hana can flow with harmony as naturally as a river. Her music is uncontainable, pouring out as if structure doesn’t and shouldn’t exist.
After moving to London where I’d finally become immersed in some sort of musical culture beyond “only classical musicians are real musicians”, I noticed women and non-binary people collaborated less with each other than men did. Yes, women and other gender minorities generally were ‘the artist’ as opposed to being ‘the producer’, but it wasn’t like we were ever accepted or allowed into the latter role. Even male ‘artists’ did collaborations, produced people and formed multiple side-projects. There were so many barriers for us, too many to write here. Sometimes it felt like our only option was to become our own voyeurs, constantly guarding and protecting the only thing we owned; ourselves. So we rarely worked together.
Being left out of conversations with technology from an early age, blocked from making decisions in the studio and living in fear of sexual harassment all made their contributions to this phenomenon. I can only speak for myself when I say I preferred to avoid technology at that time, especially after some bad experiences. But I’d told myself that fateful day that if I couldn’t plug a fucking XLR into an audio interface and record people, I’d give up on music production forever. I remember feeling so desperate. I had everything to prove. I was so tired of failing.
To my surprise, I managed it. It wasn’t as terrifying as I thought it’d be. I’d borrowed a microphone (the ‘blue bird’) purely because I thought it had a good name. We were using Hana’s interface/monitors with my new, shiny laptop bought with a new, shiny record label advance. We didn’t have a pair of stereo mics for the piano, so I used two different ones. Is that the correct way to do things? No, but the songs got recorded, didn’t they? Arts’ only purpose is self-expression. A quest for the correct way of doing things can sometimes stop you from saying something you really need to say. I can say with confidence that four years later after producing people and really getting to grips with technology, no one can ever know enough about recording.
And self-expression isn’t really about being the best. Capitalism is, and unfortunately capitalism eats everything and spits it back out for us to interact with as if it’s the truth of everything, like a parasite wearing the skin of its host, or a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Tools are toys. Music is for joy. Sometimes the least experienced person in the room will create the most interesting piece of art because they don’t have rules to bind them.
When I suggested the idea to Hana and Ailsa, they already had songs to give to the project. I hadn’t written as a solo artist in years, so I tried to think of the most Ailsa melody, the most Hana guitar part. Ailsa’s song is dedicated to her sister and “the weight of her worth”, Hana’s song was so clearly, abstractly detailing a future in London, so she escaped. Mine was about feeling invisible. “I am going to get better” became a prophecy fulfilled, however. Four years later and I really did get better.
Ailsa suggested the name, ‘Hiding Place’. We instantly liked it. The studio was like a special hiding place, shrouded in leaves, sheltering us from judgement. We only mustered the courage to get in a room together the day before Hana took a one-way flight back to her home, Australia. Everything was on the line that day. It had to go well. When we finished recording the final song, rain splattered against the shed like a conservatory roof. We looked at each other with a silent understanding we’d leave it in the final recording.
Life has not been what I imagined it would be for us. Hana managed her family farm for two years, battling bushfires, driving through black clouds of smoke to feed emaciated cows. She’s done a range of jobs trying to protect wildlife and the environment, as well as continued recording her own music (which should reach our ears soon!). I remember her telling me about reading an announcement that no one was allowed to use the word ‘global warming’. It seems like every government is trying to roll back human rights and free speech as they realise the world is not equipped to deal with the disaster laying in wait for us ahead.
Ailsa has been playing amazing festivals, moving all across the country and has experienced the unimaginable grief of her Dad dying. Still, through it all she’s poured her soul into her music.
Back in 2018, we led up to our recording day with a Bedroom Gig in the studio itself. Hana sang and played into an array of pedals, whirring magic loops with older cassette tapes over the voice of her Grandmother. Ailsa played for one of the first times on her new instrument, the bass, in harmony with her new bandmate, Gillie. It’s one of my favourite nights in the memory archive of that time. The season had just flicked like a switch and everyone piled into the room wearing gloves and hats and warm cups of tea. We managed to catch everyone just before people started leaving London, before coronavirus hit, before the world changed.
We’d like to donate the contributions on band-camp to aid flood relief in Pakistan, a country that is now a third underwater. More than 33 million people in Pakistan are in urgent need after devastating major floods have killed more than 1000 people. Entire communities have been swept away and more than a million homes have been destroyed or badly damaged, leaving people without food, shelter or clean water.
The EP will be released tomorrow on bandcamp.
Another Sky (a.k.a me)
