FEATURE:
Revisiting…
Lou Hayter – Private Sunshine
__________
RELEASED last year…
Lou Hayter’s Private Sunshine is an album that I really love. One of the best of last year, you should grab a copy of it. A blend of beautiful sounds run through a terrific record that got its share of acclaim upon its release. Hayter is one of the most underrated artists around. An exceptional artist and songwriter with one of the most distinct and stunning voice sin music, Private Sunshine is a wonderful album that needs to be heard. I am going to finish off with a couple of reviews for a magnificent album. Formerly of New Young Pony Club, I do hope we hear more music from her soon. Before coming to an interview and a couple of reviews, here is some detail about the incredible Lou Hayter and her magnificent debut, Private Sunshine:
“Effortlessly hopscotching between vintage acid and 80s Rn’B, insouciant Francophone pop and twinkling electro house, Lou Hayter has delivered something at once utterly unique and defiantly timeless with her much anticipated debut solo LP, released next year on Skint Records.
It has been a long time coming for London native Hayter, who first made her mark professionally as keyboardist for New Young Pony Club, one of THE bands at the epicentre of the white hot day-glo nu rave scene alongside the likes of the Klaxons and Test Icicles in 2006. But, to fully place her debut album in context, it is necessary to rewind a little bit – to the very beginning in fact, with Hayter growing up on a diet of Bowie, Prince, Human League and Jellybean-era Madonna while concomitantly learning classical piano from the age of five. The flames of this deliciously varied musical palette were further stoked by trips to record shops in Soho with her brother (Soul Jazz was a particular obsession), but it was while studying in Cambridge that the match was well and truly struck – she used her student grant to buy a set of Technics and started putting on club nights, before moving to London and working at Trevor Jackson’s seminal Output Recordings, placing Hayter smack bang in the middle of all the action, with disco punk fever hitting full force and bands like the Rapture and LCD Soundsystem first breaking out.
The hugely successful, Mercury-nominated New Young Pony Club followed shortly after, but it’s through her subsequent output that she started to distil and refine her idiosyncratic tastes. And certainly, you can hear hints of both the New Sins, the 80’s New Wave duo she formed with Nick Phillips, and Tomorrow’s World, the swooning Gallic pop act she fronts alongside Air’s JB Dunckel, in her remarkable debut. Full to bursting with evocative electro-soul love letters to her home town of London alongside addictive disco torch ballads, it’s like Kylie meeting Mr Fingers or, Jam & Lewis producing Jane Birkin – something beautiful and melancholic yet sharply modern and new.
From the warm, woozy, lysergic harmonies of opener “Cherry on Top”, which sound like a beloved old cassette unravelling, to the fizzy, infectious “Cold Feet”, which calls to mind Lisa Lisa & Cult Jam at their most heartworn, taken in toto the album perfectly nails the essence of gorgeously nostalgic synth-pop with a twist; crisp, stylish and sophisticated music which heralds the next chapter of Lou Hayter quite nicely, actually. Her retro-futuristic results will give 2021 the pop fix it so desperately needs”.
Even though there was love for Private Sunshine, I think that the album was underrated and did not get all the love it deserved. I would encourage people to listen to it, as it transports you somewhere else. Lou Hayter is such a compelling artist that you can’t help but listen to and follow! Less related specifically to Private Sunshine and more to do with her creative process, 15 Questions asked her about songwriting and how she approaches it. I have chosen some of the questions that caught my eye:
“What do you start with? How difficult is that first line of text, the first note?
I actually love coming up with ideas, for me finishing the tune is the hardest part. Things just literally pop into my head or I hear a snippet of conversation that I think is catchy and write it in my phone or a sample that I like and take it from there. Other times I just hear melodies or basslines and sing them into my phone.
When do the lyrics enter the picture? Where do they come from? Do lyrics need to grow together with the music or can they emerge from a place of their own?
I get lyrics from all over the place. Sometimes conversation or books or films. Or things that I'm thinking and feeling. Then I write down good snappy lines in my phone and when I get a piece of music that needs lyrics I pull out the lines that are in my phone to make a song out of them. Or sometimes the whole song just pops into my head out of no-where, that happened with "Cherry on Top". Especially once I'd got on to the theme of sugar and honey, then it was easy to get more ideas.
What makes lyrics good in your opinion? What are your own ambitions and challenges in this regard?
I'm not really someone who studies lyrics. The ones that I really listen to are usually Joni Mitchell, Steely Dan, Prince and The Smiths. I love them cause they're always telling stories and they're funny and engaging and clever. But apart from that I'm usually into the overall vibe of a song.
But with my own lyrics I try to find lines that are snappy and rhythmic and honest. The rhythm of the words along with the music is quite important to me. I like to find little snippets or lines that interest me and also things that move me.
Once you've started, how does the work gradually emerge?
I just keep working away at it. If it's in it's early stages where I just have certain elements I think of it a bit like a jigsaw puzzle: I know the answer is there but I just have to keep chipping away until it fits into pl
Many writers have claimed that as soon as they enter into the process, certain aspects of the narrative are out of their hands. Do you like to keep strict control over the process or is there a sense of following things where they lead you?
No I just let things flow into my brain, I think overthinking doesn't help so I just try to be free when I make stuff. No rules. Sometimes people in the studio tell you you can't do certain things and I never understand why - cause there aren't any rules, if there are, they're just made up.
Often, while writing, new ideas and alternative roads will open themselves up, pulling and pushing the creator in a different direction. Does this happen to you, too, and how do you deal with it? What do you do with these ideas?
Yeah I really encourage accidents and see where they take me because sometimes they’re meant to be and they open up something new and amazing. That's one of Brian Eno's concepts that he encourages too.
Especially in the digital age, the writing and production process tends towards the infinite. What marks the end of the process? How do you finish a work?
Finishing is often the hardest part but I think I’m getting better at knowing when something is ready to go out there. Sometimes I play it to a friend that I trust or Damian Harris. He's my A&R man at Skint, my label. Otherwise I might never stop chipping away at it.
Once a piece is finished, how important is it for you to let it lie and evaluate it later on? How much improvement and refinement do you personally allow until you're satisfied with a piece? What does this process look like in practise?
I usually just listen to something over and over to work out what it needs. Sometimes it involves taking a break from it and coming back to it. Also listening on headphones usually gives me more clarity than the loud speakers in the studio. So sometimes it isn't until I get home after working on something and listen in the cab home that I realise what's missing because sometimes you're too caught up in things in the studio and you need a bit of distance”.
I will wrap it up with a couple of reviews for the brilliant Private Sunshine. This is what The Forty-Five had to say about a real gem from last year. I am really keen to hear more from Lou Hayter as I really love her music. Her voice is one that I cannot get enough of! I have been spinning Private Sunshine again in research for this feature. I have been falling for the songs all over again:
“‘Private Sunshine’ often pretends to be elsewhere – whether poolside, or someplace sunnier, or the hot hum of the pre-pandemic city – offering immediate transportation to a world many of us currently crave. The album seems encased in aspirational, diamond-hard gloss, from the disco slink of ‘Pinball’ to the way ‘Cold Feet’ runs down your back like cool water.
At times, it’s almost too glacial, too remote – saved by a litany of openhearted pop refrains, the kind that have united humans on dancefloors across the past forty years. Love fuels the album, in all its yearning iterations. The songs are populated by absent lovers (“Well I went to the club and I thought saw your face” / “This city was never as good without you” / “Now I’m walking in the rain without you”), jealous lovers (“In the days of you and I, she was always hanging around”), long-time lovers (“As the leaves on the trees turn red, they mark three years since we first met”).
But even without that lyrical emotion, Hayter’s devoted attention to the music that always gets hearts beating pays off. The album channels Gwen Guthrie, ‘Elysium’-era Pet Shop Boys, and the Hall & Oates of ‘Out Of Touch’ and ‘I Can’t Go For That (No Can Do)’. A chic Moroder beat links arms with Mr Fingers’ ‘Mystery Of Love’ on ‘This City’, a tantalising hark back to covid-free life – the album was mostly finished before 2020.
And though ‘Private Sunshine’ isn’t the only record to pay homage to Steely Dan this year – St Vincent’s latest owes plenty to the band – Hayter transplants their song ‘Time Out Of Mind’ to the disco dancefloor. She completely recasts the song, the same way Poolside took on Neil Young’s ‘Harvest Moon’, or Saint Etienne adopted his ‘Only Love Can Break Your Heart’.
Perhaps ‘Private Sunshine’s best example of a pop song drawn out and looped for the floor is ‘Still Dreaming’, an impeccable blend of pathos and propulsive beats, showered in eighties synth. “Why do I still dream of you?” Hayter wonders. Maybe because, as pop doyennes Blondie once reminded us, “dreaming is free” – no matter what the forecast says”.
The final thing I will bring in is a more positive review from The Line of Best Fit. Private Sunshine is one of those albums that you need to spend time with and play several times. It is one of last year’s finest releases. I hope people pick up the album reading this, as Lou Hayter is a hugely talented artist who is shining as a solo act:
“Primed with copious party-ready peppiness and pitch-perfect production values, Private Sunshine feels very much a product of the era its modelled upon, rendering a retro-gilded bubblegum world alongside turn of the century house music nods. Hayter recalibrates her sound, to an extent, on a tracklist governed by pure ephemerality - an escapist sophisto sheen, strident in tapping the spirit of the age it emulates; echoes of Madonna’s breakthrough phase joining the carefree charisma of other post-disco contemporaries.
Hayter plasters the record with coolly nonchalant vocals alongside lavish electronic segments, flaunted with a panache that translates into addictive shots such as "My Baby Just Cares For Me", recalling the Hi-NRG of Stacey Q, and “Still Dreaming”, leaning towards early Bananarama and recent French disco revivalists such as Jupiter. The string of influences informing the album are at the forefront, pinpointing a specific style with discerning affection and attention. Particular tribute is paid, in this respect, to icons Steely Dan, with Hayter applying vivacious Pointer Sisters energy to a cover of Gaucho-era number “Time Out of Mind” - fitting neatly, in its updated garb, amongst the electro-pop abundance. Elsewhere, the title-track's Grace Jones-esque synth score zones in on the hyperrealism of a decade famed for its extravagance, capturing the emerging creative buzz at the dawn of the ‘80s, an exuberance gifted more room to develop with additional standout “You Again".
Pushing forward on a path marked by synth-toting songwriting, Private Sunshine appears a natural progression. Rather than deal a glib homage to an oft-imitated decade, Hayter orientates around its nuances with a sense of finer detail – one that easily stands as a credible time capsule, rather than a well-trodden form of mimicry”.
If you are not aware of Lou Hayter and the magnificent Private Sunshine then you need to get on it now! Such a brilliant album from an artist I am sure we will be hearing a lot more from, this is one of those releases from last year that got attention and praise, yet it warrants a new spin and some fresh love. Lou Hayter has always produced awesome music but, on Private Sunshine, she takes it to a new heights. She is an artist to…
BE very proud of.