FLA 13: Juliet Brando

FIRST: TASMIN ARCHER: Great Expectations (EMI, 1992)

Extract: ‘In Your Care’

JUSTIN LEWIS

Now, I’m presuming it was ‘Sleeping Satellite’, its big number one single, that got you into this album.

JULIET BRANDO

It definitely was. I didn’t have my own money before that, so I'd have to rely on birthdays and Christmases to get music. But when Great Expectations came out, I had my own money, bit of pocket money, babysitting money...

JUSTIN LEWIS

It’s a good album as a whole, actually, isn’t it. What were your impressions of it at the time, then?

JULIET BRANDO

The song I used to play on repeat was ‘In Your Care’. Certainly as a teenager, having problems at school, and so on, that song really was one that I played over and over, in my own little world. A lot of her lyrics seemed to have a depth to them.

JUSTIN LEWIS

‘In Your Care’ was the follow-up single to ‘Sleeping Satellite’ – I’m not sure it got played very much on the radio, what with a chorus that started ‘son of a bitch, you broke my heart’. All the royalties for that single went to ChildLine.

JULIET BRANDO

I didn’t even realise it was a single! But it was the track on the album that really grabbed my brain.

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JULIET BRANDO

At middle school, we had very basic music lessons, but they didn't really have a lot of equipment. So if people wanted to learn piano or violin or anything like that, they had to...

JUSTIN LEWIS

Go private, effectively?

JULIET BRANDO

Yes. But I always loved music, listening to it. By secondary school, a lot of my friends were into boy bands, very poppy stuff, which wasn’t really my thing. 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Bros, New Kids on the Block?

JULIET BRANDO

That kind of thing. I was a bit of an outcast at school anyway. I was the weird kid with an off-brand Walkman listening to Kate Bush, and early 80s Depeche Mode. But when Tori Amos first appeared on the music scene, I was obsessed.

JUSTIN LEWIS

Yes, that first album, Little Earthquakes, was a big album for me as well.

JULIET BRANDO

And then I had to buy everything she did, you know. I’d go to the back pages of Melody Maker and Record Collector and see if I could track down anybody who could get me bootlegs or live recordings on cassette tapes. I was about 13 or 14. I’d found this artist that I loved so much, whose lyrics I found so meaningful. And I just had to kind of follow that as far as I could go.

JUSTIN LEWIS

I take it you discovered her Chas and Dave covers? (She really did cover ‘London Girls’ and ‘That’s What I Like’ as B-sides in 1996.)

JULIET BRANDO

Oh, definitely. All the singles, all the B-sides. There was a guy, I think he was based in Wales somewhere, who used to somehow get loads and loads of bootlegs, live recordings. I’d send him a cheque through the post and he’d send me all these cassette tapes and packages.

JUSTIN LEWIS

Are you still buying Tori Amos records?

JULIET BRANDO

I am, but the latest one [Ocean to Ocean, 2021] has got so much grief and sadness in it, a lot of it is about the loss of her mother… it’s beautiful and so good, but a bit too raw for me.

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JUSTIN LEWIS

You were talking on Tim Worthington’s podcast Looks Unfamiliar about ‘Breathe’, the cover version you made of the Télépopmusik song. But it does sound remarkably close – a compliment by the way, because I really like that version as well.

JULIET BRANDO

Well, it took ages in the studio to try and get the tone of my voice to sound exactly the same as Angela McCluskey’s voice on the original. According to Last FM, I didn’t exist, so I put it up on my YouTube channel.

JUSTIN LEWIS

I’m so glad you did!

JULIET BRANDO

I worked with a lot of producers back then on various iterations. Most of them never saw the light of day at all, but ‘Breathe’ ended up being used on everything. It was a whole day in the studio, but I was never told where the song would end up. And I kept hearing it. Chill out compilations, even TV shows. It’s on Six Feet Under! I think it was cheaper to licence it out. I only got paid £150!

JUSTIN LEWIS

If only you’d held out for a percentage!

JULIET BRANDO

I had no bargaining power. I was young, I was skint!

JUSTIN LEWIS

But presumably you were pursuing this work for a while.

JULIET BRANDO

I just wanted to make my own music. I worked with some really good producers for my own stuff, even though I didn’t have a great voice, and I wasn’t massively musically talented. But basically I got picked up by a manager at a gig I was doing when I was a teenager and he said he’d manage me. So he set me up with some really good producers, but also to get to make demos with them for free. A lot of that involved doing things like testing vocals for songs for much bigger artists. Demos for all sorts of stuff… So yeah, ‘Breathe’ was one of the rare ones where I got paid at all!

JUSTIN LEWIS

Given you weren’t learning instruments, how did you get into songwriting, and how did it that process work when you were collaborating?

JULIET BRANDO

It was instinctive. Whenever I was working with musicians, I’d sing the vocal line, and I’d tap out the rhythm, and I had very basic, slightly clumsy keyboard skills. So I could figure out chords in my head, but it just took a while to make them into something other people could hear or understand. And often when I was working with producers, they’d have some sort of backing track already, or some semblance of one in mind. And I’d put lyrics over it. But mostly we’d jam until music came out.

JUSTIN LEWIS

So were you a solo artist or in a band, or was it a bit of both?

JULIET BRANDO

A little of both. I was in a band when I was about 18, and that’s when I got picked up by the manager who wanted to work with me as a solo artist. I had to have ‘the conversation’ with the other members of the band, two other guys, and they both had other stuff going on anyway.

JUSTIN LEWIS

And how would you describe what the music sounded like?

JULIET BRANDO

It was a bit like trip-hop, which I loved. Portishead, Tricky, Moloko, Morcheeba… Ruby…

JUSTIN LEWIS

Oh agreed on all those. Ruby were great. That was the woman out of Silverfish, wasn’t it? Lesley Rankine.

JULIET BRANDO

I've got all Ruby’s stuff, I love it so much and they’re still putting out music now and it's brilliant. Their first album definitely was one of my really big influences. With my first band, I wanted to push our sound in that direction, but the other guys… one was driving towards house music, and the other towards guitar rock. So it ended up being a clash of all of those things, and we didn’t really have a direction as such.

When I was doing solo stuff, I was trying to push it towards dark trip-hop roots, you know?

But it was just before Evanescence and that sort of scene… Nine Inch Nails, nu-metal, away from that trip-hop style. So we ended up being more metally. I had a backing band by that point.

JUSTIN LEWIS

What were you called?

JULIET BRANDO

I was called Fae Magdalene. I’ve actually googled myself just to see if there was any trace of me. I did some big gigs in Germany, in Manchester, a lot around the south coast of England. Sometimes record company people would be in, but that was a nightmare. It was in the early noughties when all these Simon Cowell-type programmes had first become popular. There’d be these A&R people, standing at the back with their arms folded, looking angry and unimpressed, and then smug and dismissive. It was the worst possible audience and as somebody in my early twenties, I was not very emotionally resilient at the time. I was just trying to do something I loved, to make a living wage out of it, but I was just not strong enough for the music industry.

JUSTIN LEWIS

Very few people are, really, I think. And the experiences of the last couple of years where nobody could go and do gigs for a long time really did expose a lot of vulnerabilities, especially as very few people were making money out of recordings in the first place. I mean, I think streams have probably killed the pop band, at least in the British/American world. It’s all solo artists at the top end.

JULIET BRANDO

Yeah, it’s really strange how much the industry has changed – even without COVID – just in the space of a few years. But I remember in the early 2000s, on the motorway with my then manager, I was playing a recording of a live gig by PJ Harvey. And he just scoffed at it. ‘Well, she wouldn’t get signed now.’ She should always have been signed. Always. She’s a genius.

JUSTIN LEWIS

I think people just got a lot more cautious and conservative. The thing about all those things like Pop Idol and X Factor. They’re never really about music. They’re about television. [Agreement] I mean, some talented people have gone through that machine, but the trouble is, the whole thing is predicated on a guarantee that people will buy the music at the end of the series, and even that is prone to all sorts of variables. And you can’t guarantee that because, really, nobody can predict what will take off. The public can get behind some quite unusual things sometimes, which completely derails the idea that there’s some magic formula.

JULIET BRANDO

Yeah, and because those TV shows are so gladiatorial… that kind of influence, the way musicians and music were talked about behind the scenes… that all spilled over into where I was making music. There was so much pressure to be thin enough, and confident enough. It became all about the saleability of it, not about the music itself. And I just fell to pieces a bit when I was about 23. I thought, This really isn’t for me. This is not something I can keep doing. And I mean, I genuinely wasn't talented enough, either musically or my singing voice. I loved writing music, but I think I would have been better placed to write it for other people.

JUSTIN LEWIS

Music isn’t always directly about pure musical talent. Which is not to do her down, but take Madonna. Not the greatest voice in the world, but it’s about the determination and concentration on image. All of which is obviously valid.

JULIET BRANDO

 My sister went through a brief Madonna phase. I bought a single on tape for her! ‘Crazy for You’ [the slightly remixed version, 1991].

And it’s like going back to the Beatles and bonfires. Madonna sheds her skin every now and then. She just reinvents herself, constantly keeps moving.

JUSTIN LEWIS

Working with whoever the up-and-coming producers are.

JULIET BRANDO

As well as keeping up with what’s going on in the queer scene and underground scene. I like it when people do this. I’m thinking maybe Taylor Swift will go down this route, but also people like Björk who got really big and poppy but then went down these weird musical corridors and made whole albums of throat singing.

JUSTIN LEWIS

I was just thinking of the Medulla album! I seem to remember she did a song from that (‘Oceania’) at the Athens Olympics (2004).

JULIET BRANDO

I love her weird stuff. Just a really unusual sort of experiment that goes to really unexpected places. And I’m not a big Taylor Swift fan, but I can see that she's very talented and good at what she does. I like that she drops an album occasionally that’s totally not her usual style. I have a lot of respect for that.

JUSTIN LEWIS

I wonder if that’s what Billie Eilish is going to do as well.

JULIET BRANDO

Everything I’ve heard by her has been really good. I know little about her music or about her, but I know that if I got into it, I think I’d be a really big fan.

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JULIET BRANDO

Because I’ve been going through some tough times, there are a lot of songs that would make me cry, like that new Tori Amos album I mentioned earlier. My safe space is Cuban music, which I first got into via Kirsty MacColl.

JUSTIN LEWIS

Oh yes, ‘Mambo de la Luna’. What’s that album called?

JULIET BRANDO

Tropical Brainstorm (2000). I love everything she did. I got into her music fairly late, and through a series of coincidences which are gonna sound really, really odd. Her music was always around in the background, but I’d never really properly listened. And one day, years ago, near Christmas, I was sitting in a pub with my sister, and ‘Fairytale of New York’ [with the Pogues] came on the jukebox, it was just on autoplay as it was the afternoon, nobody else was in there. And suddenly, we just stopped talking. As soon as Kirsty's voice kicked in, as if we were hearing her voice for the first time. It was kind of revelatory: ‘Fuck, she’s amazing.’

It was like a sort of weirdly religious experience. And then we got home and it was on the news that she’d died [18/12/2000].

And that was the start of a whole series of events and really, really weird coincidences that led me to buy everything she’d ever done. I ended up being friends with various friends of hers and family members of hers, and her sons… even down to one of her best friends ending up as my lodger last year. The world is a small and strange place, and somehow Kirsty is in the algorithm, and all the strange coincidences led me down a kind of rabbit hole.

JUSTIN LEWIS

She had lots of label trouble, especially in the 80s, she was on so many different record labels in the end [Polydor, Stiff, Virgin, ZTT, V2]. The first time there was a compilation of her stuff was Galore, which was a great compilation (Virgin, 1995). Unfortunately, you still tend to hear her cover versions (‘A New England’, ‘Days’) rather than the stuff she wrote herself.

JULIET BRANDO

She was an amazing writer. [Agreement] Lyrically, she inspired me more than anybody, certainly in my twenties. Her lyrics were so clever and funny, on the verge of being comedy songs, but with equal depth and heartbreak. People have compared her to Dorothy Parker and it’s a good comparison: funny, sharp, cutting lyrics.

JUSTIN LEWIS

I suspect she would have been an amazing tweeter. But the roots of her interest in Cuban music seem to stem from ‘My Affair’, from the Electric Landlady album (1991). Not a big hit, but it was a surprise, a very unlikely direction for her to go in.

JULIET BRANDO

I don’t use Spotify, and so for my car, I just put a load more songs on a USB stick every few months, so my car playlist has been growing and growing and growing. And it's mostly Cuban music, or Afro-Cuban music, or upbeat, tropical Kirsty songs. And a record I recently got into was this:

LAST: VARIOUS ARTISTS: Putumayo Presents: Congo to Cuba (2002, Putumayo World Music)

Extract: ‘Canto a la Vueltabajera’ by Alfredo Valdes

JUSTIN LEWIS

It’s impossible to feel downhearted with this sort of music, isn’t it?

JULIET BRANDO

That’s exactly it. A deliberate shove to my own mental health, to try and listen only to music that will make me feel more upbeat and happy.

JUSTIN LEWIS

Cheerful music is seen as a little unfashionable, isn’t it? Pop music in general, there’s something uplifting about it. Anything that’s seen to cheer you up is not really viewed as great art. It’s like the eternal question: Why do so few comedy films win Oscars?

But you were telling me before we started that you don’t know what the lyrics are. And I think, more than a book or a film, once we hear a song, our own experience colours what that song is, and what it means. You can’t necessarily do that with a film, but you definitely can do it with a piece of music because the moment of that music completely and instantly associates itself with something in your life, whether it’s that holiday, that person you fell in love with… Sometimes it’s a bad experience. But even just hearing one line, one word of it, can take you right back.

JULIET BRANDO

It’s fascinating. When I was growing up, and certainly all the way through most of my 20s, I always felt that lyrics were the most important part of a song, the part that spoke to me the most. But I think it’s because I had quite severe clinical depression and anxiety – it’s sort of hearing me cackling in the background – but I could relate to it in such a way, it spoke to the heartbreak and anxiety I was feeling. I don’t know whether you’d call it a breakdown, but I went through a really bad time towards my late twenties. I found I couldn’t listen to music with lyrics at that point because it would just hit me too hard.

More recently, I’ve been going through something similar – different sorts of fears and bereavements. I could only listen to instrumentals for a while. I think there's a sort of mass trauma with all of us at the moment. We’re going through some really strange times and I think my safe space is delightful, happy sunshiny music with lyrics in Spanish. Even though I know some Spanish, I almost don’t want to be able to understand fully what they’re saying. They all feel like summertime and fun and serotonin and dopamine. Good brain chemicals.

JUSTIN LEWIS

I almost was tempted to put some of the lyrics into Google Translate to see if I could work out what the songs were about. And then I thought, ‘Maybe Juliet would prefer not to know what they mean.’

JULIET BRANDO

I actually have done that with some of them. They seem to be about quite nice things anyway. But I love that I’ve slightly misheard them in some cases. You know Buena Vista Social Club? There’s a song called ‘Pueblo Nuevo’, a song about a ‘New Town’. But I slightly misread it, so when it came up on my car playlist, I thought it was about ‘New Paul’. Somebody called Paul! [Laughter]

JUSTIN LEWIS

It’s all about Pablo, almost!

JULIET BRANDO

I misread it as Pablo! [Laughter]

JUSTIN LEWIS

Congo to Cuba, as the title suggests, by the way, seems to reflect this passing of a musical baton back and forth between Latin America and Africa. As I understand it, it’s some Latin melodies got taken to Africa, that music then became Africanised, and then that version gravitated back to Latin America. So it’s like this ongoing conversation where the music kept getting embellished.

JULIET BRANDO

I love that about it because listening to so many of those tracks has got me into different African music that’s just amazing. Like there’s this Congolese band called Mbongwana Star. They have a song called ‘Malukayi’. I still haven’t been able to find a whole album by them, because it’s the only song by them that I’ve got.

JUSTIN LEWIS

I have established there is an album. It’s called From Kinshasa (released 2015, World Circuit Limited Records).

JULIET BRANDO

I found ‘Malukayi’ on YouTube, put it on in my car, and the bass on it is so strong that it makes the whole car rattle. I'm pretty sure I’ve blown my speakers now because that bass is just so odd.

JUSTIN LEWIS

It’s got that great electronic pulse underneath it.

JULIET BRANDO

Exactly.

JUSTIN LEWIS

It appears that some of the group is French, so they’ve mixed Congolese and European music.

JULIET BRANDO

I know very little about them, but that song… As soon as I heard it, it just hit me so hard. It made me want to dance. There’s something so powerful and fizzy about it, it reminds me of when you put an Alka-Seltzer in a glass. There’s something so delicious and energising about the sound.

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