As a music-obsessed kid growing up in Newcastle, Beth Jeans Houghton would watch No Doubt, and Veruca Salt, and Skunk Anansie, and Garbage on television, and dream of one day taking her place alongside iconic female performers such as Shirley Manson and Skin on stages worldwide. But when she actually broke into the music industry, signing her first record contract aged just 18, the reality would prove to be a nightmare.
On her brilliant new album Sniff More Gritty, her fourth long-player as Du Blonde, you can hear Houghton pour what she remembers as "15 years of anxiety, stress, and heartbreak" into the scathing, furiously sarcastic Next Big Thing, a sharply observed critique of the music industry (with guest vocals from Skin) which features quotes of 'helpful' comments made to her in the past by people entrusted with her art.
"I know you’re scared, what you want me to do? He only touched you a few times, so why does it bother you?" was one man's reaction to hearing of the sexual harassment she reported: another verse runs, "Here’s some latex, you should give it a spin. Oh Honey, trust me, they’ll love it, then you could be the Next Big Thing."
The trauma of those years will not easily be erased, but starting with 2021's superb Homecoming, her first self-produced, self-released record, Du Blonde has taken back control of her career, and is reaping the benefits of having the freedom to do exactly what she wants.
Louder caught up with the non-binary Geordie singer/songwriter to find out where it all went right.
When you look back on your first album, 2012's Yours Truly, Cellophane Nose - released as the debut album by Beth Jeans Houghton and the Hooves of Destiny - do you recognise the artist that made that record?
I do, yes. The weird thing is, I wrote most of that record when I was 16, and then by the time it came out, I was 21 so it was already kind of... I love that album, and I love the songs, and it's not what I would make now, but I I feel like it represented me really well back then, for who I was. I was really lucky to work with Ben Hillier [Depeche Mode, Blur, Nadine Shah], who just made the record sound like me. But I'm going to be 35 in January, and I feel like I'm a different person now from even five years ago, so it's funny looking back at when I began almost 20 years ago, and it feels like an entirely different person. I'd like to go back and give younger me a bit of advice, if I could.
There's a Guardian article from 2011 where you say, 'I know I'm not going to be a huge artist. I know I'll go out of fashion. I'm not for everyone.' So what were your ambitions at that point, or when you re-branded as Du Blonde?
I think the main thing I've always wanted since the beginning, over anything else, is just, longevity. The thing that I love most in the world is creating stuff, especially music, and I would hope - if I'm blessed to have a long, healthy life - to still be playing shows and making records into my seventies. I love sharing music and writing music, and I'd be doing this even if I didn't have a fanbase, and even if I wasn't making money: who makes money now anyway? So that was the main thing for me.
I think as well though there was an element when I was younger of, if I felt like I didn't care about success, then it wouldn't be painful if I didn't get it. But maybe I did have ambitions that I wouldn't allow myself to think of: like I've always wanted to do a US tour. My favourite film is Almost Famous, so I always wanted to drive around America playing shows.
It's funny, because everyone thinks that if you're a musician, you just want to be famous, but I feel like fame is a slightly separate thing, and it's really toxic. I mean, look at Chapell Roan and what she's saying about having boundaries: that's a really important conversation, and so many people have got their fucking knickers in a twist about it. But I've seen so much of that throughout my career, just through friends' careers, where you end up not living a life. So the fact that 20 years on, I can still make records, I can tour and I can have a private life is really perfect for me, and I wouldn't really change it.
Being signed to record labels made me fall so out of love with making music that I almost stopped
You originally signed with Mute Records, which has a reputation as an artist-friendly, less corporate label, but listening to the lyrics on the new record, and seeing that smile on your face just now, I'm guessing that maybe wasn't your experience...
I mean it's difficult because I can't really... I've been with a few labels, and I'm not gonna say who did what, or said what. But, I will say this: if I could go back in time, I never would have signed a contract.
I think that it's a very different time now. When I first signed a record deal, you'd still get a bit of an advance, and it seemed like it made sense at the time, business wise and financially. But I think that for me, what you give up for a record deal versus what you get back, it's not worth it at all. If you're a pop artist, or if you're someone whose goal is success, no matter how that comes, and you're happy to do what's suggested to you, there are good record labels out there. But being signed to record labels made me fall so out of love with making music that I almost stopped. I was so traumatised by the whole music industry, like, severely depressed. To have the thing you love bastardised and destroyed by people who're meant to help you is soul-destroying."
Happily you're still making music, and I presume a lot of that is down to how you regained control with Homecoming.
Yeah, but Homecoming was meant to be my last record.
Really?
Yeah, with Homecoming, I was just like, I'm gonna give it one more go, and I'm gonna make the record I always wanted to make, without any input from anybody. I thought, I'm going to do it for me, so that I know that at least one time in my career I made the record I wanted. And it was scary in a way, but also I was convinced by so many people that walking away from record labels was going to be the end of my career, so I was like, well, if I'm about to lose it all, then there is nothing else to lose.
And I had so much fun making that album. It became the first album where I recouped the money I spent on it, and has become my most successful album to date. It basically ended up being the beginning of who I am now.
With Homecoming, what expectations did you have, or did you really not care?
I didn't really care, which was an amazing feeling that I'll probably never recapture. I just knew that I loved it, and I'd done the one thing I set out to do, which was make a record that was fully mine. So even if it had got loads of shit reviews, which it didn't, I didn't really mind.
But it's funny, because I realised in making this record that because of all the years of people in my ear going, like, 'Well, that's not good for radio', or whatever, I hear those voices still. That's why it took quite a while to finish this one... that and the fact that I wrote about 150 songs for it! I had to really get back to that place where I was like, Am I writing this because I love it, or have I made this compromise because some ghost from my past is convincing me I should?
I got really fucking high at a party in LA and accidentally set my head on fire
Homecoming featured a number of guests, including Shirley Manson from Garbage (on Medicated) and Ezra Furman (on I'm Glad That We Broke Up). Are they old friends, or were they people you reached out to because you thought they might like the song?
Ezra is one of my best friends, and I've known her for 12 years or something now. I wrote I'm Glad... really quickly, in, like, 15 minutes, and as soon as I wrote it, I could sort of hear her voice on it. And then with Shirley, she'd written something about me, there was a magazine that asked her to write about an artist that she liked, and she wrote about [the first Du Blonde record] Welcome Back To Milk and so I just sent her a message, like, Would you ever want to sing on a song? And she said 'Yeah', so I was like, Oh, amazing! Shirley, like Skin, was someone very inspiring to me me when I was younger, seeing that sort of heavy, dark music.
With the new record - and I know you didn't ask about this - Skin, I sort of vaguely knew, because she'd interviewed me for her radio show once. I'd also met her, like, 15 years ago, when there was some exhibition opening at the V&A, and Skin was there, and I kinda danced with her, thinking, God, she's so beautiful! But I've never said to her that we'd already met all that time ago, because we didn't speak. But she is super great. And then Laura Jane Grace, I didn't know at all, but my manager had a connection to her, and it was a similar thing, like with the Ezra thing, where when I wrote Solitary Individual, I could hear her voice on it more than I could hear mine.
I know a lot of people in rock or indie don't often go down the collaborations route, but people in hip hop get collaborators all the time, and I really love it because it adds, like, a different flavour. One of my favourite things when I was a kid was looking on the back of LPs from, say, Los Angeles in the 1970s, from Joni Mitchell, and The Byrds, and The Mamas and Papas, and you could see in the credits that they'd all played on each other's records. I really loved that sense of musical community, so that's why I keep doing it. Plus, if you can have people that you really admire work with you, why the fuck not?
You mentioned that making the new record took a while: was it quite fraught process this time around?
It was a bit. It was one of these things where I'm always raring to go, and I could probably write an album in two weeks, but it's getting it finished that I find more difficult. I started writing right after Homecoming, actually it was more like a continuation from Homecoming, and I had an whole album, and I was going to mix it in November of 2021, two months after Homecoming came out. And then in September 2021, I caught Covid, and it turned into long Covid, and I couldn't breathe properly for six months, to the point where I couldn't walk for five minutes, and I had to sleep sitting up. I wasn't, like, suicidal in a depressed way, but it got to the point where it was such a stress on my body that I was like, Oh, if I was dead, I wouldn't be dealing with this, it was that bad.
So then that mixing session was missed, and it took me really long time to recover, by which point I'd started writing more songs. And then it starts this fucking terrible cycle... I wouldn't say terrible, but it starts this cycle of, I'll write a bunch of songs, I'll start to finish them, and then because of my ADHD, I'll get bored, and when I get bored, I'll start writing a new song. But one good thing that I did was I started a Patreon, and I've got such lovely people on my Patreon, and they basically helped me sift through the songs and pick which ones to go on the album. Which was so helpful, because as a solo artist, and because I produce and engineer everything on my own in the studio, the one thing I miss is having a second set of ears. Having that guidance was really helpful in giving me the confidence to make decisions.
That confidence shines through on a song such as Out Of A Million, just the fact that you can include this beautiful stripped-back piano ballad amid the punkier songs and it totally works.
Oh I'm glad to hear that, because that was the one I was a bit worried about. I wrote that initially for this long-running mixtape project I have called Baby Forever, which is basically all the shit I'm not going to put on an album. But as I was putting the tracklist together, I was thinking I'd love a song likeOut Of A Million on the record, and I tried to write some piano ballads to stick one on, and then thought, Oh, I just need to put that one in, so I moved it. Do you know what that one's about?
I don't, no...
It's about having to quit smoking weed. If you listen to the lyrics again, it becomes very obvious. I was at a New Year's party in LA in like, 2022, and I smoked from a bong for the first time, and I didn't realise it was mixed with ketamine, and I got really fucking high. And then I accidentally set my head on fire, or rather the hat that I was wearing. It just absolutely fucked my brain. And I've not been able to smoke weed since, but I really miss it, because I used to smoke it every day when I woke up.
Yeah, I've done ketamine by mistake too: it's not fun.
It's so awful, it's one of my greatest fears. The only two times I've ever taken shrooms was also by accident. My brain is already pretty precarious, and when you suddenly realise that you've taken something, and you can't take it back and you've just got to ride it out... so much anxiety.
Without getting too invasive into your past relationships, the songs Perfect and Blame suggest that you've had a pretty challenging time people wanting to mould you, or change you. And if you say you've already got anxiety…
Yeah, which I think is why I was probably previously quite prone to getting into relationships with people like that. I think I was like the prime target for that kind of personality. It's funny, because most of my records have been about people that I've just broken up with or I'm in a relationship with, but I've been single for the past five years, and they've been the best five years of my life... probably going to be single forever! [Laughs] So all of the songs that are on the record that are about relationships are very much hindsight songs.
Perfect and Blame are about two different people, but both pretty, gaslighty people. The thing with gaslighting that's so cruel is that it makes you question your own mind, and then you take that with you after you've broken up with the person. It's really kind of predatory behaviour to either convince someone that something's happened that didn't happen, or convince them that something that did happen didn't because it just puts you on such unstable footing, just in life in general.
With both of those relationships it took me a good long time to even trust my own judgment on stuff afterwards. On Lucky there's the line where it says, 'I've been working on my demons and my personality, I'm just an inch away from being what you need'. There's a lot of sarcasm there, a lot of dark humour, looking back and thinking, God, look what I did or allowed myself to become in order to keep this person who tried to convince me that I was nothing without them. So it's very cathartic to be able to to write about that. I'm sure my therapist might think differently...
This is a somewhat crass question, because I know these things don't exist as a binary thing, but would you say you're in a happy place right now?
Yes, 100%. Which is something I probably never would have ever said before. I think that my thirties have been the best decade of my life, don't know what I was worried about! And I think that being independent... yeah, I'm very happy. I'm in a place where I've gotten a lot better at having boundaries, both with people in business and in relationships. I used to spend a lot of time in relationships or friendships or whatever, trying to make something work. Or if I felt like someone didn't like me, it would be really upsetting, and then I'd feel like, Well, I need to convince them that I'm a good person, or whatever. It was really important to me.
But I realised a lot of the stuff that I was worried about being a reflection of me, is often a reflection of other people, and it's absolutely fine not to be liked, it's totally fine. If I think about it, even in a music sense, if I made music that everybody liked, it would probably be pretty bland, and it wouldn't be me. My grandma always used to say, 'You can't please everyone, so please yourself'. I'm a lot more comfortable now with criticism. I still don't like it - if people leave shitty comments on social media I'm not one of those people who can be, Oh, whatever, I'm like, Oh, uh, let me just throw up! But as long as I know that I'm being a good person, that kind of matters more now to me than anything anyone else might think.
