Lou Hayter has been the coolest woman in London for years now, but she is about to hit Major Tom-in-deep-space levels of frostbite with her new album, Unfamiliar Skin. She’s always been cool but the difference now is that she is in total control.
“I decided to produce it myself, which was a challenge, but it was time,” Hayter says, “It is a male dominated music industry. I’ve worked with a lot of wonderful men who respected me, but also experienced the flip side of that, both in my DJ career and my production career, of being mansplained at, of not having an opinion that was valid.
A very small percentage of women are producers, so this felt like a statement. It’s very undiluted me. And sonically I moved elsewhere as well. It’s a slightly more sinister sound to my first record”
After the sunshiney Eighties feel of her debut solo album Private Sunshine, this latest one is darker and more ambitious with its retro-future sci-fi art-pop. David Bowie would surely approve of its eclecticism, the way it balances personal intimacy and otherworldliness, and an uncanny ability to, well, get under your skin.
“The title Unfamiliar Skin came from a conversation with a friend where we were talking about affairs and how the pull of unfamiliar skin is so compelling to somebody in a long relationship,” she says, “But it has a duel meaning because I’m in an unfamiliar skin as a producer.”
Lou first came to attention as keyboardist in the Mercury-nominated New Young Pony Club (the year Klaxons beat Amy Winehouse to the prize), right at the height of what is now called Indie Sleaze but was then New Rave. While she has fond memories – “It was fun, like summer camp.” – her songwriting only started as the scene ended.
After establishing herself as a successful DJ, she’s now flourishing as a solo artist, bringing to bear her vast musical knowledge: “For the record, I was thinking about Compass Point Studios, the early 2000s space age, Neptunes-style production, and Massive Attack in the Blue Lines era.”
The songs tell stories of the highs and lows, the betrayals and the compromises, of love affairs: the sleepy acquiescence of OK OK, the wired solitary yearning of 3AM, the JG Ballard mind control eroticism of Frequency, which Hayter insists is based on her real abilities: “I have an increasing sense of Extra Sensory Perception. I feel I can communicate beyond the physical. My family laughed me out of the room when I told them that.”
It is a vivid, nocturnal neon album, which is represented well in the video to In My Heart, a Ghost in the Shell-style anime, made by former member of The Horrors, Tom Furse. Furse also created the video for album title track, which uses AI to morph Hayter’s face onto classic movie characters, so we get to see her as Sean Connery in Dr. No and, less of a stretch, Claudia Cardinale in 8 ½. This is a classic kind of British pop music, where the effortless appeal belies an uncompromising sophistication.
Hayter says she surprised herself with how her ideas came together: “It’s exciting. I didn’t know I was going to make this record, it just poured out of me. For the first time I felt I wasn’t overthinking, I was channelling. That was interesting for me, to listen to it and think what is this record? Like ‘In My Heart’, when I was making that, I knew I had these elements, and I knew they were going to work together but I didn’t know how. It suddenly fell together but I wasn’t expecting it to sound like that myself.”
This kind of instinctive working is surely what all artists at their creative peak achieve. And ultimately, this is also the best kind of British pop because it is an act of self-actualisation. Everyone from Bowie to Kate Bush used acts of creation to meet themselves. She says, “I feel more like me when I put music out. And a lot happier. Like, ‘Oh this is who I am.’
Unfamiliar Skin is out on now on Greco Roman Records
