“They’re still signing,” the manager of Woman’s Hour says in explanation. I’m waiting in Rough Trade East, off Brick Lane, and the five-piece from Kendal have just finished a seamless, smoothly-orchestrated 45-minute set lifted from their debut album, ‘Conversations’.
The band - vocalist Fiona Burgess, her older brother and guitarist Will, Josh Hunnisett on keys, bass player Nicolas Graves and Rob the new drummer - are penned in near the stage, scrawling on records and T-shirts, smiling at compliments and fielding questions about their recent tours of America and Europe. Assorted music biz people – from their label, Secretly Canadian, and a couple of PR outfits - hang in the background.
Woman’s Hour have toured solidly this summer. The early 20-somethings have another 30 gigs lined up, from here until November. Looking at them as they soak it up, you would never know that one of them had to leg it across town from a job in a solicitors to make it to the gig, that another opened a deli at seven that morning, or that Fiona did a long shift in a psychiatric unit and will be back serving coffee the next day.
Woman’s Hour are all still holding full time odd-jobs in bars and cafes, even as they establish themselves as one of the most talked-about bands of the moment. “I started working it out the other day,” Josh says. “I realised I’ve been working a 90-hour week for the last six months.”
“It’s been non-stop,” Fiona adds. “We finished the record in February, had three days to rehearse the live show, and then we’ve been on the road ever since. I never really thought about, and prepared myself, for this life. I love performing, and that experience makes it worth it. But I have to spend a fair amount of time in a van with five boys, not getting a lot of sleep, bedding down on sofas. It’s gruelling.”
Woman’s Hour have been around for three years and have been taking it seriously for two. They are trying to make it in an industry that expects musicians to do more and more with less and less. They play electro-soul and indie which, as any wannabe hipster will tell you, is pretty much ten-a-penny in today’s scene. Listening to their debut album, which is played almost in its entirety during the Rough Trade gig, though, you can tick off the dub and Latin influences and the embrace of classic pop balladry - from Fleetwood Mac through to AlanisMorrisette - in their intensely modern, blended sound.
They don’t sing about the state of the nation, but the vagaries of love. Their early break was a cover of a Leona Lewis tune, which featured on Made In Chelsea. Their first single, Jenni, released almost three years ago, barely made a dent and a spate of gigs failed to register. On paper, there’s little reason why Woman’s Hour should be making it as they are.
But this band have that elusive thing. For all their lack of definition, their lack of real ‘newness’, Woman’s Hour are deeply, effortlessly listenable. They took a long live hiatus after Jenni didn’t go anywhere, spending time in rehearsal rooms and then a south London studio.
‘Conversations’, consequently, is a feat of production, each sound spacious and lush and refined, each undulating synth given shape by an off-kilter beat, each guitar line layered with telepathic bass. Fiona’s vocals ride high and rich over the soundscape, sometimes almost childlike, her Kendal accent breaking through. In Spinal Tap, they turned it up to 11. Woman’s Hour barely make it to two.
Yet it undeniably works. There are plenty of tasteful acts out there that drift from memory as quickly as a fade-out. Woman’s Hour stay with you. If they hit the occasional weak note in the gig, if Will doesn’t quite nail a solo, or the new drummer doesn’t quite blend his live sound into their calibrated compositions, or Fiona’s voice takes time to fill the room, one thing remains obvious: their melodies just stick.
It may be because such style is met with substance. Fiona’s lyrics, of which she is fiercely, protectively secretive about, speak of a deep, introspective sense of uncertainty, about herself, her lover, a relationship yearned for or spurned. When she uses her voice purely as an instrument, which she does often, it feels like part of the message; as if she’s trying to call out something that can’t be said through words. “I know I’ve asked too much of you, and now I’m pushing you away,” she sings on Her Ghost. On Darkest: “However I ask the answer’s still the same, you cut me loose because I let you down.”
“I become so connected I can’t ever remember anything,” Fiona says of singing live. “It’s surreal. I forget who I am, I just feel all these people staring at me. It feels like this incredible engagement.”
It’s almost ironic that she’s so central to the success of this band. Each of the boys had been in bands before, and were pretty set on giving music a go. But it hadn’t crossed Fiona’s mind. She was studying theatre at Central School of Speech & Drama in Swiss Cottage, London. Her involvement with the band during its early years was split between a part-time theatre MA at King’s College, working as a drama teacher for C&T Theatre Company, putting on workshops in an adolescent psychiatric unit and then working in a coffee shop. “Thank god for flexible employers,” she says.
She hadn’t sung in public since a miserable experience of being in a choir as a 10-year-old. Her brother convinced her to give it a go and they had the awkward experience of her singing for him while he played his guitar. She still suffers, quite acutely, from nerves. “It can come in this wave, and I feel myself go red, I get hot, my heart starts beating really hard. I have to stand away from the microphone and breathe really slowly,” she says.
She now writes all the lyrics, fronts the band with an elegiac intensity, takes point on the band’s imagery and recently directed their next music video in her native Kendal before playing at Deer Shed festival in North Yorkshire and Tramlines in Sheffield on the same weekend.
Kendal, that quaint town in the Lake District, holds mixed feelings now. “A big part of my growing up was going into Kendal to hang out and drink with my friends, and to go the club nights there,” Fiona says. “If I go to a club in Kendal I freak out now. I feel self-conscious and uncomfortable.”
The new music video was shot in the secondary school where members of the band went through their most formative years. Fiona was “fucking nervous” about going back there. “And then, when I went through the doors again, I realised I loved growing up there. I went through stages of being a nightmare but I loved that school. And then I went walking up into the hills and thought: ‘There’s nothing else like this.’”
Stood in the crowd is Oliver Chanarin, one part of the celebrated photography partnership Broomberg & Chanarin. The pair became the first duo to win the Deutsche Börse photography prize last year and, in photography circles, are considered a big deal.
After a chance encounter and an evident meeting of minds, Broomberg &Chanarin have created Woman’s Hour’s sleeve art and press imagery, as well as directing each of their music videos, with Fiona as a co-director.
“We’re using it as an excuse to interrogate photography,” Chanarin told the British Journal of Photography, when discussing their collaboration with Woman’s Hour. “Photographs are bad at capturing anything beyond a surface, a momentary event. We wanted to explore a language of gesture, as it might help us get beyond the limitations of photographic imagery.”
Woman’s Hour’s imagery has a theme: they resurrect archival images that once held a definable practical purpose, thus re-contextualising their suggestive significance. The image for To The End, their first single, shows a passive man, his arms spread-eagled, his legs buckled as he falls to the floor. The original shot came from a manual given to Czech policemen, advising officers how to take a fall without breaking anything. Broomberg & Chanarin found the image when travelling through Prague over a decade ago.
Darkest Place, the band’s second single, shows a prone man with a blank stare and a hand holding his neck. It comes from an old first aid book, showing how to stem a severed jugular. The song’s video is a stunning single take of Fiona singing while unseen hands grip her face and try to prise her eyes open. It’s a homage to the 1971 performance of Pryings by performance and installation artist VitoAcconci. It’s also an integral part of Woman’s Hour’s holistic offering in this multimedia age.
The crowds have dissipated by the time our interview finishes. The band stay for a quick pint with their handlers, before being taken out to dinner. Both Fiona and Josh hug me before they leave – a very unusual gesture for an arts critic to receive. It seems to sum up where the band are right now: still very green, still working it out, and still with a lot to give.
The next time I interview Woman’s Hour, I thought, it’ll be a snatched, formal 10 minutes in a hotel, or backstage at an amphitheatre. They’ll be surrounded by security and given the full VIP treatment. Because they’re only going one way.
Woman's Hour Upcoming Tour Dates are as follows
Tue September 23 2014 - LONDON Village Underground
Wed September 24 2014 - OXFORD Jericho Tavern.
Thu September 25 2014 - BIRMINGHAM Hare and Hounds
Fri September 26 2014 - LEEDS Belgrave Music Hall
Sat September 27 2014 - MANCHESTER Deaf Institute
Tue October 14 2014 - BRISTOL Exchange
Wed October 15 2014 - NOTTINGHAM Nottingham Stealth
Thu October 16 2014 - GLASGOW King Tuts Wah Wah Hut
Fri October 17 2014 - LIVERPOOL East Village Arts Club
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