IN 2006, Nerina Pallot had a big, topical hit single with a perfect piece of peace-demanding pop, ‘Everybody’s Gone To War’. It was the aftermath of invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, both greeted with mass protests, and Pallot’s punchy, memorable hit was a throwback to the era of flowers and love. In context, the chirpy pop song made perfect sense.
The thing is, that’s not really who Pallot is. While many will forever tag her as that summer’s big protest-pop singer, that particular track was always a bit of an aside. Her modern-day music is very much deeper and more personal, a kind of soulful, vocally-led exploration of self, warts and all.
“I’ve got another audience now, especially in the UK,” she explains. “The people who bought that song probably aren’t my core fanbase, which is very supportive and much more long term. I’m really in a different part of my career, and I don’t often play ‘Everybody’s Gone To War’ live anymore. It’s not really representative of me as an artist, it just happened to resonate at the right political moment.”
‘Stay Lucky’, her latest LP, follows a string year of monthly EP releases. Pallot jokingly calls it the latest her “death and shagging” record: it’s got this Sunday-morning delicacy, a storytelling quality and quick-witted lyricism that makes it stand out. It’s very much a grown-up reincarnation: still supping wine, perhaps, but with a worldview that’s less quippy sloganeering and more gritty sensuality and storytelling. She’s evolved to be a far cry from her major label years.
“I did years with the majors, but no major label would touch the EPs,” Pallot laughs of her habit of putting out shorter, more experimental releases in recent years. “Majors are all about products and marketing, and I just wanted to do different things. After the fifth one I got a real block, and the sixth EP ended up being real bubblegum pop, but I did one every month for a year, and it was great fun.”
“Then I went on to ‘The Sound and The Fury’, which was very political, but also quite personal. Social media was relentless around Trump and all that stuff, and I was very despondent. This real bitterness became the new normal and I really just wanted to go out and clear my garden, I suppose. Trump is such an attention junkie and people just keep on encouraging him.” Pallot got her anger out of her system, and stepped away.
“With the new one, ‘Stay Lucky’, I listened to a lot of hip-hop and I was inspired by that. Stuff like Jorja Smith and Frank Ocean. The songs came really thick and fast and it wasn’t what I thought it would be,” the Jersey-born star says of her 2018 return. “I think it was because I’d spent some time enjoying doing other things for a while, working with other people. I have this real self-critical thing, and it’s the first time I’ve made a record that I didn’t hate very soon afterwards.”
“It became quite heavy, that write, record, play cycle. Now I’ve become a lot more natural and unforced. I just write when I’ve got something to say, and that seems to work for me. It’s been six years since I played alone, so I’ll be stepping out from behind my band on this tour and that’ll make it a little bit more natural. I’ll just do the setlist on the fly and take requests, and I can feel a bit freer.”
This article is one of my weekly music columns for the Dublin Gazette, reproduced here with permission. Note: this column is published in the Dublin Gazette several days ahead of on this website. The Gazette is a freesheet paper available across Dublin, published on a Thursday. Pick up copies at these locations.
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