LoneLady
Location: Manchester
Website: http://myspace.com/hiholonelady
Bio: On 22 February 2010 new WARP signing Lone Lady is to release her debut album. Titled ‘Nerve Up’, the album follows 2009’s limited edition ‘Immaterial’ ... (more)
7", which is now available as a free download from www.lonelady.co.uk. The album will also be preceded by the release of a second single, ‘Intuition’, which is set for a 11 January release.
Born two miles east of Manchester city centre and having lived for 10 years in the centre right next to a motorway, the Mancunian Way, a stone’s throw from the Arndale Centre, Canal Street, all the shitty, brilliant pubs, clubs, dives, stinking canals, redbrick council estates, leafy suburbs and tarted-up ‘quarters’, LoneLady could walk around Manchester blindfolded. She loves / hates it, it is her home, so she had to record there.
A fan of first albums, believing them to be a document of struggle, real-ness and wilderness, a lot of LoneLady’s favourite albums are debuts, and she didn’t want to go to London or anywhere else to record ‘Nerve Up’.
LoneLady, AKA Julie Campbell is a self-styled writer, vocalist and tight guitarist. With little more than thorny determination and a shoestring budget, she built a secluded ramshackle studio in the belly of one of Manchester’s crumbling mills and created ‘Nerve Up’ in the span of four weeks.
The aesthetics of this ex-mill were a pure joy for LoneLady and invoked the ghosts of bands she loves ... (Joy Division, ESG, Wire, Grace Jones, The Fall, Suicide, PiL) … grainy black and white images depicting the kind of spaces that have barely changed over the past 30 years, where ghosts stretch from the past and point to the future.
Co-produced by Julie and Guy Fixsen (My Bloody Valentine, The Breeders, Stereolab), LoneLady has delivered far more than just an assembly of songs in album form, but the outcome of a process of making something out of nothing. Not so much searching for the light in the pouring rain, as revelling in the perversity of it’s inhospitable barren beauty - witness to the gargantuan task of forging a homemade recording studio in a crumbling corner of a dilapidated mill, as though it were hewn from the tattered remnants of some unnamed apocalypse.
Stripping back the glossy veneer of glass and cheap tinfoil to uncover the brittle, workaday ordinariness of a Manchester that has been trampled, buried and renovated, she exposes the raw, ragged memories, ideals and nerves now wriggling, bare, vulnerable; the dove-grey patina of the old city that lurks beneath. Uncovering a Manchester we seldom choose to revisit with her harsh, uncompromising and discordant stance, a new kind of beauty is revealed, alive with the rich hues of slate and mauve we’ve been persuaded to outgrow and discouraged from appreciating.
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