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 LoneLady
Born two miles east of
Manchester city centre and having lived for 10 years in the centre, 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. 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.
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.
Links
www.lonelady.co.uk
www.warp.net
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