Narc. Magazine Online
Reliably informed
Isabel Johnson talks to the power pair about their debut album, a self-produced labour of
love exploring confessional and often hopeful themes
Image by Kelly Briggs Atkinson, set & art direction by Lady Kitt
The debut album. It’s not a small feat by any means, and it takes a village – often, it feels, anarmy – to make a great one. Yet, in the freshly soundproofed laundry cupboard at Bridie Jackson and Nick Pierce’s home in Newcastle, there is no village. There’s Bridie, there’s Nick, and there’s Flowers, which turns out to be one of those great debut albums.
Having informally begun collaborating in the 2020 lockdown via a series of themed online concerts, this album has been a long time coming for Staithe. And for such a talented pair, it only makes sense that Flowers is entirely their own brainchild, with no outside noise daring to tiptoe its way into the music. “It’s been a labour of love because we’ve done every single bit of it ourselves, and that’s been very tough and very intense, but just completely wonderful,” Bridie muses. “I’m so happy that we decided to do it this way, because you kind of get to know the bones of it in a different way when you’re involved in every aspect.”
The album’s title was inspired by the idea of ‘getting your flowers’, in the sense of finally finding something rewarding after a long period of hardship or unappreciation. Bridie heard the phrase for the first time a few years ago and immediately fell for the concept. “I thought itwas such a good phrase, and it totally captured how I was feeling at that moment in time,” she shares. “I’d been through some really complicated difficult things and I felt like I’d come out of the other side calmer and happier than I’d ever been, with more empathy than I’d ever had.”
As a general rule, the album is incredibly confessional. “It’s wrestling with some pretty gnarly stuff, but I like to think that it ends in a much more hopeful place.” This emotional arc is even reflected in the album’s cover art; it begins at the darkest point of night, but if you turn the cover over it looks instead like the earliest hours of daylight.
Sonically, the album demonstrates sheer power in the softest of ways, seamlessly flitting between tenderness and intensity. For an album with such a magical feel to it, it might come as a surprise to know that Bridie and Nick haven’t actually been producing music for all that long. “Bridie’s laptop broke just before lockdown, so she had to buy a new one. But the new laptop came with Garageband on it, so we were able to spend lockdown learning how to usethat,” Nick says. “More recently we’ve upped our game a bit in terms of understanding how to record and mix our work properly.”
There’s so much to consider when creating a record, and the fact that Staithe have not only written and played on the whole thing by themselves, but learned entirely from scratch how to produce it is something of a miracle. Though it’s a miracle derived entirely from Bridie and Nick’s hard work, and pure unfiltered talent for doing the thing they love, and this is why Staithe certainly do deserve their flowers.
