LoneLady

Exchanging grey Manchester for a basement studio at London’s Somerset House, Julie Campbell (aka LoneLady) broke out the machines and got started on her third album.

- Danny Turner

Residing in a Manchester tower block for most of her adult life, Julie Campbell’s LoneLady project has been founded on the concrete brutalism of her environment and childhood memories of flickering VHS videos and art school. Her debut album Nerve Up (2010) featured a crackling miasma of post-punk influences and was followed five years later by the spindly guitars of the funk-driven Hinterland.

For her third album, Campbell sought a new creative ecosystem and found a suitable gloomy residence at a decaying basement studio at London’s Somerset House. In drum machine heaven, the producer created Former Things, her most accessible album to date. Bristling with heavily programmed electro-pop loops and synth bass, Campbell’s cleverly assimilated vocals eulogise on memories of lost youth with a renewed sense of vigour.

You took up residency at Somerset House, thus relocating from Manchester to London. What precipitated that move?

“Marie McPartlin, the director of Somerset House studios, was looking for a wide range of artists to join their new studios with a remit of bringing people back to London’s city centre. I leapt at the opportunity because I was dying to get out of Manchester and do something different having totally immersed myself and written a personal travelogue about where I came from on my second album Hinterland. I was frankly bored of Manchester so it came at a great time for me – a new city gave me totally new stimulus, which was a great starting point from which to write new material.”

We guess Somerset House still contains something of the concrete brutalism in its outwards appearance?