"A Little Life" is the latest collaboration of Marnie with Union of Knives. It's the 9th track of their 2021 album Endless From the Start. Another collaboration is the 4th track "A Tall Tale".
15 November 2021
A new collaboration: Union of Knives feat. Marnie - A Little Life
15 June 2021
Witching Hour Listening Party 2021
Ladytron participated at a Witching Hour Listening Party organized by Tim Burgess of The Charlatans on 14 June 2021. They shared on Twitter interesting memories, facts and pictures related to that great album. Below are the tweets from the band, Jim Abbiss, the WH main producer and Sam Wiehl. Ladytron also announced they are working on a new album!
Ok here we go: Ladytron’s Witching Hour on @LISTENING_PARTY Start your albums.
"High Rise is Ladytron pretending to be Neu! Touring evolved how we made new work. Layers, complex textures, distortion, and live energy. High Rise was an embodiment of that and it became the album and live opener." @Reuben_Wu
"I like how High Rise evolved. Lyrics were incomplete when recording so each of us went off to a corner and came up with thoughts and images that were pulled together to create this lyrically vivid track." @marnieofficial
"High Rise would have seemed like a massive jump, but the way the previous album Light & Magic ended, the final few minutes at least, already hinted at where we were going." @Daniel_IV_
"Wrote Destroy everything you touch in minutes after getting in a taxi to the airport on the way to Australia. It was almost instantaneous." @Daniel_IV_
"I love playing Destroy live. The connection with the crowd is always great and the energy they give back really makes me happy. If it's not about that then i don't know what it is." @marnieofficial
Adam Bartley’s video for Destroy has some history attached. The idea was originally based on garden of earthly delights but the treatment evolved into this kind of Hokusai landscape setting.
Destroy shoot was to be 7th July 2005 in London, but we woke up that morning to a flurry of messages and voicemails insisting we stay where we were, that there had been bomb attacks on the tube and not to leave the hotel.
"Destroy video felt like Lord of The Rings set. Huge models built for us to slot our faces into - a living ice mountain. My neck has never felt such pain since, hours static in an awkward position. Was worth it." @marnieofficial
"We received from permission from China to play a concert but on condition we did not play the song Destroy Everything You Touch, because of the word "destroy" We considered switching ‘destroy’ for ‘enjoy’ or ‘improve’." @Reuben_Wu
"If you listen in phones, the mix of Destroy sounds complicated. It is actually two mixes stuck together. We kept that secret for fifteen years." @Daniel_IV_
International dateline. They’re not guitars, they’re tears.
"Soft Power is the song that comes to mind for me when this album is mentioned. Its the centrepiece, and still a key part of the live shows." @Daniel_IV_
"Soft Power. I always enjoy the songs where Mira and i converge and sing together on a verse or chorus. When it works it's great." @marnieofficial
"CMYK. We used to do these interludes on our early albums. I kind of miss them." - @Reuben_Wu
Artwork: "We wanted to do two versions of the print - one with girls and one with boys on the cover. My partner Dave Hand and I came down to the photoshoot at Eltham Palace to to get the images to base the illustrations." @SamWiehl
"Riff for AMTV came about drunkenly messing around in my bedroom studio where I just had my MS 20 plugged into my laptop, a set of speakers and pretty much no furniture." Mira
"We were fortunate to be invited to China in 2004 and that's where we first played Sugar. In a country that couldn't buy our music we were unsure what to expect. But the kids there just wanted to party." @marnieofficial
"I remember it took two of us to play the MBV style guitar sound on Sugar in the studio, Danny on the whammy bar and me holding an e-bow on the strings." @Reuben_Wu
"FIBUA. I used to be (I still am) really into military surplus gear and the term Fighting in Built Up Areas seemed like an instant fit to a track I was working on. There is a musical nod to Eisbaer by Grauzone." @Reuben_Wu
"Last One Standing makes me think of Mexico City and the crazy reaction we got playing there. It was another level. Pure joy." @marnieofficial
"We got heavier, as bands tend to; harder and faster with each performance. This was reflected in the early tunes we had for Witching Hour, like Weekend" @Daniel_IV_
"Beauty*2. I remember being in a bar in London with Reuben and i told him i had a title for a song; Beauty number 2. Just the title, no music. Sometimes that's all you need. It just flows from there. My Chanel no.5." @marnieofficial
"Beauty*2. I love how stripped down the song sounds in the beginning and then builds fully to the end. My sister Semay played cello in those parts which always get me." @Reuben_Wu
"Whitelightgenerator was an artefact from my service in the shoegazing wars.
That delicate guitar part that comes in around half way had a name: ‘Heidi’." @Daniel_IV_
"All The Way. The images Danny presents here with the lyrics are just perfect. Makes me think of my time in Liverpool. It has a big nostalgic feel. All that talk of winter and Victorian England." @marnieofficial
Guess what. Witching hour was almost never made...
Jim Abbiss, producer: "We had the worst possible start to the session, finding out that the record label had folded on the morning of day one." (1/5)
Jim Abbiss: "Everything could have ended there & then, but we decided to carry on regardless, it may have galvanised us more. It also crucially meant that no-one interrupted or gave pointless opinions, we just did what felt right at the time." (2/5)
Jim Abbiss, producer: "What happened over the next few weeks was as near to what I’d dreamed making records would be like when I was a teenage music fan. (3/5)
Jim Abbiss, producer: "We worked really long hours but still found time to go out & experience Liverpool’s weird & wonderful late-night entertainment, the Russian members' club cabaret night a firm favourite." (4/5)
Jim Abbiss, producer: "We all became solid friends over the time & had the added bonus of Euro 2004 footy on the telly every day, absolutely priceless! It remains one of my favourite ever album experiences." (5/5)
*An unlisted 9 minute 3 seconds track of total silence* called 'Witching Hour'.
You must listen to that until the very end, or you haven’t experienced the album as it was intended.
That was Witching Hour. Thanks for tuning in.
Cheers to @Tim_Burgess @LISTENING_PARTY.
Lets do this again.
(p.s. don't tell anyone, but a new album is on its way...)
23 May 2021
Gary Numan likes Ladytron
Today I listened to BBC 6 Music Radio (by the way, great radio) and they had a special edition dedicated to Gary Numan with songs and live interview. He released his new album Intruder on 21 May. Just before the show ended, the host played Destroy Everything You Touch and asked Gary if he sees any Numan influence in that song:
Interviewer: [...] it reckons that Ladytron probably catch the Numanoid vibe pretty well, down to the sense of menace underlying the synths mastery. Try listening to Destroy Everything You Touch this way.
[interrupting the song]
Interviewer: Talking about fish and water, I mean... can you see any Numan influences in there?
Gary Numan: Again... I like Ladytron, but I don't. 'Cause I don't know what I suppose to sound like.
You can listen to the whole show here.19 December 2020
Ladytron are working on a new album!
Helen Marnie confirmed it on Twitter and Instagram.
Helen: "Nope. [about a solo album] Working with the 'tron".31 October 2020
30 October 2020
Bido Lito! interview, 2019
Ladytron are, for me, the best of English pop music. They're the kind of band that really only appears in England, with this funny mixture of eccentric art- school dicking around and dressing up, with a full awareness of what's happening everywhere musically, which is kind of knitted together and woven into something quite new."
This is a quote from Brian Eno. Lifted from Wikipedia and unashamedly so. A quote like that stops you dead. Brian Eno knows his eggs and rarely proffers his compliments so starkly. For anyone familiar with the work of Marnie, Wu, Hunt and Ayoro then the excitement of a return is enraptured in such a comment. For those of you who are not: welcome. They've been away, you see, and now the time is upon us to behold a band that was conceived, then born in Liverpool and brought up around the world. There are places in Glasgow, São Paulo, Chicago, Bulgaria, Italy, London and Bebington that have nurtured and developed the four-piece to the point where the 'electronic pop' (their own simplified tag) of Ladytron is more than just a sound. It's an ology. A way of crafting distant and otherworldly artificial pop sounds that are actually none of the above. They are the sound you'd hear when crossing the International Dateline of space and time on a broken Korg.
We are on the cusp of the group's sixth album, simply titled Ladytron. There's been a hiatus, brought on by life and the merits of living in the moment. There's babies (Mira), solo work (Helen), photography (Reuben) and production (Danny) that have all conspired to keep the creative flow of the band to a mere trickle over the last seven years. But all that has changed and a redefined, realigned and rebooted Ladytron are returning with an album of such heft and direction, it's hard to believe the gap was that long. Danny is stood outside a cafe in Glasgow. It's cold and he's tired. Rehearsing is a bitch. But now the dust has settled on getting everyone back in the same room, Bido Lito! can ask the opening question that he's probably sick of now: where the bloody hell have you been? He doesn't sigh. He almost enjoys the bounce.
"When we wrapped up the last record [Gravity The Seducer], late 2011, we just stopped. Mira had a baby and stuff. We didn't tour it as much as we'd have liked to as we couldn't play live any more. We were ready for a break and we anticipated three years or something like that. A brief pause, I guess." It's such a good record. A remarkable 'comeback' if you will. There's a nod to new romantic on Tower of Glass, there's a fraught, post-punk nursery rhyme Paper Highways, there's Michael Jackson pop electro-funk on Deadzone and the industrial seeping You've Changed. There's a lot of ideas fighting for attention here. He continues. "It [the new album] wasn't intentionally over-thought. It was a collection of our various ideas from the break that worked well together as a group. It was actually easy and therefore the most straightforward record to make. We had more material than we needed, but as we'd been working remotely, going in the studio was such a release. Remember we'd also been going back and forth to the UK and bouncing stuff around the four of us for a couple of years."
Ladytron have had the luxury of being able to creatively mutate over the various record deals down the years, so it seemed right to plough on and plan. "We weren't in a hurry," Danny continues. "We'd done six or seven world tours and it was very intensive for a long time. This break has allowed us to hit reset." This time he does sigh. Not a world-weary sigh, more a contemplative force of breath. The album backs that up furiously. There's an argument that the previous album, Gravity The Seducer, was not a typical Ladytron record. Their need to push the boundaries suggested it had been pushed too close to the edge, and the pop sensibilities had been overcooked. This eponymous sixth has more than steadied the ship, it has plotted a course that suggests that there's a future ahead. There've been hiccups along the way. Indeed, the time it has taken to produce Ladytron is not lost on the other band members, as Helen explains. "Seven years in the life of Ladytron compressed into a neat 13 songs. That was actually the hard part, pruning it down to a listenable amount of songs."
Electronic music production as topiary? Did it work? Did you argue? "Yes! Personally, I'm really happy with the album. It's different to our previous efforts, but I think it needed to be. We needed to come back as a new, refreshed Ladytron and that is definitely expressed through this record. I'm not going to lie; having four members spread out across the globe is not always the easiest to negotiate. However, some things you just have to work around for the greater good." Helen's comments are slightly at odds with Danny's, but only marginally as both views are born out of relief.
This has been more difficult to arrange than both members are giving us, dear reader, credit for. But the globalisation of echnology, infused with the desire to make this happen has brought to the fore the need for an act like Ladytron to flourish. As pop music blands itself through its own advancement, the acts that grow in the margins are becoming more and more essential, or necessary, depending on your passion for the anti-mediocre. The new album draws on the societal sources that have plotted the course of the majority of Ladytron's oeuvre, especially since the first album. Ladytron have never been shy of exploring themes that are personal to their own world-view.
But it's been the 'difficult' sixth album, so what were the main influences both musically and, more importantly, culturally? Here's Helen Marnie: "Musically, we wanted to bring an energy to some of the tracks in order to create songs that were more danceable, or at least had more of an up tempo vibe. But at the same time we always want to create space and atmosphere with a record, and songs such as Run and Tomorrow Is Another Day do that well. It's hard not to be influenced by the politics of today, but saying that, most of the songs I've written are more influenced by personal events as well as being injected with a little imagination. One track is a dreamscape, exploring that feeling of trying to dodge death as we always do within a dream."
Danny's side of the story has a more concrete base of influence. "Experience and wisdom, really. We were writing in that vein on the last two, but now, I feel, we are closer to the subject matter, especially when you consider we are getting older and we have had more experiences. I'm satisfied with the lyrical content of this one more so than any of the others. We've grown up more and life has shown us things that it possibly hadn't before. I certainly wasn't dissatisfied with the previous ones, but this one has something about 'the moment' to it." The new record hasn't quite got around to the full live experience. Only the two 'singles' – The Island and the utterly glorious bastardised pop of The Animals – made it into the set for the band's three shows in late November (Glasgow, Liverpool and London).
It's worth noting that these were an overwhelming success as the quartet gingerly dipped their live toe back in the water. Glasgow was heaving, and a sold-out London Roundhouse proved the demand is still more than there. There were over eight hundred in Liverpool, the older songs being as enthusiastically received as some of the more 'classic' analogue tunes. The packed Liverpool Academy danced, listened, swayed and thrusted as a rejuvenated Ladytron powered through their strongest moments. As the band exited the three screens came together to show a giant '¡No Pasarán!' They shall not pass. A comment based on Danny's life in the day-to-day political upheaval of modern day Brazil.
With sweat dripping off the walls and the 30-something crowd baying for more, the lights came up and there was a palpable sense that there's more of this to come. Especially in the Merseyside soul of its creator. "With the Liverpool show, we just wanted to see a load of people we haven't seen for a long time. But I do come back reasonably regularly. Liverpool produces so much unique stuff and has a better infrastructure in terms of labels and 'scenes' for want of a better word. There's a whole bunch of folk that didn't exist 20 years ago and I'm very proud of what's happening here."
With that he exhales, wishes me a good night and turns back towards the warmth of the cafe, the bosom of his band waiting to drink, laugh and row about the rehearsals. They needn't have. The gigs were a success and 2019 sees our heroes take on America, South America and back to Europe, cradling an album that has been more than worth the wait. Ladytron are here for your pleasure and they deserve that embrace so much now more than ever. Welcome back. Don't leave it so long next time.
24 October 2020
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