Stereoboard Speak To Emelie Autumn About Her Latest Album 'Fight Like A Girl' & Sell Out Book
Thursday, 24 May 2012
Written by Gemma-Louise Johnson
Singer-songwriter, poet, and violinist extraordinaire: Emilie Autumn is a performer who not only offers her art, but has lived it. Through her trials and adversity, she has remained true to herself as well as her art, but the road to establishing herself has been anything but
easy. Friday 13th (lucky for some, unlucky for others), seems a fitting day to catch up with the lady herself, but during our call Autumn was called unexpectedly to sound checks and all outstanding questions were rescheduled to a later date. In this interview, Autumn speaks openly of her time spent on suicide watch, her sell-out book, touring with Courtney Love, her new album, and recording naked. So ladies and gents, without further delay I finally present to you the one and only Emilie Autumn...
Today is Friday 13th are you superstitious?
Actually no, I’m magical... that sounded strange to say I’m magical (laughs), but l of us ladies that are on this tour and part of the show are all into that sorta stuff but not in a negative superstitious way, we all consider it a very lucky, fortuitous day, and I think it helps that I am in one of my favourite places in the show that I have looked forward to this entire tour that is incredibly important to me, so no this is an absolute lucky day.
How has the Fight Like A Girl tour been going?
It’s been the most incredible series of performances I’ve ever given or been a part of because it has essentially changed our relationship (meaning myself and the Bloody Crumpets) with our audiences. The loudest screams and applause I have ever received from an audience in my entire career as a performer was in London on this tour when I announced the debut of “The Asylum For Wayward Victorian Girls” musical set for 2014 on London’s West End. I wanted to tell more about it, but I couldn’t say a word because the audience was so loud that, even though I was the one with the microphone, they couldn’t hear me. We’ve gone from playing for gothic or industrial music fans to having a legion of people who freak out when they hear I’m making a Broadway musical. That’s a bit surreal.
You mentioned through Twitter that during the production of the new album 'Fight Like A Girl', you sometimes record nude. That’s a very natural and free way to be, does it change your ability to perform compared to when you are live on stage?
That’s funny, this is crazy that you just ask that, this is kinda the backwards answer to go about this but the fact is, that I have completely ran outta underwear because we don’t really get to do laundry almost ever while on tour, and if we do it’s like ‘oh here’s the sinks for 10 minutes wash your clothes!”... So I completely to my great shock! ran out of almost everything, so I’ve been performing for the past two shows and will again do so for tonight and tomorrow, be performing without any underpants on. Fortunately we have costumes to cover things but yes the reality is that. In my mind I am not wearing underwear so I am able to sort of adopt that freeing energy of what happened during the recording process (laughs).
Do you think the internet has taken away a lot of mystique that once surrounded bands and artists alike?
I think it’s perhaps a double edged... erm no double edged sword would not be the right words because that would be extremely negative. It’s a mixed blessing, in that the internet is the exact reason why artists like myself, are able to not have a label and not have a marketing company, to not require all of that ‘sell-your-soul type of support’, along with the need for funding and things. So I absolutely have to attribute my personal success on whatever scale it is- I’ve toured places where for the first time I am in England, a few years ago the first time I’m playing Finland, Sweden and Italy, and everywhere we have gone, people know all the words to all of these songs and they welcome us very generously. They’re waiting outside in the early morning and the rain and I don’t understand any of this, but then I realise...‘oh fuck! you guys have YouTube’ and this is how a lot of this has happened. So I really can’t be ungrateful for all of that.
I think also it is kind of like up to the individual to maintain a sense of mystique and I don’t think the internet can really take anything away from you, that you voluntarily put out anymore than in Hollywood or elsewhere. In Hollywood the paparazzi can most certainly follow you around and take away a bit of that away, but I think it just depends on your personality, how you represent yourself and how interesting you are. Personally I don’t really feel like there is a particular loss with any of that for me, but then again, I am also happy to do meet and greet sessions in my pyjamas because I have this feeling (maybe its delusional), but I have this sense that even without costume, makeup and the rest of it I still represent something that is unique and individual, which I think we all do and should do, and I don’t believe anyone could take that away from me no matter how much they [people] know [about me], I have to have the confidence that there will always be something else, so I don’t actually worry it terribly much.
The new album is said to be more angry than the latter, how did the song writing process differ this time round?
Well it’s a bit different, but obviously it sounds like me, it’s identifiable and comes from the same places, but it’s different in that it was very intentionally not supposed to be a rock record, it’s not a top 40, and it’s the acceptance of the fact that that’s not what I want. I want to be able to tell a story and I want to do it using all of these different forms of music, media all the rest, and on stage, the performance, the visuals, the acting, the comedy of it all is equally important in telling the story, and the art of story-telling became more than just writing a song.
This particular album was intentionally meant to be a soundtrack, not a rock album by any means. It has all those elements of rock, operatic, industrial and all the rest, but it’s all meant to be a soundtrack to the show, which is the primary attraction, not something to support the sales of an album- it’s quite the other way round and meant to be approached in a completely different way. The difference in the writing process has been so as it is not only listened to in the car on the way to work, but also written for a live experience and that is definitely a different way of approaching it.
What inspired the title given to the new album ‘Fight Like A Girl’?
Right well, a couple of things erm, half of it is about the story you know the asylum and my own life, and then there’s music and the show is based upon who is telling the story of that, so the fact that in this part of the story we are able to show and this album, the limited amount of time that this album is able to contain in a rock setting, its particularly about the scenes where this girl and her inmates in this Victorian insane asylum in London, manage, after many years of torture, break out of their cells, in which case what do they do? They need to take back the asylum and irradiate the enemy, which is in this case it’s the doctors and attendants who have been keeping them unjustly imprisoned and experimented on and all the rest. So basically they need to go on this massacre and take everybody down, and in order to gain their own freedom and get their own lives back, so really if you’re a lady and this is what you have to do and how you have to fight, then that is how a girl fights.
It’s all meant to combat something that I growing up, have overheard and I think millions of people have, that there’s this phrase that you say as an insult to boys and yet used in another way to ridicule girls from the very start of their lives, from the minds of the boys - that you fight like a girl, meaning you are weak and feminine, which has always seemed to be a very bad thing. So in the modern sense its entirely meant to take a very difficult, painful and humiliating term and turn it into something very positive, a source of power and strength, because ultimately there’s nothing negative about being a girl and fighting like one, which is something that should be a compliment to you from any gentlemen. It’s a beautiful thing to make that a bit more apparent, because women are considered conscious of that in all parts of the world still. In some areas more than others we have no equality and the illusion of that is more damaging because it makes us more placated for the time we should still be fighting, so fighting like a girl is a definite intentional call to arms for the revolution, it has to happen in order for us to have any form of equality, because its kinda ridiculous that were still considered a minority, when we’re actually the majority and ladies are 51 percent of the population on planet earth.
Stemming right back to your last album 'Orpheliac', a lot of what you do tends to portray a continuing theme. Is it true that you’re planning on turning your book The Asylum For Wayward Victorian Girls into a full Broadway musical, with the new album as its soundtrack?
Yes, that’s exactly what this is all about, what we’re doing is really setting the stage for that, being able to tell this entire story of this book and beyond in a live theatrical musical setting, where as much of a privilege as it is to tour and go to so many different places every day, there’s something to be said to actually having a proper stage, that you’re in the same place for at least a small residency for a month or two at a time and then we bring it to the rest of the world, but that IS happening and will debut in 2014 on London’s West End, where I think it is the most appropriate because as you know that’s where the bulk of the story is set.
Your book illustrates the time you spent in a Psychiatric ward on suicide watch. Do you feel you got the message across that you wished to convey in the book?
I do, in fact. I feel it came across exactly, and for every one person who misses the point and sends me death threats for what they see as my “glamorizing suicide,” there are ten thousand who tell me that they’ve been empowered. That’s not a bad ratio.
As a bi-polar sufferer, have there ever been times that such a thing has held you back?
Living as a bi-polar a.k.a. manic depressive person is like being born with a ticking time bomb in your chest that may detonate at any moment sending you into oblivion at your own hand. There are medications that can balance this out a bit and make life a lot less scary (though the side effects often lead me to wonder which is better – the cure or the disease). Having come this far, and having used the access to the portal to a heightened reality that being bi-polar gives to some people to create works of art, I now have learned to look at myself and the way my mind works as being all about capacity. I have, and many have, the capacity for great darkness, but that only means that I also have the capacity for great light. It’s the capacity that matters, and that is something I am not sorry to possess.
What inspired your idea to create the Emporium and how is it coming along?
The Asylum Emporium (www.asylumemporium.com) is all about having a central place on the web where people can go for all things EA and Asylum related – a place where they know that everything is official, approved and created by me, and that proceeds go back into the Asylum to support the music, the tours, and so forth. This is important because there are so many bootlegs sites and unauthorized EA merchandise; it’s difficult to know what’s real. The Emporium is growing every day, and is being stocked with new and fabulous things as we speak!
The store will be selling speciality tea, what’s your favourite choice of tea?
There was a time when I would have said “green tea” with absolutely no hesitation, but I can no longer do this. There are so many different kinds of greens, and blacks, and oolongs, and darjeelings, and so forth, within the same category that one wouldn’t even know they were related. The world of tea is very much like the world of fine wine, only much vaster, and much older. That being said, I’d never argue with an old-fashioned pot of Earl Grey…
What was it like working and touring with Courtney Love?
It was exactly as you imagine it would have been.
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Today is Friday 13th are you superstitious?
