Nerina Pallot dancing to her own tune
Nerina Pallot wasn’t shocked when the MeToo sexual-harassment scandal broke last year. But she hadn’t suffered as many of her peers had.
“When that all came out… I recognised some of it,” says the Jersey-born singer-songwriter. “But I always had been so ballsy and in control. I escaped.”
Pallot once appeared on the British music panel quiz show, Never Mind The Buzzcocks. The running gag was that nobody had any idea who she was.
A decade on, she remains a cult artist, with a loyal fanbase (Rufus Wainwright recently took her on tour), but a lack of platinum discs on her wall. That’s brought its own blessings.
Without a slew of number-ones, she has been free to follow her own path, and whatever she has done, she has always been brave and engaging. Now, Irish fans have a rare opportunity to catch up with her, as she comes to Whelan’s tonight.
To the casual listener, her best-known moment probably came in the mid-2000s and her fantastic album Fires.
She very nearly had a hit with single ‘Everybody’s Gone To War’, a madly catchy rumination on life in Blairite Britain, in the aftermath of the Iraq invasion (albeit spoiled slightly by a tacky video in which she negotiates a food-fight at a supermarket).
It went top-20 in the UK and reached number three on the airplay chart.
This should have been the springboard for better things. Instead, it would prove her commercial highpoint, though the follow-up, ‘Sophia’, would earn her an Ivor Novella nomination (she was also nominated for a Brit Award in 2007, for ‘best female singer’).
She has since moved languidly between styles. The Year of the Wolf (2011) was a moving meditation on motherhood (she was pregnant with her son, Wolfie, at the time); 2015’s The Sound and the Fury was both melancholy and captivating.
The highpoint, ‘Rousseau’, was a pop banger inspired by the writings of the 18th century Swiss philosopher, Rousseau (beat that, Ed Sheeran).
Pallot is proud to have charted her own course. That isn’t to say she doesn’t have regrets. She reflects on her early years and wonders if she might not have been too headstrong.
“I was always so uncompromising, always trying to get my own way, for the sake of it rather than because it was the right thing to do,” she says.
“I look back on my first album [2001’s Dear Frustrated Superstar] and think I should have worked with a producer.
The label had much better ideas than I did. I insisted on working with my boyfriend at the time. There are some decent songs, but not particularly great production. That was a wasted opportunity.
"Of course [being able to look back], that’s the luxury of being old.”
Pallot is also struck at how fashionably miserable she used to sound in her early 20s — when, really, she had her whole life ahead of her.
“I was a baby when I started. The angst on those early albums… when I hadn’t faced any particular hardship. I hadn’t faced proper struggles… the real digging in. The stuff that happens when you’re in the thick of it, with kids and a mortgage to pay. "You are so enmeshed, you don’t have time to navel gaze.”
At one point, she flirted with working behind the scenes as a hit-maker. She wrote material for Kylie Minogue’s Aphrodite album and for X Factor winner Joe McElderry.
But the entrenched sexism she encountered put her off. She’s much happier where she is, a cult songwriter, appreciated by those who recognise quality when they hear it.
"It was so bizarre, sitting in a room [writing songs] with strangers. That’s when I felt the discrimination against women, the perception of women in the industry. I’d come into the studio and the track would already have been made.
Nobody thought you, a woman, could do the track yourself. I studied music at college. I had as much idea as anyone about backing tracks. Probably more, in fact.
"I’d get there and they would have laid it down and expect me to just do the melody over it.”
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