Emma Pollock: Begging The Night To Take Hold (interview)

Founding member of The Delgados and of independent label Chemikal Underground, Emma Pollock returns with Begging the Night to Take Hold, her first album since 2016’s In Search of Harperfield.

It’s been nearly a decade since your last album and the world is a very different place. Does it feel different, releasing music now?

I suppose the biggest thing is that social media is now incredibly important. The digital world was very much in play back in 2016, but I don’t think that careers were necessarily being made by social media the way that they are now. A lot of the magazines have closed down; radio is mostly interested in pop music these days. And so you look at those two traditional media outlets and you realise that they are powerful only to a certain extent. I think that’s the main thing that’s changed – that so much of the work now falls at the feet of the artist and the record and the record label – and I can speak with both hats on.

There’s more music coming out every week now than there has ever been, but there is less of an audience for each of those artists as a result. The DIY ethic was to circumvent a very conservative music industry in the 90s, which was very quickly showing holes. Postcard Records, Fast Records, Factory Records: they were all hugely important to me growing up because they demonstrated an undercurrent and a protest against a really commercial music industry. And so Chemikal Underground was born out of that inspiration.

There has always been a wish to communicate with a fan base. The way that we do it now, it’s so much harder – simply because not only do you have the problem of 10 percent of the income compared to what it was 25 years ago, you’ve also got the competition of how much time a person has and what they’re going to choose to listen to. For a record to really land with somebody as a whole thing, as an album, you’re asking quite a lot of people now.

This is an incredibly personal album. Are you a person who starts with lyrics?

No, absolutely not. I have always begun with a musical kernel, something which moves me; that’s where the emotional tone is held. I don’t know where lyrics come from. I find it fascinating that I wrote an album five, six years ago, and yet that album has preempted things I’ve discovered about myself in the last few years, that I wrote about without necessarily knowing the name of them or knowing what was brewing.

So in many ways this album’s been written by a subconscious, which I would never have believed possible.

You spoke about being diagnosed as autistic. Many people who were diagnosed later in life have spoken a lot about the comfort and self acceptance that’s come from that. Is that something you’ve experienced?

Yeah, it is. For me it has aided understanding of why in certain situations, like sitting in a pub, round a table with lots and lots of people all talking at once, I suddenly find that I just don’t want to be there after maybe an hour. Now, instead of me thinking I was antisocial and maybe quite rude or aloof, I know that, okay, this is what’s going to happen.

It really helps to be able to say, okay, this situation coming up here, I really want to be part of it, but there are limitations.

So it’s also understanding that the way that we’re built can’t necessarily be changed, but the way that we respond to it and live with it maybe can. I think what’s great about getting slightly older is that we are much more open to being very different people.

Part of my excitement of going on tour in October is just to spend time with Graeme [Smillie] and Pete [Harvey] because they’re two absolutely extraordinary people, never mind musicians. The way in which we put the record together was one of the greatest weeks I’ve ever spent.

We had a week of respite during COVID. So we got together and it was just beautiful; we spent five days running through the songs, allowing them to find their feet with keys and cello. And within those five days, the bulk of the record and arrangements were written, and suddenly the whole thing began to feel very, very, very special.

I was really struck by ‘Fire Inside’ and just how minimal that is. Does that take a bit of bravery to do that: to just let it be?

It’s funny because you talk about space and I think about the richness.

Sometimes space is very loud. Sometimes pausing is hugely busy with the pregnancy of what’s about to come. I think it takes bravery to go there after you’ve been so used to filling up the space with noise. And then a song presents itself, like this one, where it’s all about the lyric. It suddenly becomes about feeling that you sing that line and then you need there to be space in order for it to land.

It’s a song that just demanded the treatment that it got. I really love songwriting that goes somewhere completely unexpected. I love modulation. I love when keys shift, even just temporarily, and come home again. That’s the thing that really excites me about music.

Chords can do many weird and wonderful things. The trick is that the melody that goes over the top needs to glue them together in such a manner that it feels as if they’re the only chords that could ever have been. So the best music, for me, is the music that sounds inevitable. I do love the element of surprise. Here’s maybe a verse which sounds fairly predictable, but then suddenly here’s the curveball. And the curveball will become your favourite thing about that piece of music.

Begging the Night to Take Hold is out 26th September on Chemikal Underground

emmapollock.com