MARI WILSON: Bunny Boilers, Jean Sibelius, and an Album That Wasn’t Planned
MARI WILSON releases her first new material in over a decade today – the ten-track long player ‘Girl About Town,’ each song showcasing an age-defying voice that first piqued our interest in 1980. But following the long break, what inspired the return?
“It’s funny, because I don’t really have an answer to that. My last album was ten years ago, we were touring it, it did quite well especially for a covers album, and I think it’s pretty good. But then Covid happened and it was like, “Well I don’t know what I’m going to do now,” and a lot of us were wondering how we were going to get back into it. I had got in the habit of putting out an album pretty much every three years, but after lockdown I didn’t want to do another covers album, so I just didn’t kind of think about it.
“But then Adrian York who was in Roman Holliday and someone I’ve known for a long, long time because they’d supported me on some of my tours in the ‘80s and we made two other albums together, he emailed me out of the blue and said, “Do you fancy coming round and writing some songs?” So, we just thought we’d have a bit of fun, and I think that’s why we’ve made quite a good album because there wasn’t any agenda at all, it wasn’t even an album. We’ve both got a good sense of humour, he knows me, he knows what I like. We’re quite maximalist, it’s like “Oh shall we put some French horns on, oh yeah put that on there, what about some cellos?” And we just had fun and some of the songs have got a bit of humour, and what happened was we wrote four songs and I thought, These are quite good, maybe I should put a new album out and just do totally original songs for a change,” so we did and it evolved naturally which was quite nice.”
Today’s album opens with ‘Good News,’ a much-needed song for the here and now – familiar at times, fresh at others. Subtle hints of the Beach Boys, but for me, the embodiment of prime Carnaby Street with the added bonus of The Beatles not far behind.
“That’s interesting, what a great description, that’s me that is! I think people have mentioned the Beach Boys because on the chorus there’s a lot of backing vocals going “good, good, good good news” which is a little bit Beach Boys-ee, but my whole upbringing was The Beatles. The Beatles, The Bee Gees, The Beach Boys, then Motown and then people like Bonnie Raitt and Dusty Springfield and then Chicago Transit Authority – not Chicago later on, but Chicago at the beginning when they were doing ‘25 or 6 to 4’ and stuff like that, I was mad about them – and Blood Sweat and Tears. I mean such a hybrid really, and the then the things my parents liked, and it’s funny because when you’re doing it, at least for me, you’re not really aware you’re being ‘sixties’ you’re just aware you’re doing something that you like and Adrian’s a great orchestrator, I mean those brass parts towards the end they’re quite emotional and when he did that I said, “oh wow!”
“It’s a bit like Beach Baby by The First Class, there’s that Jean Sibelius bit in the middle, and I mean I almost cry every time I hear that because it just touches me in a way, and when Adrian did that on Good News it reminded me of that a little bit, that spark of emotion I love all that – but your description is fantastic, I’ll have to use that!
From the upbeat pop opener, we drop straight into the world of soul. A surprising change of direction, but ‘Love Letter’ opens up and greets you like one of Soulsville’s finest.
“I became quite obsessed with Bruno Mars, Silk Sonic with Anderson .Paak which is really like the Philly Sound and also right up my street. And I mean this is what happens, I just remember going to Adrian and I said, “Let’s do a Silk Sonic soul type thing,” and he pretty much 99.9% of the time knows exactly what I want and he’ll start playing some chords and I’ll sing over it, and it turned into ‘Love Letter’ and I do particularly like that one because I love soul music.”
The initial plan was merely to write ‘some songs’ but that is the album’s strength. Had the duo set out to write an album, filler tracks would have crept in. But ‘Girl About Town’ avoids that pitfall. ‘Man About Town’ the perfect example of a song full of detail and humour, and clearly written without the stress of an approaching deadline.
“I wasn’t with Adrian every day, he teaches music at University of Westminster, he’s got gigs, I’ve got gigs with my band and other things I was doing so we didn’t meet at his studio and work for two or three weeks, it was more like a year of me going round there, and not even every week sometimes because he’d be busy or I’d be busy.
“So, I’d only be there for a whole day and we’d write something. I suppose because it wasn’t constant there was time to think about what we wanted to do the next time we met. We would finish what we were working on before, and then we’d go “come on let’s write another one.” One day I turned up and said I wanted to do a song that’s a bit like Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased), I used to love that theme tune, and I thought it would be quite funny. It’s loosely based on someone I know but it’s also a bit of a fantasy figure, and I could use all those descriptions of ‘Cuban-heeled boots’ and ‘smart shirts’ and also some of it’s quite funny because I wanted there to be some humour, there’s not much humour in music at the moment I find, and that song became ‘Man About Town.’
The official ‘Lost On The Dancefloor’ video takes us back to a pre-social media time when the capital’s clubs were full of music’s icons, an alien concept in today’s immediate, Instagrammable world.
“On a Thursday night everybody went to Camden Palace, all the pop stars which is ridiculous really, and I remember being there and I’ve got a picture of me with Roger Taylor from Queen and we both look like we’ve had a few drinks, and you’d see Boy George, Thompson Twins, Steve Strange, everyone was milling about.
“One night they played Frankie Goes To Hollywood, ‘Relax’ and no one had heard it and everyone was like, “Oh my God, what is this, it’s amazing!” because you can imagine hearing it for the first time in Camden Palace really, really loud. So ‘Lost On The Dancefloor’ is about that and Soho which is my favourite place in the world. I was always in Soho even throughout the ‘90s because I was playing at Ronnie Scott’s all the time, so Soho is very close to my heart. We used to go to this place called ‘Pandys’ it was like something out of a film, you would knock on the door and they would look through the thing and go, “oh yeah you can come in,” and you could go in there and drink until five in the morning. It was all very illegal, but kind of exciting, but you do things like that when you’re young.”
‘Spellbound’ shows Mari’s voice has not changed since we first heard it, but what is the magic, the regime behind keeping it perfect condition?
“You know what, I don’t really know. Someone did a review of me at a gig about two years ago and said, “She still sounds like a girl,” and I thought is that good or bad? But I think I’m just really lucky, I mean I do look after myself, I’ve got type1 diabetes which I’ve had for forty-eight years so I have to be very careful with my diet and with my whole lifestyle because it’s a serious disease and I want to live for as long as I can. I exercise a lot, I swim, I do yoga I walk a lot, Zumba, but I don’t know, and a couple of people have said that, and I do still sound like ‘me.‘ I’ve just been quite lucky I think, but I have some gigs coming up and I haven’t been gigging recently so I know I’ve got to start getting in to do my scales and get my voice in gear because my last gig was in March.
“But it must be awful for people who have had those nodules and things, I can’t imagine not being able to sing, but I do sing in a slightly lower register because you do naturally as you get older but once I’m warmed up I can still hit those notes like the middle of ‘Just What I Always Wanted,’ because that’s a tough one.”
Plenty of humour and positivity on ‘Girl About Town,’ but ‘Tomatoes in the Fridge’ walks a fine line between hilarity and darkness, and I love that change of direction. The song perhaps the perfect accompaniment for a twisted, psyche-shocker portraying someone’s slow, descent into madness – or is that too deep an analysis?
“I’m not disappointed to hear that explanation because it could be about a real bunny boiler couldn’t it! But this is what will happen, I’ll get to Adrian’s and I go I’ve got a melody line and a couple of lyrics, what do you think? And I remember I walked in and he said, “Right, what are we doing?” and I said, “We’re going to write a song about tomatoes in the fridge” and I explained you shouldn’t keep them in the fridge because they don’t really taste of anything, you keep them in the kitchen at room temperature.”
“And I’d already written quite a few of the lyrics and he just came up with this like baroque kind of sound and he very rarely does something where I go, “no I don’t like that,” sometimes but very rarely, and I thought this is nice because it’s kind of sinister, but at the same time it’s like when people move in together I mean the big arguments would be about money probably, but putting that aside, the things people argue about are the really petty things like, ‘who left that there’ and ‘you haven’t loaded the dishwasher properly’ or ‘didn’t you put the bins out,’ and it’s kind of petty that you’re putting the tomatoes in the fridge, but she likes things done a certain way and if you want to live here, you’ve got to keep up, because there’s also the part where she’s kind of saying how much she loves him, but it’s a fine line.”
But the album ends as it began, with a message of positivity, perfect bookmarking, and the appropriate finale to such a collection of songs.
“‘Come On Out’ is kind of about someone. I mean the words ‘mental health’ are so overused at the moment, but someone who doesn’t go out because they have a fear of everything and they just stay indoors all the time, and I just thought even if they just went and sat in the park – and I’d been the week before up to Alexandra Palace for a walk and there was a brass band playing in the park and everyone was eating ice-cream – so all the songs have come some element of truth. I mean people who are down often look down because they are actually ‘looking down.’ Their head isn’t lifted up, but if you lift your head up and look, it automatically makes you feel better. It sounds terribly simple but it’s true, so it was kind of, don’t worry about these huge things just go and do something really simple like go on the swings again like you used to, that might make you feel good.”
The constant reference points of ‘Mari Wilson the ‘80s singer’ are nothing short of lazy pigeonholing. From her early days Mari has undertaken a remarkable musical journey working hard to avoid those dismissive cliches – but easy labels can sometimes be difficult to shake off.
“The thing is, the ‘80s Mari was the shortest part of my career because I left the pop world deliberately. I asked the record company to let me go which of course people don’t usually do that. But I was quite naïve at the time, and I thought well I’m not happy doing this and I don’t want to end up at the end of the pier. You know if people want to do ‘80s tours and things that’s fine and I have nothing bad to say about them, but I didn’t and I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to just go out and sing my songs from the ‘80s I confidently wanted to move forward, and I wanted to become a better singer and so I ended up going into the world of jazz and that’s where I learnt to sing to be honest.
“If you’re going to be singing standards and stuff and you’re playing live all the time, and jazz is all about being ‘live,’ it’s about the performance not the product. You don’t go on stage and say, “this is my new single,” it’s all about how good you are live, and I worked with some great musicians and learned a lot from them and I got better and I was exposed to different types of music. But you’re always labelled with something, everyone has got their beehive I suppose but it’s just because I went away.
“I mean sometimes people come and see me and they go “Oh I didn’t know you could sing like that,” because they just remember, ‘Just What I Always Wanted’ which has got a lovely vocal on it of course, but I’ve grown as a singer and an artist and a writer and a lot of people don’t know about that and it’s only this album where I’ve done so many interviews that people are finding that out. Maybe they’ll find it by coming to a couple of gigs. But I wore a beehive and that’s how I got noticed. But what is interesting is that because I no longer wear a beehive I’m not recognisable as that person. Whereas if you look at Toyah, or Kim Wilde, or Clare Grogan, they all look the same and don’t look very different, but I look completely different from how I looked back then.”
And if we were able to take that ‘Lost on the Dancefloor’ time machine back to 1980, what advice would there be for a young Mari?
“I think I’d tell her to trust her instincts a bit more instead of doing what everyone else said. I was young and a bit naïve, and I think a lot of young people now know all about the music industry and how it all works, but I didn’t really know anything, I just knew that I loved singing.
“And I met Tot Taylor and we made some great records, and it was good fun, but I didn’t have a business head on me because I’d come from doing temp work in offices to that. But when I did have certain ideas I kind of kept them to myself and I wish I had spoken up. I wish I would have said no to some things – and this isn’t a go at Tot – but when he wrote ‘Remember Boyfriend’ I remember thinking, “This isn’t very good this song,” but I did it anyway because it was kind of expected. And when we put the single out we should have said, “No don’t put that one out, let’s put Wonderful out.”
“‘Wonderful’ would have been a much better single, but now it’s different because I would, but that’s what I would say, speak up, don’t keep quiet, give them your opinion and trust your gut because it’s usually right. It’s always been right for me if I’ve not felt something’s right.”
And you should trust your gut on ‘Girl About Town,’ exactly as I did. You’ll be rewarded with forty minutes of some of the most rewarding music released this year. For an album that wasn’t planned, thank your lucky stars they persevered.
MARI WILSON has confirmed three shows before the end of the year: London’s Cadogan Hall October 4th, Liverpool Music Room November 7th, and Otley Courthouse, November 8th, further details HERE
