I remember not telling people that I doing a PhD and I was trying to hide it – I didn’t want people to know anything about me. When I first started making music, I spent a long time thinking I had to be someone else. I am book obsessed, the clothes I wear on stage are the ones I wear during the day, my make-up is always like that! The Anchoress is an alias, but it’s not a persona. The Anchoress is like that too – what you see is what you get. It’s not something she does just in public – and I’m really attracted to that in musicians where there isn’t a line between their public and private lives. It’s interesting because I worked with someone who worked on many of her records and he said she is exactly the way you see here – like she will turn up to the studio in a lampshade dress. The thing I’ve always loved about Björk too is that she is precisely who she is – there is no artifice there. Like Kate Bush has these references when it comes to sex, but with Björk here, there was a bluntness in talking about desire and I’ve always been attracted to that.
The British are quite oblique when it comes to sex. There’s something about it that's expressed in a very female way - and I hate to talk about gender in essentialist terms - but she doesn't shy away from being quite specific about the male body from her own female viewpoint. It was like our lives were beating in time. It’s about the beginnings of her relationship with Matthew Barney and it made me think of my own relationship – but I was also equally obsessed later on with the break-up album she wrote about this relationship too, Vulnicura, which also coincided with a break up I had. I couldn't ever recall a woman having ever speak about the process of falling in love but in a very sexualised way. The record spoke to me significantly as well about female sexuality.
This record has so much minute detail and a lot of panning, which is something I find myself leaning into on my own records now. It’s one of those records that has had quite an unconscious influence on me in terms of my style of production, partly because it was something that I listened to obsessively on headphones. Vespertine was the one album that made me see that a woman could do that.
I always credit this album in particular as being the album that made me want to be a record producer, probably alongside Kate Bush's The Dreaming. Looking back, it wasn’t the best thing to do with an album that is all about the unhealthy romanticisation of someone at the beginning of a relationship, but I have always been a masochist when it comes to my listening habits. I would listen obsessively to it on my headphones sort of silently crying to myself thinking it was the worst thing in the world that could happen. This is an album I strongly associate with getting the train back and forth to London from my parent’s house when I was starting to go to gigs and I remember going through a bad break up.
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