It’s on a Thursday night in Notting Hill that I find myself stood in the smoking area of the Arts Club talking to a lovely young Canadian singer/songwriter who goes by the name of Lowell, who’s just finished her sound check for her first UK show. It’s a more stripped down affair tonight, as she’s normally backed by Apparatjik (the super group comprised of Gary Berryman of Coldplay, Magne Furuholmen from A-Ha, Jonas Bjerre of Mew and producer Martin Terefe), however as it is, her set will be fuelled by her keyboard, a set of loop pedals and her drummer. “I think that just comes from me still looking for the right band,” she says, “obviously Apparatjik, they do their own thing and I’m not gonna be always looking to play with them, and they’re not always gonna be looking to play with me. But I dunno, I mean a trust myself on stage and I trust Chris because he drums for Apparatjik, so yeah, it’ll be fine.”
So how did you get involved with Apparatjik?
Well this is my 5th time (in the UK) so the first time I came here it was to work with Martin (Terefe). We were going to do an album together- which we might still do – but whilst we were still writing and what not and testing the water he was like “Do you want to write a song for Apparatjik?” And I was like sure and so I did. It was written in 5 minutes and he released it on the internet that day and everyone liked it, so we continued that and did an EP together. I was down because I’ve been having trouble finding a producer since I’m a producer myself and very often it’s hard to jive with people, so when you have 5 people in a room it makes a huge difference and everyone’s just throwing things everywhere and they have a rule that you can’t say no to anything, so if you don’t like it you just change it.
So there’s quite a lot of ideas going around there, does that make it harder with the writing process?
No it’s good, I mean that’s how you write, right? You just throw things and then if people are negative about it then they’re like “No that doesn’t sound good.” So anything that doesn’t sound really beautiful yet is going have time to flourish. I mean, if you think about someone like Bjork, she probably didn’t sound amazing when she first came out. People would probably all be like ‘no you suck’ but then if people are all like ‘yeah yeah keep doing that weird thing that you’re doing’ and then she keeps going, and then the next thing you know she’s the most iconic artistic woman in the world.”
Apparatjik has quite a big electro-funky sound going on at the moment. Is that where you’re coming from as well or…?
No, no not at all. I mean if you listen to the first album it’s more indie rock, kind of synthy, 80s mixed into I don’t know what they thought the future would look like, and it got more funky towards the second album. I think the first one’s more my roots though. I love all kinds of music, everything is amazing if it’s good, like you can get really shitty funk music but really good stuff too.
So what would you say is the main influence in your music?
Ummm, well I mean obviously I’m a Canadian artist so a lot of my icons are from there, like I grew up in the 90’s with all the pop there like Aqua and Spice Girls, then I sort of picked up grunge later, like I was too young to like Nirvana at the time, but now it’s sort of a big love of mine, so it’s a mixture of everything I guess.
You’ve got quite a strong visual aspect to your live show, what’s the basis for that?
Well (Furuholmen) is really into the theatre of the show, and I think that’s what really drew me into Apparatjik, but for my visuals and my videos- I’ve always liked making (them). My mum used to make movies and documentaries and I picked that up when I was 5 and that kinda descended into what I do now.
You have a mini album coming out at the end of the month, what can we expect from that?
Well actually, we’re selling some today. We’ve got like 25 and I made the covers myself and they’re all hand painted, but it’s very Apparatjik. We’ve got “Kids”, and “Shake Him Off” which are the two singles and then I’ve got this piano ballad that I wrote when I was 14, and this weird Beatles-y quirkily song, it’s sort of all over the place but it sort of works I think, I think! Haha
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