How I found the Lorde

You know who she is; I don’t need to write the preamble, including her real name. This is a personal reflection on the strange case of the middle-aged man sat on the sofa in his ‘day room’, who discovered the Lorde. It was a Saturday morning and therefore an 87% chance of me being hungover. I may have seen the video to ‘Royals’ once before but only in passing as I attempted to engage with my pre-adolescent daughter (more of that later). What struck me the second (real first) time was the slight grimness, the manky teenage boys and this incredibly calm-looking girl-woman. Neither she nor the setting seemed American or British. The mass of hair, comme ma fille, the total poise, the minimalist music and the slightly lisped vocals. Not a hint of the porn industry. I was intrigued. As the blurb appeared on the screen towards the end of the track, and her place of birth was conveyed, I turned to my highly educated niece and remarked; ‘now I get it’. She smiled her agreement. This was something different.

Around the time of this pop discovery I would have been immersed in bands like Karnivool, Deftones (Koi No Yokan – could write a book on how great that opus is) and Clutch. I had also recently rediscovered Dead Can Dance. I was not a major fan of female vocalists, but having been fairly down around that time, I had turned to DCD’s mystical vibe and, in particular, Lisa Gerrard’s extra-Earth vocals. Her voice, within the eclectic ‘soundspace’ (sorry) of the band is genuinely transcendental. I eventually had the huge privilege to see them at the Albert Hall. My mind opened to the female voice, via YouTube, I (literally) found (on my own) Grimes, HANA (deserving of a much higher profile), Chvrches, Wolf Alice and even Lady Leshurr. And I still love the libidinous fury of Phil Anselmo spitting-out 5 Minutes Alone [FOOTNOTE: Sophia Urista, Brass Against – you need to check it]. Yet I might be told that I have a narrow mind when it comes to music. Perhaps the inliers are prone to confuse enthusiastic discernment with closed-mindedness.

The pebble in the female concentric circles remains Lorde. I think like all super-stars she proffers the possibility of our excellence, whilst still being flawed. Some of her interviews are excruciatingly gauche and as for the spastic dancing... Yet which teenager do you know could write and deliver something as existentially aching, whilst life-affirming, as Ribs? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4qaeoz_7cyE. The hypnotic alien in Tennis Court, the insightfulness of White Teeth Teens, the heart-broken defiance of Green Light, the Autumnal gray grace of The Louvre and...well?

What does this all amount to? A question any writer should ask themselves - regularly. Well, I think this is about something to do with that uniquely normal urge felt by many men. I have a daughter. And I want her to be inspired. And I innately related with Lorde at the point of discovery because my daughter was only eight or nine. I could already see the Machine preparing her for adolescence – whether that be the behaviour of young women on the streets, the music industry, TV and the sodding internet. Social media – both pimp and judge. Lorde seemed to be an antidote to much of that, and still does.

I bought Pure Heroine in a flash and we played it on virtually every car journey for the next three or four years. It and Melodrama, still get significant family air-time. I learned as much as I could about Lorde and dropped snippets into conversation about her. I liked the fact she was multi-national and that her Mum was a poet. I have promoted her excellence to anyone who will listen, including my 74-year-old Mother. I should bill her record company.

We saw her on the Melodrama tour. My excitement, a quasi-religious fervour (despite the soporific efforts of Khalid), fuelled by itsu, beer and rum does something to my daughter. She panics. I take her angst to be as a result of my apparent desperate desire for her to be inspired, to share the moment with me – to reject conformity and the mono-culture that envelopes our youth. I am also edgy; I don’t normally go to gigs like this. I am the reverential square peg. 90% of the audience seems to be young females; many of them have adopted counter-cultural appearances. I feel a little like I do when in church – a total imposter waiting to be outed. But it doesn’t come. What I am in fact is a quasi-invisible anomaly. No-one gives a shit. I watch the show with my son, while the daughter seeks haven with her mother. Was it one of the best gigs I have been to in nearly forty years of attending them? No. But it was different, confirmed Ella’s superstardom and reminded me of something all real music fans know – pop music can be brilliant; take heed Rita Ora.

The probable highlight of the show was the rendition of ‘Liability’. There is something so universal about the mood of the song. At their core, both the song and Melodrama as a body of work, are beautifully crafted Honesty. And isn’t that what we should want from Art? Put it another way compare any verse of lyrics on Melodrama with the infantile vomit of Sam Smith’s ‘break-up’ and tell me I am wrong.

So a la Clarice Starling I must turn that request for Honesty upon myself. Is there something psycho-sexual going on with this mild obsession? If there is I would suggest it has more to do with ‘girls I would have gone for in my 20s’ than ludicrous middle-aged mantasy. Maybe those two states are linked... I have recently had the good fortune to read my first Philip Roth novel (Exit Ghost) and the sheer Honesty in the microscopic dissection of the male as sexual being is brutally beautiful. Young, sexually powerful women, we don’t stop finding you stimulating just because we know we can’t have you, literally in the case of Exit Ghost. How cruel, and brave, a confession(?) to have Nathan both impotent and incontinent whilst overwhelmed with the young female ‘writer’, who despite all of her wealth and education is no closer to being a success as a scribe as Nathan is to fucking her. Again, how truthful Roth is, when he enables us to make the very clear conclusion that discrepancy in career potency is obliterated when the ‘big man’ is confronted with the overwhelming desire for a female – especially one he cannot have.

But enough of that diversion – for now. There is nothing overt going on here when it comes to desire. If anything Lorde is uber-lust. Unlike Ariana Grande, the revolting Beyonce and even her friend Taylor Swift; she has not needed to resort to any thigh-length boots, or suspension of a religious upbringing, to build and maintain her career. Lorde is incomparable and I genuinely (Honestly!) believe that she is one of a handful of great pop performers in the history of the genre. How else would she have grabbed the attention of a hungover, ageing Metalhead?