Låplsey’s hushed whisper on her recordings is
often mistaken for shyness or timidity, and it might even be a fair assumption,
given the kind of hood up, heads-down stage manner of so many of her
predecessors. But there are moments in this brief interview that Låpsley, or
Holly Lapsley Fletcher, becomes quite animated: “I’m actually a very open
person. I just want to be myself, so I’m not going to pretend to be shy just
because it sounds appropriate for the kind of music I’m playing” she says,
sounding suspicious. Holly might have to start getting used to this kind of
probing, though, as she attempts to balance on the colossal wave of acclaim swelling
behind her right now. Nearly a month ago, her newest song - the soft and
unassuming Station - quietly appeared online. And whilst it would be
unfair to discredit her previous works entirely, this very much feels like a
debut single for the 17 year old singer: “I’ve been producing for like four
months”, she explains, “but I’ve written writing songs for about three years,
doing gigs with just a guitar and piano. After some time working with local
producers Drohne, I got a feel for it and wanted to see what I could do with
that kind of aesthetic on my own”. Songs like Crosses (which you can
still hear on her Soundcloud) do indeed sound unfinished, but they still serve
as significant signposts for the artist we see today. “I still write all my
songs on a guitar or piano, and then chopped the parts up and take certain verses
or certain sections of them. So the final productions are just electronic
versions of these if you know what I mean. Station began as an acoustic song
called Walk You Back to The Station, and then I took a few parts from that and
cut it down and it became the final version we can hear now”.
Låpsley’s transformation from acoustic
crooner to electronic beatmaker is a telling reflection on what it means to be
a singer-songwriter in 2014. At the turn of the century, as dubstep started to
wobble from a Croydon record store and Jamie Cullum made his four-hundredth
appearance on Jools Holland, singer-songwriters were still chained to their
pianos or their acoustic guitars, constructing songs based purely around
natural and organic sounds. Similarly, DJs and producers were still confined,
at least in mainstream media terms, to wastemen with some form of synthetic
drug addiction or socially awkward computer geeks flicking between World of
Warcraft and Protools. At some point though, between Kanye discovering auto-tune
and James Blake discovering ceiling protectors, it started to become ok for
singers and songwriters to fuck around with their voices. We are at a stage now
where producers and solo artists are starting to meet in the middle. The likes
of Sohn, Sampha, even Jai Paul – three of the UK’s biggest rising solo artists
– are writing, performing and producing their own tunes, fudging the boundaries
to the point where you don’t even ask who wrote or produced what track anymore
because really; it doesn’t fucking matter. And these are still the same songs
of love, hate, loss and regret, just shaped with electronics and producing more
complex and more versatile results. Låpsley’s development as a songwriter began
with just that - songwriting. And now, as she’s matured and looked for more
flexible ways to express herself, we are left with this quite brilliant piece
of music; a subtle, simple song, framed stunningly by the lightest touch of
electronics. “I knew when I finished writing Station that this was what I wanted
to sound like. I was still experimenting before, playing around with different
beats, techniques and tempos”. Yet despite the new reliance on technology, the
finest moments of Station and those that speak the loudest can be found in the
silences. Those hushed intakes of air, that tiny patter of static, all allowing
that touching refrain of ‘I could walk you back to the station’ to resonate as affectingly
as possible.
Half way through the interview her phone
rings. She stares blankly at a number she doesn’t recognize. ‘I’ll get
that later”, she says tiredly, “I’ve had a load of managers and people I don’t
know ringing me recently. It’s all getting a bit mad”. It would be easy to put
a comment like this down to a bit of harmless bravado. That is, if you had
managed to avoid the Internet for the last two weeks. Her twitter timeline is
flooded with blogs from all over the world, all picking up on Station with some
astonishingly high praise. The term overnight success is inherently flawed, but
having bumped into Holly on New Years Eve when she tentatively suggested I
check out her new song that was “getting some good early coverage”, its
difficult not to include that kind of throwaway phrase in this piece. I mean,
at the time of writing, Stations has accrued over 100,000 plays on Soundcloud,
most of which have been in the last fortnight. That, by anyone’s standards, is
mental. Especially when you consider that she’s done next to no promotion for
it: “Yeah, I’ve gone from 46 followers on Soundcloud to over 2000 in less than
a month. It’s really weird, because Station took me like two hours to make. I
don’t even feel like much thought went into it, I just wrote this chilled
track, added some synths and some claps, and then all of a sudden everyone is
trying to emotionally dissect it. It’s a really simple song though, and I think
I quite like that”.
Pigeons and Planes call Station one of
their ‘favorite tracks so far this year’, whilst The Line of Best Fit go a step
further, calling it ‘exquisite’. And it must be difficult, the notion of everyone
scrutinizing and analyzing these tunes when for a long time, it must have felt
like no one was listening. “Yeah, its very strange, as your songs are a very
personal thing”, she says cautiously, playing with the ice in her glass of
orange juice. “I mean it is all quite hectic, but hopefully I’m managing it alright
at the moment”. With several label meetings in London this week, the details of
which she is wisely keeping under wraps, Holly will need to work hard to give
herself the space and time she needs to develop her sound naturally. “I’m not
going to do much music until the summer now, as I’ve got my A Levels coming up,
she says assuredly. “I was just quite anxious to get Stations out there, so I
could show everyone what I’m about before I took some time away to proper nail
it down”. Almost everything written about Låpsley so far has been preceded with
her age. And whilst it may seem like lazy journalism, the mention of her A
Levels is a sobering reminder of just how fucking young 17 actually is. However, when balanced against how exciting her coming of age is going to sound, I'm pretty sure it will only be a momentary lapse into sobriety.
Mike Townsend
@townsendyesmate
