3 May, 2023Print
Pioneering Filmmaker Sally Potter Excavates Teenage Adventure & Shame On Debut Album Pink Bikini, Out July 14
LISTEN TO LEAD SINGLE “PINK BIKINI” HERE
Today, Sally Potter — best known as the award-winning director of films like 1992’s Oscar-nominated Orlando, 2017’s The Party, and 2020’s The Roads Not Taken — announces Pink Bikini, her first-ever studio album. With music and lyrics by Sally Potter, Pink Bikini is a semi-autobiographical collection of songs about growing up as a young rebel and activist in London in the 1960s. Over these 12 songs, Potter shares a varied and vivid depiction of a teenager on the cusp of womanhood, with all the hormonally heightened exhilaration, sexuality, shame, and devastation that youth entails.
The album’s lead single and title track “Pink Bikini” draws on the freewheeling spirit of her musical legacy and the ‘tell all’ nature of the album as a whole.
Says Potter:
“This song is based on actual events. When I was 16, I really did see a pink bikini in a shop window on the way to Victoria Station... Later, in the South of France, badly sunburned in my fruitless attempt to get a tan, I went to the local disco and afterwards “lay on the evening sand” with a French boy. It seemed romantic but led to trouble and despair as I experienced the cruel double standards of the time."
On Pink Bikini, Potter’s song-writing talents are quickly evident — one hears shades of Leonard Cohen, Françoise Hardy, Scott Walker, Marianne Faithfull and even more modern voices from Pete Doherty to Weyes Blood. While she’s accompanied by an assortment of collaborators — including guitarist extraordinaire Fred Frith (Robert Wyatt, Brian Eno), whose uniquely haunting sound has appeared on nearly all of Potter’s films from Orlando onwards — the vision is distinctively hers.
Album opener “Mama,” a song of gratitude from Potter to her mother, encapsulates all the intimacy and power of that most fundamental of relationships. Meanwhile, “Pink Bikini,” “Army of Teens,” and “Black Mascara” reflect the ambition and intergenerational tension of young womanhood. On “Black and White Badge,” the anxiety of the nuclear disarmament campaign finds a mirror image in the radical urgency of today’s climate activists. While Potter allows herself to inhabit the juvenile energies of these memoiristic songs, album closer “Dance Girl Dance” reflects on the recognition of boundless possibility that often comes only in hindsight: “Oh, Joy, you are living…your life is beginning…”
These 12 songs provide an unsparing excavation of adolescent feelings, cast in a post-modern performance of the types of musics one imagines a serious, style-savvy 60s teenager might obsess over: moodily orchestrated folk and protest songs, the sweeping and romantic chanson tradition, jazz from Charlie Parker and Billie Holiday, and the more conceptual works of British invasion bands like The Animals and The Beatles. Pink Bikini offers a cross-generational bridge between experiences then and now, meaningful to anyone who has weathered the joys and melancholia of youth; the loves and losses, terrors and disappointments, and looming fears of global annihilation.
As Potter explains: “Pink Bikini chronicles some of the key moments of the turbulent female years of transition from childhood to young adulthood that I experienced growing up in the 1960s in London. The arc of the songs begins with an evocation of the very earliest intimacies of life before language, then travels through the epic pains of love, loss and awakening in the teenage years, with its fears of global and personal annihilation, and finally out the other side, when life itself seems to be beginning again.”
About Sally Potter
Sally Potter’s films have won over forty international awards and received BAFTA and Academy Award nominations. Her 1992 breakthrough Orlando(1992) an adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s classic novel starring Tilda Swinton, was followed by The Tango Lesson (1996), The Man Who Cried (2000), Yes(2004), Rage (2009), Ginger & Rosa (2012), The Party (2017), and The Roads Not Taken (2020). Last September her short film Look At Me, starring Chris Rock and Javier Bardem, premiered at the Venice Film Festival. She was awarded an OBE in 2012 and her book Naked Cinema - Working with Actorsis published by Faber & Faber. Her soundtrack albums have been released by major labels including Sony Classical, Deutsche Grammaphon, and Milan.
Potter had a life in music that predates her work as a composer for film. As a voice in the avant-garde scene of the late 1970s she was a member of the ground-breaking group FIG (Feminist Improvising Group) with whom she toured extensively in Europe. She also performed with Lindsay Cooper’s Film Music Orchestra and collaborated (as lyricist) with her on the song cycle OH MOSCOW, performing in the USSR and East Berlin in 1989, before the wall came down. From the 1990s Sally moved away from improvised music and focused on the precisely structured scores for her films.
Pink Bikini
Mama
Ginger Curls
Black and White Badge
Army of Teens
Hymn
Ghosts
Black Mascara
Flames
Pink Bikini
The Secret
One Day
Dance Girl Dance
Album Credits
Music & Lyrics by Sally Potter
Lead Guitar & Electric Bass: Fred Frith
Drums & Percussion: Paul Clarvis
Upright Bass: Misha Mullov-Abbado
Keyboards: Sally Potter
Acoustic Guitar: Laura Snowden
Acoustic Guitar: Giacomo Susani
Harp: Hattie Webb
Album Recorded at Jankowski SoundFabrik (Germany) and The Premises (London)
Engineering & Mixing by Peter Hardt
Vocal Engineering by Marie Ormes
Additional Mixing & Pre-Mastering by Marta Salogni
Mastered by Matt Colton
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