Nerina Pallot's Personal Best

BEST FIT: You’ve previously described your debut album Dear Frustrated Superstar as “Oh, so sweet. Keep going kid.” “Patience” was the second single from the record. What made you earmark it for discussion today?

NERINA PALLOT: When I did my shows earlier this year I decided to resurrect “Patience” because so many people love this song. I’ve sort of been a bit down on that first record, so no one was expecting me to play it, and everyone was so sweet! Then I was like, “Okay, it’s time to let that song have its day in the sun again.”

“Patience” was written around the time when a lot of my friends were either going out into the world, getting work or getting into the fields they wanted to. I majored as a music student and, ask any arts major, about 95% of us at any given time are out of work, right? I was living in London too, which even then was an expensive city, and I just felt like I had all these dreams and didn’t know how I was going to achieve them.

I think this song was born out of frustration. I often use this analogy, the idea of my nose against the glass and the world is this shop. Like in Charlie & the Chocolate Factory. Before he gets the golden ticket, Charlie’s constantly wanting to have this experience, but he doesn’t know when it’s going to come to him. “Patience” comes from that time of me trying to make sense of how to be an adult, telling myself I need to take my time.

Also, a lot of people came to “Patience”, and the album, at a formative time in their lives. A lot of people were teenagers when they first came to that record, some of my long-term fans. I think at that point in your life, between 13 to 18, is where music absolutely rewires your brain. It shapes who you are. I’m not saying it doesn’t do that once you’re an adult, because it can still do that. But I think there’s this formative experience in your youth, and that’s another reason it makes sense that this song is so precious to certain fans.

I’ve always felt that Dear Frustrated Superstar has a diaristic feel to it.

It’s really funny that you say that, because I wasn’t strictly keeping a diary when I wrote “Patience”, when I was about 19 or 20, but I would keep loose notes. Back in the day I didn’t have a Pinterest but I did have scrapbooks with pictures, news articles and reviews of records I loved, from whatever press I was reading, and I would have my own little meditations on things. I was journaling a lot. I would call it journaling rather than diary keeping. A lot of the songs on the first record came from that kind of scrapbook / journal land where I’d get a line and then I’d work a song around it.

BEST FIT: This next song comes from my favourite album of yours, Year of the Wolf. "All Bets Are Off" reminds me of everything I love about British pop music at its best: refined, smart and cool.

NERINA PALLOT: I wish I could play the demo for you because it’s so different. I was trying to write a song that I could pitch to Leona Lewis, something like “Bleeding Love.” It was around the time that I had worked with Kylie Minogue, and suddenly I was writing a lot with other people to pitch songs to other artists. I was still writing for myself as well, and “All Bets Are Off” is one that I wrote on my own, trying to write something modern. The demo is like a hip-hop groove with keyboard strings and my vocal. It’s much tougher and really cool. Sometimes I think, ‘Oh! What if I’d done it like that?’

The song is about the memory of a bad relationship. That line in the second verse, “freak show divine,” was about how horrible it was at the end. Just so toxic and so awful, doomed from the beginning. I think we all have relationships where we know it’s going to be a disaster, but something compels us to stay and see it to the bitter end. That’s the meaning of the song. It was quite a painful one to write, and it’s weird that it tumbled out of me all those years later, when I’m fortunate to be happily married. I remember doing an interview for Year of the Wolf – my son had been born by then, and it was a real period of reflection – and I said to the interviewer, “I just realised that, for the first time in my life, I think I might know what happiness is.” I was finally feeling happy because I was writing about all the shit I’d been through to get there, if that makes sense?

Absolutely, yeah, and I think you can hear that on other songs from Year of the Wolf, like “Turn Me on Again”, which captures the rush of attraction and new love. That’s the light! For me, “All Bets Are Off” speaks to the complexities of a “fixed love” once the newness has worn off and you’re getting down to the nitty gritty of compatibility. The shadow and the “grown-up stuff.”

Yeah. I’ve had a lot of messages over the years from people saying “All Bets Are Off” was their “end of my relationship” song. I always feel sad when I get those, but I understand why because that’s absolutely what it is.

It was a joy to make Year of the Wolf because I worked with an amazing producer, Bernard Butler. He’s a well-respected musician as well, but he was so trusting of me as a writer. He didn’t interfere with the writing in any way. He just let me do my thing. As a result, I completely trusted him. I also completely trusted the arranger I worked with, Sally Herbert, who I’ve worked with a lot over the years. This is one of the only albums I’ve made where I didn’t write any of the string arrangements. With nearly every other record, I’ve written at least half, but for this one I let Sally do it all. Between the three of us we made an album that I’m so proud of because it’s, like you say, very British.

NERINA PALLOT: There’s actually a link between these two songs, which is why I wanted to talk about them both.

BEST FIT: Let’s start with "Oh Berlin", which isn’t a track I was familiar with before now as it was a standalone single that you released in between your sixth and seventh albums.

I’m kind of glad that you don’t know it that well. I started writing it in 2011, around the time of Year of the Wolf. I had started to work on the German version of The Voice for one season as a co-coach, which is like a sidekick to the main coach. Do not ask me how I got involved with it, but somehow I did [laughs].

What happened was, when Universal Records put out Year of the Wolf, they thought it would be a perfect combo for me to promote my new album by being on German TV all the time. So I was like, okay, fine, and I did the show. It was a real eye-opener. I’d previously done work on these shows in the UK, doing the music for the contestants, but it was quite different watching it all happen in real time. I only did one season as I had some concerns about how these shows treat the contestants, but at the end of it, they asked me to stay on in Berlin and work with a writing camp to write singles for the contestants.

I found myself in this fancy studio inside this plastic hotel that was really pink. Not pink in a cool way, but in a way that was purpose built to appeal to people in the entertainment industry, which is always the worst possible idea. It was so clinical and so at odds with the creative experience. I remember sitting in this pink studio, day after day, trying to come up with pop hits and it was just the most hideous experience. But I remember walking back to the hotel one day and singing “Oh Berlin”, because I was feeling kind of like, “How did I end up in a pink studio trying to write bangers for a 17-year-old?”

I always had that chorus. It stayed in my head, but I couldn’t write lyrics for it properly until some years later –in 2018, I think – when I went back to Germany on tour. It was a weird European tour, and the Berlin show was not a good show. I got catfished in really dark circumstances. I thought that I was going to go and meet this terminally ill teenage girl. For months they’d been writing to the label saying, “Would Nerina come to my hospice?” and things like that. So when I was on that tour I said, “Yes, of course I will come.” But this girl didn’t exist. It was some weird, dark form of catfishing. I was feeling really sad about it, and everything – this and the weird shows – caused a bit of an existential crisis for the second time in Berlin. How dark is humanity that somebody would pretend to be a terminally ill 15-year-old girl? I mean, that is just so fucked. Anyway, I went home and I finally finished “Oh Berlin”. It’s about self-sabotage, about all the bad decisions I’ve made.

It’s incredible that you could pull something so artistically rewarding from all that. And that catfishing situation was definitely not your fault. You were only trying to do the right thing, the kind thing.

It was so strange. Just very, very odd. But the real reason I wanted to talk about it is because my friend Chris, who died in 2022, absolutely loved that song. He was obsessed with it. It wasn’t a massive hit. It didn’t do anything, really, but he loved it so much. He was always very supportive of my music and he understood self-sabotage. We are – were – both in the entertainment industry, yet really quite straightforward people.

A week before Chris died, he said to me, “I really want to hear the new record [I Don’t Know What I’m Doing]. I know it’s not coming out for a few months, but can you send it to me? You know, just let me hear a few tracks.” And I said, “Oh, I don’t know if it’s good enough.” I kept putting him off, saying “I’ve got a little work to do with it. When it’s ready, I will send it to you.” Well, then he died, right? He never got to hear it. And I have thought about that pretty much every day since, you know? Like, “Your friend asked for one little thing. You never gave it to him. He died. He might’ve really liked that record.” And then, of all the songs that his family chose to play at his funeral, they chose “Oh Berlin.” It was his favourite song of mine.

The first song I wrote for the new album was “And Here a Garden”, which is about Chris and being in his hometown in Glasgow for a show I had there a couple of years ago. Whenever I’d go to Glasgow, he would often fly out from London to come and see my show and hang out with his family up there. When I was writing “Regrets”, I was thinking about him as well, because [not sending Chris the record] was probably one of my most present regrets. You should always tell your friends that you love them because you just don’t know what’s next. I did not expect my friend to die so suddenly at such a relatively young age. It was such a shock. The new record is coming out on his birthday. I feel like, somehow, this is partly a way to make up for him not getting to hear the last one.

I want him to live on, you know, by saying his name, by talking about him. He was such a larger-than-life figure. Funny, brilliant, but never narcissistic. He was so self-critical in so many ways.

"Regrets", to me, feels like it has a message of not getting in your own way.

Yeah. I don’t know if you have a lack of confidence in certain things, but one of the things I’ve decided to do since turning 50 is to start owning stuff, like really owning it. I look back and I think, “You know what? I haven’t done so bad to get to 50, to have made eight albums, to be a functioning adult, to be a good wife, a good mother.” I’m gonna start saying, “Well done!”