Experimental artist Sally Potter talks through the songs that soundtracked her life and career in music, film and activism.
Anatomy, the new record by Sally Potter, tackles the existential threats of climate change through exploring the symbiotic relationship between humans and the Earth. It’s an eclectic and direct project that feels entirely appropriate within the wider body of work from the filmmaking luminary.
The 75-year-old London-born Potter actually took her first steps in music with improvised performances and concerts in her twenties – including a stint on vocals and saxophone with the ensemble Feminist Improvising Group in the late '70s. She also composed the soundtracks to many of her films, often working with multi-instrumentalist and avant-composer Fred Frith – who she met during those early experimental performances.
Frith has been a key collaborator in Potter’s musical output ever since and worked with her on both of her solo records. Her 2023 debut Pink Bikini was self-released but Anatomy finds her on the Bella Union roster, among the likes of Father John Misty, John Grant and Beach House. “I think they've been fantastic,” she tells me of the legendary indie label. “They're very artist-centric, and they've been funny and kind and efficient and all the good things; very collaborative and I have only praise for them thus far.”
Potter learned a lot from her first album, she explains, “especially from the sound world and what I was trying to do there.” On Anatomy, she wanted to make something that felt very intimate and direct, “so that I was, so to speak, singing to somebody about as far away as you are from me now, because all of the lyrics are really about different forms of connection. Connection with other people, connection with your own body, and connection with the body of the earth," she explains, "And that you can't pull those apart and think of those as separate things, but rather, we are all one unified anatomy.”
The songs on Anatomy, she tells me, grew out of “finding a kind of chord sequence and a key and a tempo and the beginnings of a shape, or a little phrase or something, and building.” Potter’s first record was deliberately drawn on autobiographical experience – crystallised into songs that channelled the universal experience of the pain and anguish of growing up in a difficult world – but Anatomy applies a older perspective with an emphasis on different kind of survival.
“If the Earth itself doesn't survive and if the climate – and all the repercussions of climate change get so extreme that it becomes impossible for humans to live on it – then it's the end of everything,” she tells me firmly.
Her 2012 film Ginger & Rosa dealt with some of her own anxieties as a teenager living through the nuclear crisis. Does the fight against climate change feel less hopeful, I ask her? Is it scarier? “It’s the same, it feels similarly scary,” she answers. “But I think when you're a 12 year old, becoming aware of the nuclear threat, you're vulnerable. The idea of of a bomb falling – the idea of obliteration, or being separated from a family, all those things are catastrophically terrifying. And I used to dream about this every night, of the bomb falling, the four-minute warning. How would I find the people I love?
“I imagine for younger people now – at a similar age – finding out about what's going on with the climate and the nightmare of disavowal about it would perhaps result in similar states of terror, and the only way you can turn that around is by being active about it. If you just go into a passive state of terror and fear, all you do is fall in on yourself, or your world shrinks.”
While Potter didn't play any live shows around Pink Bikini, she’ll mark the release of the new record with a rare performance at London’s Cafe OTO. “It is marginally terrifying,” she laughs. “In my 20s I was touring a lot but this is different. A lot of those were improvised gigs, but this is written material that needs to be rehearsed. I love Cafe OTO though – I think it's the most brilliant venue. I've heard wonderful music there and the atmosphere is fantastic. And I think it tends to be, in my experience, a generous audience as well. It's not a snooty audience who are going to be judgmental!”
Before we delve into the canon music that Potter has chosen for her Nine Songs, I ask her how it feels as a filmmaker and songwriter in the age of the needle drop: how critical is she of the choices other directors make about the use of song in modern cinema?
“It’s not restful for me… my mind is working the whole time,” she explains. “I’m often more interested in things that don't use music on film, because often I don't like the way music is used. Or I prefer if music is going to be on a film that it’s there to be listened to – so you're listening and looking at the same time. Sometimes that's a very hard ask, because the brain is having to absorb so much information. Visually, every frame of a picture has got so many gazillions of bits of information!
"What I'm generally not particularly keen on are big orchestral music for films – it tends to make me go a bit weary, because I often feel trapped in a very descriptive genre. It decides and tells you what to think or feel or anticipate, and I prefer it when music is used as a counterpoint.”
“God Bless the Child” by Billie Holiday
SALLY POTTER: As far as I'm concerned, Billie Holiday is a genius… a great, great artist.
She’s like an umbrella over everything, because she set a standard of truth; her technical priorities are second to none but you never hear that – what you hear is absolute, direct, intimate meaning and experience, often the channelling of pain but not only.
I chose this particular song as well because it's so quietly political… it’s really a critique of money, of the power of money, which is so of this moment – it couldn't be a more appropriate song in the age of the billionaires.
I think when I was a child somebody said to me that she sings her voice as if it was an instrument – a musical instrument – and then began to hear what she was doing musically. I would have been very young when I first heard her but I kept going: I was buying her albums when I was a teenager, and listening to her on repeat in my 20s. I go back to her if I want to be reminded of what a voice can do.
“A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall” by Bob Dylan
I was a teenager when I heard this, maybe at the time of marching during the Cuban missile crisis, or even shortly after. I can certainly remember being in a room aged 13 or 14 and listening to this song. And for me again, it was a feeling of, 'This is what the poetic use of language can do to this apocalyptic, political and social and every human crisis, every existential crisis. The language that you use when you're marching – you know, ”Ban the bomb” – is fine, but when it's ”A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall”, you've got words that come at you in a different way.
So it's the power of beautifully constructed language that comes at things in a rather oblique way, that suggests something in a much more precise and nuanced way than a lot of political rhetoric.
I was also just taken by the simplicity, the kind of rudeness of his voice in the sense of unpolished sound, deliberate and not prettified in any way sound – the rawness of the sound – and the sheer beauty and precision of the lyrics, as well as the surprising nature of the lyrics and the subject. It’s just taking on the biggest thing of the day, the biggest issue of the day and making something eternal.
BEST FIT: How did you feel about the James Mangold movie?
I think they did an incredible job – the actors – learning how to replicate the sounds that already exist but I've also seen the documentaries about Bob Dylan, and I often wonder about biopics. Do we need them when somebody has already been filmed, or their actual image is there? I'm not sure, and so I always have a slightly ambivalent relationship with any biopic. I'd rather watch fiction. But what it's done brilliantly is introduce a lot of people to the songs that they just weren't aware of and it’s a great service in that regard.
I’m always surprised when I talk to very young music writers and there isn’t that same level of familiarity with Dylan or the Beatles that you might expect.
It reminds me that often when I meet young filmmakers for example, and I discover they haven't seen the 50 or 100 films – what I would think of as key works of cinema – without which you don't know what you're making and why you're making it. It’s amazing in the era of the Internet, that somehow people's field of attention gets narrower and narrower because of the fucking algorithms.
I read how some independent filmmakers were putting their own movies out there on filesharing sites, because there’s no other way to see them without that – the DVDs are out of print, they aren’t on any streaming service anywhere… and I was wondering what it feels like as a musician to have your art pressed onto a physical object such as vinyl?
I talked about it a lot with Bella Union and there's something about a physical object that seeps out by osmosis. Not that many people are going to have that physical object, but just knowing that it exists gives a fluid sort of solidity to the existence of the music. So it's not just drifting on this the ether of everything and Spotify times a gazillion, you know. Just like films that were shot on 35mm – they’re the ones that last, It’s the digital we’ve got real problems with now!
“Blow the Wind Southerly” by Kathleen Ferrier
Kathleen Ferrier I would have heard at various points in my life – this song in particular.
My mother loved singing too, she studied singing later on in her life and she would have played this. But what really struck me about Kathleen Ferrier is that she's a classical singer with this amazing, deep contralto voice. And I have a fascination with just the sound of her voice, just as I do with countertenors or male sopranos, when unexpected sounds come out of the body, and how beautiful that is.
The fact that she's singing a folk song – an acapella – so simply… it has a mesmerising quality. It has a very dated quality too, because her enunciation is so perfect, but that's okay!
I was reminded about it again when Terence Davies made his documentary about Liverpool and he included this, along with the shipping forecast. It's these kinds of things that have a sort of aura of some time, lost in memory.
“Suzanne” by Leonard Cohen
I would have been listening to this possibly on the same day as I was listening to the Bob Dylan song, unless I've got my dates wrong… but I have a feeling of being a young teen and part of me going in the direction of marching against bombs, and part of me going in the direction of.. 'Oh I want to be this kind of adult Suzanne!' Then I figured out after a while: 'No! I don't want to be Suzanne! I want to be the person singing about Suzanne! I want to be Leonard Cohen!'
So there was this back-forth, back-forth around it, but I remember listening to it in this kind of hormonal sort of trance, you know: “tea and oranges…:” this wonderful Leonard Cohen drone. I think that felt like really the two faces of teenage-hood. Those two faces were his songs. I think he's a master songwriter,
The sort of romanticism – the feeling he conjured up of this life that he was living on a Greek island – it all became part of this impossible kind of adult life, sensual and free.
Was he a big influence on you musically?
Probably. I'm sounding kind of slightly ironic now when I'm talking about him, but I was seriously engaged with his songs. I love the lower register of his voice – it's just a wonderful sound and it’s so warm. I think the story of his life – having spent a long time meditating and developing a whole spiritual life, and all the things that he did in his life – comes through in the music.
There is a transcendent quality to some of it: the intimacy, the quality of intimacy, the feeling that you are being sung to personally.
“Non, je ne regrette rien” by Édith Piaf
At some point in my twenties, I started busking. I would go out into the street alone and sing – just voice – and one of the songs I occasionally sang was this one.
I have some French ancestry and so I feel some connection in that regard, but it was more like this image of her: this tiny suffering person – channelling suffering but also survival in a very particular way – and standing with her voice alone, against the world. They called her “The Little Sparrow”, didn't they?
It was more the sound of her voice and the feeling of the words of this particular song – not regretting, not looking back – that encouraged me in my explorations of what it meant to pitch my voice against the sound of traffic in a street.
I crossed this one out from the list of songs and then I put it back, and then crossed it out and put it back again… it’s not a sound, for example, that I would want to emulate, but it's something about her as this tiny female figure out there with her voice!
“Fado Português” by Amália Rodrigues
When I was on tour in my late twenties with one of the improvising groups, we were in Lisbon and went out to a bar, and there was a live fado singer there.
As it happens, we were in a lot of trouble, because the organisers of this huge Jazz Festival we were playing at paid the big names first while the smaller support groups like us ended up not getting paid at all – to the degree that we actually couldn't leave Lisbon. We didn’t have enough money to pay our fares to get home – but in the midst of all that, we went into this bar and heard this fado music.
The beauty of that way of singing – the glorious open throat sound – felt to me like a guiding light in what's possible in the voice. The strength in those voices, and the absolutely unapologetic embrace of extreme feeling, not as an indulgence, but as a truth telling: 'This is how it feels to be alive, and this is what you feel in your heart of hearts, and I'm going to express for you what you can't express.'
So you sit there with tears rolling down your face while Amália or some of the other fado singers bring your experience to you and give it a shape and a sound.
“De-AR Fi Lumea de Hârtie” by Nicolae Guță
It was a toss up for me between Nicolae Guță or the Taraf de Haïdouks who I'd worked with before [in 2001’s The Man Who Cried] and who would have come first, I guess, before I heard Nikolai.
Strangely enough, his Wikipedia page –the one in Romanian, not in English – mentions you proclaiming him a “national treasure” but I couldn’t find the source of that quote anywhere online…
That's how stuff moves on the internet, isn't it? Well, I found out about Nicolae Guță rifling through CDs in a shop in Paris. And thought: 'Well, that looks good', and I bought it. I was blown away by the voice, but nobody I speak to has ever heard of Nicolae! Why haven't people heard him? This is the most incredible voice!
I think with the Taraf de Haïdouks and Nicolae Guță, the way that they sing, and the particular kind of songs coming out of Romania, out of Romany culture… I don't know if Nicolae Guță does, but certainly the Taraf de Haïdouks, did not read a note of music. Everything's done by ear, everything's done with not necessarily the best quality violins.... It’s like: 'Chuck out everything you ever thought about technical proficiency, Western standards, and what it means to be a “good musician"!'
But they're fucking brilliant musicians, and I had the great fortune to work both with the Kronos Quartet and the Taraf de Haïdouks. I know I'm talking about them, not Nicolae Guță but it all relates. I saw how classically trained people and instinctive people, who've learned by ear, would work together perfectly.
With Nicolae Guță, what I adore about this particular track is that it refers to the state of longing necessary in order to sing, in order to make music singing that way – and that's what his voice, to me, expresses. It’s a yearning and longing for something. It’s kind of transcendent and at the same time an incredibly human, earthy sound with no pretension. Not what we would think of as 'classically perfect' stuff, but it's technically brilliant in the phrasing and some of the fastest songs he does are really astonishing. It's a whole strand of music that should be heard much more.
Is that longing comparable to how you felt as a teenager wanting to make films?
I have that longing all the time! I think that longing is the state necessary to make a feature film. You've got to long for it so much, because you're going to have such a terrible time. It takes such a long time and there’s so many obstacles. Things always go wrong. It's huge, just huge and you have to have something to be like an engine to carry you through that.
“Different Trains” by Steve Reich
I’m thinking of the Kronos Quartet recording of Steve Reich's Different Trains. They're so brilliant and have such an ear for music around the world, and the collaborations they do are fantastic.
One of the things I love about it is the way that the sounds – the sounds of a train, the recordings of the human voice – everything is music. Every human utterance is a song of some description. And somehow that piece by Steve Reich works with that principle that there is music everywhere in all these sounds, and if you put it together in a different way, you hear it more as music.
But Steve Reich for me also signifies, in my life, the role of all the minimalist composers. So Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Michael Nyman… their relationship with loops, repetitions and a lack of sentimentality… a relationship with a kind of meditative, repetitive structures, and with mathematics and the principles of harmony.
It’s been a huge influence on me and on my film writing, but also just generally as a way of listening to music. Some of those things I've listened to through the decades. I think Terry Riley’s “In C” I certainly had in my 20s, and listened to that on repeat. The others I gradually caught up with over the years.
“La Yumba” (Instrumental) by Osvaldo Pugliese
Tango became a great big part of my life while I was finishing making my film Orlando. To give myself mental rest, I was going off and having ballroom dancing lessons, which is as far as you can get from that. And then I fell through those into actual Argentine Tango – and then I thought, 'Forget the ballroom dancing – Buenos Aires, here I come!
And so I went to Buenos Aires and I was actually at the last concert that Osvaldo Pugliese ever did. And tango music then took over my life and I learned a lot about it from my various tango teachers and friends. I have a huge collection of tango music, and I discovered that in the tango salons and in the clubs, people of all ages – from very young to very old – were dancing and listening and knew all the tracks of all the great tango composers.
And not only the tracks, but which recording?! “Oh, that's a 1954 version of this?” “Oh, no, no, no, this is a 1973 version!” I mean, incredible knowledge about their own musical culture, and it's huge. The body of work is enormous, of all the composers.
And I got into that first of all through Astor Piazzolla, whose work, of course, has travelled a great deal in the West, and people know a lot about it worldwide. Pugliese, and the others like di Sarli and Canaro and Troilo and the others – if you're into the world of tango music, you get to know those composers.
Pugliese was quite extraordinary; he too was politically very active, and was imprisoned several times for his dissent against the dictatorship. And when he was in prison, the rest of his orchestra would not put another pianist in. They would lay a red rose on the keyboards and play without the piano until he returned. It's very beautiful.
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