April 2003
"The Trouble With……." Harry
Release date 21st April 03
She towers many feet above the ground, an amalgam of leather, studs and stilts. It‘s like rock‘n roll as seen through the lens of Leni Riefenstahl, or maybe Hype Williams (actually, its the work of Oasis/Marilyn Manson videographer Wiz). You‘d say this vision was larger than life, if Harry herself didn‘t seem at least 60 feet tall in person, and about a hundred times more impressive.
She struts onto the scene, casually iconic in a way that‘ll sear her form permanently onto a generations‘ eyeballs and heartbeats, bringing with her a clutch of great rock ‘n roll music, a stardust-splattered presence music‘s sorely been lacking, not to mention dreams and opinions. Lots of em.
"The only thing I told Wiz was that I want to be the antithesis of Britney Spears. I don‘t want to be the Rock Britney; this has got to be f****** different. Because I‘m different, and the album‘s different. There‘s not been a female artist willing to go to loggerheads with the mainstream, for years...
She hasn‘t taken a breath yet.
"I‘ve got this idea for a movie, loads of bands are really up for appearing in it. Its gonna be the greatest rock ‘n roll movie EVER..."
If Harry‘s own life were a movie, it‘d open with her childhood in Singapore, where she lived out her toddler years with her strictly religious parents (her grandfather was a preacher). Then we‘d cut to a montage of her peripatetic youth, travelling the world and visiting Israel and the Wailing Wall as part of some perpetual pilgrimage on her parent‘s part.
Then, a troubled period, settled in Ascot (absolutely barren, sez Harry), her parents deeming her barbie dolls, her school friends and even Top Of The Pops demonic and therefore not for their little girl. A short, sweet, funny vignette sees Harry, aged 8, attending her school disco dressed in a black-lycra catsuit, demure and retiring as ever. Then we cut to Harry‘s dad leaving the family for New York when she was aged eleven, an experience which Harry will only say gave her a taste for America and its media and its all-conquering, gargantuan hunger.
Then segue to Harry dressed all in black rubber, working the door at Slimelight, and dancing all night at the Torture Garden (I was retardedly goth, she guffaws). Fastforward to Harry aged 16, her publishing deal snugly slipped in her back pocket, her lust for life in general and rock ‘n roll in particular coursing through her, but lacking the tools and the collaborators to make her dreams and visions real.
So she parties for England, giving her life over to a rock ‘n roll scene teeming with drugs and transient pleasures and reprobate a******s.
Before the inevitable happy ending, however, Harry‘s own passion for rock ‘n roll would have to be chronicled. Rock music was, unsurprisingly, banned in her house, but salvation came in the form of her half-sister. A decade or so older, she initiated Harry into the world of pop with a bunch of David Bowie records. "He‘s really artful, iconic; he went through a lot of problems and chronicled them in his music", explains Harry, of her still-throbbing Bowie-passion.
This emotional link with music remains to this day. Ask her why she writes music, and she‘ll answer plainly that, if she didn‘t, she probably wouldn‘t be here today. "Music is like therapy to me", she explains. "Writing a song is often the only thing that comforts me."
It is this intense relationship with rock ‘n roll that stokes the furious passion which both informs her own music, and her dissatisfaction with the pop world today. Among her bugbears, the sexism of the music industry which so rarely finds roles for female artists beyond mere puppet-strung screen-candy (Harry might be blonde and beautiful, but she certainly ain‘t dumb, and she‘s holding her own strings); artists who languish in the shadows of cult-stardom because they consider it unhip to engage the mainstream; and rock-stars whose conception of rock ‘n roll extends no further than how many drugs they can take, and how many groupies they can f***.
"I just think, thank f*** I got all that out of my system when I was sixteen," she smiles.
"You‘re not gonna save anyone‘s‘ life like that, let alone yourself. There‘s a whole generation out there that‘s gonna grow up getting f***** up and believing what stupid 21 year old boys in the NME say.
Too many of these bands just don‘t have anything to say."
Harry, of course, has plenty to say. She‘s also got a lot of music inside her to share with the world. She‘s recorded with Adamski, and looks forward to making more music with him, satisfying her electro side. Her own debut album, meanwhile, has been three years in the making, involved many talented and diverse collaborators- not least Youth, who found a muse in Harry with her love of dark 80s synths and heavy guitar riffs. Together they wrote what was to become the basis of "The Trouble With....," a quaking slab of futuristic rock‘n‘roll....... that‘s bold brash and pop, personal powerful and poignant, heavy dark and uplifting. It‘s a record of extreme. It‘s a record that hums with it‘s creators‘ knowledge of the great power rock ‘n roll can hold over its most dedicated fans, while never blundering into pomposity, or away from gleaming, accessible, glorious pop.
Ask Harry to name the top 5 rock icons who mean the most to her, and you‘ll have to shut her up as she reaches number 9 with no sign of stopping, having already name-checked Madonna, Bowie, Grace Slick, Nirvana, Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, Ella Fitzgerald, Jane‘s Addiction, Led Ze.……..
But find some more room on that rock ‘n roll legend mantelpiece. Harry‘s coming, and she‘s ready to take her spot.
The final reel: Harry walks across Hyde Park, the finished copy of her album finally loaded into her walkman and unfurling in her ears. Tears are in her eyes, of relief, of joy. "It‘s been three years; I nearly died during the making of it, I lost faith in myself, in life, in everything. and then regained it. I put everything, every atom of myself, into that record. I‘m at a point where I don‘t know what I‘ve got left, because I‘ve given it all. I feel like I‘ve got so much more to say, I‘ve not even begun yet."
By Kas Mercer
David Jensen Photography:
https://www.davidjensen.co.uk/
