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Signed to Bristol’s Invada label and with a bleak and chilling debut album to her name, Anika’s turning more than a few heads with her ice-cool covers of Dylan & co. Julian Owen meets the half-German songstress. Pics: Ellen Doherty.

The music says cold, austere. The clank of the rolling metal door to the studio compound and the threadbare sofa sitting dwarfed and alone in the loading bay at the foot of the stairs say the same. The studio owner at the top of the stairs says his cute-beyond-words dog, Alfie, is so wilful that he’s been browsing canine GPS systems online. Ah, well – so much for bleak scene-setting.

But it’s so tempting to play the stark angle. The man upstairs is Geoff Barrow, whose Portishead brought forth the voice of Beth Gibbons: eerie, desolate, vulnerable to storm-tossed tides of emotion. He’s about to introduce us to Gibbons’s frost-glazed polar opposite: Anika, ‘the first lady of Invada’, his label’s latest signing. Tall, blonde, strikingly attractive, born to a German mother and “proper London boy” father, she flew in from Berlin at midnight and tomorrow will make her full live UK debut in London’s Buffalo Bar. Today she’ll rehearse, but not before cradling 10am caffeine and explaining to Venue how she “used to come over to Bristol to...” She trails off, takes another slug of coffee. “Sorry, it’s been a tough week. Lots of travelling.” This may or may not be related to her parallel career as a political journalist, or recently signed sponsorship tie-in with French fashion powerhouse agnès b. No matter; let’s allow pause and fill you in on the music.

In tandem with BEAK>-shaped band (Barrow, Billy Fuller, Matt Williams), Anika has created a work that, while echoing the first Portishead album in brooding density, would saw a coffee table in half as soon as look at it, thanks partly to her unnervingly dispassionate, Nico-recalling delivery (“It wasn’t unintentional. I’m half-German, for god’s sake”). Though recorded in Bristol, it has the steel blood of Berlin running right through it. It’s the soundtrack to the subterranean bars frequented by Iggy Pop on a ‘Nightclubbing’ crawl, drinking in the sound and vision of a 60s girl-pop starlet whose voice drained of emotion years ago. Twinkle, perhaps – a cover of her 1964 banned-by-the-Beeb ode to a boyfriend killed in a bike smash, ‘Terry’, opens the album. All but two of the following tracks are also covers. “I like making people feel uncomfortable. The original ‘Terry’ is ice-cream stuff.” Whereas this is dark as hell. “That’s exactly the point – if they’d been originals, you wouldn’t have got that juxtaposition.”

Perhaps, next album, more self-penned songs, she’ll reveal more of herself. For now, and in a way that adds brilliantly to the debut, she’s un-pinnable. “I sound German when I speak Russian,” she says, as if puzzled. “When I speak German I sound Dutch.” When she speaks English she sounds English, albeit having grown up “getting detention for getting names wrong. I still mispronounce things.” She’s worked in music since “14 or 15”, among other things setting up and managing a record label, always pretending to be 24 so as not to be taken for a ride. “That’s why I’ve hidden behind various names. That’s why the album cover’s a bit ambiguous – you can’t really see me.”

Your singing voice is so intensely dispassionate, says Venue, that there’s got to be passion behind it. Like in politics – when you get to the extremes of left wing and right wing, they’re almost touching.

“Definitely. Especially in the live show, it’s very cold.”

You don’t seem very cold.

“That’s because I’m talking to you. Mostly I just linger in the corner looking on.”

You’re a journalist. It’s your job to quietly look on.

“Exactly. That’s why it was strange to then be the front person.”

Does it feel empowering to be centre stage?

“No, the opposite. Previously I was in the background, I had control. When you’re in the front you’re at the mercy of everyone, out there, vulnerable.”

So what are you doing, then…?

“I go on as a different person.”

You’d imagine Bob Dylan nodding approvingly at this. Ditto the album’s take on his ‘Masters of War’, stretched out on a rack of skitterish, rumbling dub, cutting straight to the heart of the original’s portentous spirit, and concluding with the words of a soldier in Iraq: “We were told we were fighting terrorists, but the real terrorist was me, and the real terrorism is this occupation.” The coda has drawn criticism. “But listen to the song,” says Anika. “It’s talking about the people in their mansions directing the soldiers, never at all criticising them. I don’t believe in the reasons for [the war], but what they do is really brave.”

Bleak, oppressive, politically agitating... this album is a timely release, no? “It’s strange how it’s coincided with this uprising,” she admits, as we talk in the week of the first student demos. “Before it was ‘Oh, I hate the way things are’, and that was it. Now they’re doing something about it. Maybe people will be a bit more open to the album. If it had been released ten years ago, they’d have been ‘What…?’”

Anika hasn’t lived anywhere for more than three months in two years. In post-Cold War east Berlin she dwelt “in one of those Soviet flats with holes in the ceiling where they probably used to have cameras”; then there’s been Wakarusa, Indiana, when recession hit and closed down the majority-employing car factory (an event that inspired the album’s ‘No One’s There’); and, latterly, Stokes Croft. “It’s a shame people only know them for the Tesco thing. They’re bringing the community together, so similar to what I saw in Berlin, really well structured.”

She was living in Cardiff (“so frustrating – do something a bit different, no one would turn up”) when she got a call from a graphic design client, the Louisiana’s Mig Schillace: “My friend Geoff has got a new project...” He didn’t say which Geoff, but she “was just keen to try something out, not have the intention of releasing it.” Not that she’d have been daunted had she known, she assures. “Geoff’s completely not thrown by what I’m doing. In the past I’ve had new ideas and people just look at you.”

Initial live shows in France pulled “500 people, and they actually knew the words”. She’s become the first European signing to none-more-hip US label Stones Throw. As to the future, “It needs to be done well. There’s only so much you can do by mistake. The plan at the moment goes up to the end of October.” Thus, talk of breaking the US with lowish-key New York DJ sets, SXSW, European festivals – “by then, America might be ready for some full shows.” Right now, she’s ready – desperate, actually – to relax briefly pre-rehearsal. “The thing is, plans can change,” she concludes. “If tomorrow it falls flat on its face, I’ll move back to Berlin and carry on the journalism.”

ANIKA PLAYED THE CROFT, BRISTOL ON WED 15 DEC. HER EPONYMOUS DEBUT ALBUM IS OUT NOW ON INVADA. FFI: HTTP://ANIKAINVADA.TUMBLR.COM FOR REVIEW CLICK HERE.
 

Copyright Julian Owen 2010; pics Ellen Doherty, www.duchessphotographic.com

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