LOS ANGELES – Award-winning Director Sally Potter has challenged British society over the course of her 50-year career, in movies like Orlando, The Party and Ginger and Rosa. Now at the age of 73, Potter is continuing her creative resolve with her debut studio album, Pink Bikini.
Self-released on Friday, the LP is a semi-autobiographical collection of alternative tracks chronicling Potter’s youth in 1960s London.
In 12 songs, the filmmaker addresses turbulent relationships and oppressive social constraints.
“There’s something very life-affirming about working in a different medium, learning a new skill, or making a change at a point in life where you thought you should know exactly who you are and what you want.” Do it,” Potter told The Associated Press.
Potter found lyrical inspiration in notebooks, which she filled with poetry throughout her life. Coincidentally, the songs continue “Pink Bikini” deal with a variety of different themes, including frustration with beauty standards (“Ginger Curls”), a “No Bombs” march (“Black and White Badge”) and female authorship (“Ghosts”), performed in minor keys and seductive instrumentals .
“Some people say I have a rhyme gene,” says Potter.
The AP spoke to Potter about the transition from film to music. Responses have been edited for clarity and brevity.
AP: Your background is interdisciplinary; You have co-composed or curated music in your films. But when did this album start for you?
POTTER: Actually, it’s quite a mystery to me. Why now? Why this? I think I felt a strong desire to work with the apparent simplicity of the song form. After making big films, always involving a large number of people and a lot of money, the appeal of the short form is so lasting and so emotionally rich and so direct and so intimate.
AP: What was it like for you to revisit your youth at this stage in your life on this album?
POTTER: I’m not sure she ever left me. I’m not sure any of our young selves will ever leave us. But reliving those memories is such a strange thing, and that’s one of the things the songs are about: Do I remember it? Or do I remember a photo of it? And then when you tell the story, because every song is a little story, you start to rewrite the story, so to speak.
AP: How does gender dynamics influence your songs?
POTTER: I chose those teenage years because it’s that moment of intense gender identification crisis when you realize for the first time that you’re being treated according to the gender you were born into. If I’m just talking about myself and my generation of girls, when we hit puberty, as a time of great loss, loss of freedom, dynamism… suddenly you (have to) think about what impression you have? Doing new things and the limitations of being a woman. At the same time, it’s an incredible kind of growth that’s seething with hormones, emotions, confusion, trauma, intensity and finding out a great many things about yourself in the world. It’s a very brilliant and intense time to write about.
AP: On Pink Bikini, are you exploring what it means to be like a woman who is reclaiming her art?
POTTER: I’d say not so much reclaiming yourself as moving on whether people want it or not.
AP: Songs like “Ginger Curls,” “Pink Bikini,” and “Hymn” are linked to a sense of shame. Does shame affect your sense of femininity?
POTTER: I think young girls learn to be ashamed. (Even) before social media, we had a very problematic relationship with the body, which is a double message. On the one hand one should display (oneself) and be proud of it, on the other hand one should hide it. ‘Cause if you flaunt it too much, you’re a bitch. And if you hide it too much, you’re frigid. It was sort of a ’60s and ’70s thing — those impossible, contradictory demands of all women.
“Hymn” is a fight against religious oppression. It’s a fight against shame. A token of love between people of the same sex. That was actually more of the feeling of all the songs, of this suppression that comes suddenly.
AP: You mention nuclear war in Black and White Badge. Your films also speak of this time and the political dissidence. What was it like exploring your life and those feelings in music versus film?
POTTER: In the film, you can tell the story more well-rounded through the characters, put words in people’s mouths, build up the situation, and get a lot of visual impressions. In a song it is evocative in a distilled way, an era with simple language. I thought, “How can I write about something that was so important to me – climate change, essentially the threat of an apocalypse – and not make it too heavy?” I wanted to lighten it up. I sang in a fairly undramatized way. You can be a 12-year-old girl on a march – on the one hand combative of the very existence of nuclear weapons – and on the other hand afraid that you don’t look cool enough. There’s a bit of humor amidst the fear of the apocalypse, the ultimate terror.
AP: Are there any questions from your childhood in the ’60s that you think are relevant in 2023?
POTTER: You can’t mention climate change enough, because I think the fear of everything ending – what’s bigger than that? There’s nothing bigger than that. It’s crippling.
The Cuban Missile Crisis, which happened when I was eleven, seemed very close to a third world war. I think the sense of crisis (of this generation) is similar to what it was then. Confusions surrounding sexuality… and domestic life. There are so many similarities and these are the simple things.
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