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to get this kid to dance. He was shy and didn’t want to. Eventually he got up and danced. He was phenomenal. But all that happened was the little boy blushed and everyone clapped. It didn’t need to go any further. He was humble. I’ve taken that a long way with me.”
After a brief stab at a flat share with her best mate Cath in a basement in Edinburgh in her early 20s, Theodore moved to London. She and her sister found an artists’ studio in Hackney where her sis- ter could paint and Theodore could start a band and rehearse. Through a bloke from the punk band Tofu Love Frog who rented them the space in which they lived (on the quiet) and worked, Theodore discovered that living on a boat was an option. A friend helped find one in Newbury and Theodore sailed her new home to a berth on the Lea River in Hackney.
Theodore was increasingly uncomfortable in the studio she’d helped to build. “It was becoming hipster. All winklepickers and facial hair and flopping around.” She found that after sharing a few years with homeless people, some of whom were “the most caring, interesting, humble, honest people” she’d met that “the new cul- ture of hipsters and money and very rich youth not knowing what they’re doing” fuelled her anger that “people who had lived and worked in places for their whole lives were being supplanted”. This and poverty and class division fuel her songwriting.
And while that songwriting remains unconventional,
Theodore’s living conditions are beginning to be on nodding terms with convention. She has recently installed a wood-burner and elec- tricity on her boat. “People who don’t know how to use power tools, shouldn’t use power tools,” she says gnomically. It’s a discovery she made the hard way. Using an angle grinder, her scarf became entan- gled in the mechanism. As the machine climbed her scarf, increasing- ly choking her, she realised she couldn’t find the off-switch. Only as the machine was grazing her neck did she locate it. Luckily, she was found by someone who untangled her.
I
met her looking unscathed at a sound check at the Border- line this autumn. It was clear she’s used to being completely in command of the music: she was easy with it and so were her brilliant band. With her slim frame and quirky beauty, Theodore has that compelling mix of toughness and vulnera- bility that comes across in her music. Her record company (Aveline, set up by Immy Doman of Camden’s Green Note – a staunch sup- porter of Theodore for the past decade) is clearly behind her and I got the sense it’s an environment in which Theodore, with her new outward perspective, will thrive.
The last track on Cactacus, Everything Is Temporary, a sweet country-tinged song featuring steel guitar and unexpected arrange- ments, explores stifling social restrictions on the way relationships should unfold. It’s also a comment on her view that “all the things we have to buffer us against loss don’t exist”. This realisation hit home when the Olympics came to London and she and her neigh- bours, all living on boats, were told they’d be evicted. When 400 people turned up to demonstrate against the decision it was reversed. But Theodore saw that we can’t stick to something and call it ours. As human beings, she says “our safety net is non-existent. But her song says ‘Don’t worry. It’s all temporary and it’s beautiful. Keep moving.’
Meanwhile she’s made a beautiful album that will last. And
quite frankly, come the revolution I’d want to be on her team. Ruth Theodore is touring the UK in the spring. Make it a date to go and see her.
ruththeodore.com F
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