Acclaimed American singer-songwriter Jesca Hoop releases her new album, Stonechild, on 5 July – and she’s giving Oh Comely readers a sneak preview with an exclusive live recording of her mesmerising track Outside of Eden.

Featuring Kate Stables from This is the Kit as well as Jesca’s nephew Justis on vocals, the track is the folkiest offering on her forthcoming release – featuring her trademark finger-plucked guitar. 

The song represents one of Jesca’s biggest concerns: the effect of technology on young people and their increasing reliance on electronic devices. On the track, she sings: “Come shut in boys for the girlfriend experience, enter the code and I’ll taste real”.

Watch it here.

Stonechild is Californian-born Jesca’s fifth release and also features the talents of Rozi Plain and Lucius. The album title was inspired by a trip to a Philadelphia’s Mütter Museum, where the Stonechild is a sad display of an unborn foetus carried by a woman for over 30 years. “They become a hard ball of bones, a rock,” Jesca explains. “Phonetically, it's a beautiful sounding word – hard and soft – but also, I am taken by the idea of carrying something for a long time, perhaps in secret and then giving it up. I hope I have made an album of substance.”

Despite living in Manchester for more than a decade, Jesca normally records her music back in the States. This time, however, the recording took place in Bristol alongside renowned producer John Parish – best known for his work with PJ Harvey, Aldous Harding and This is the Kit . “It was time to step out of my comfort zone, my safe place,” she says. 

“Parish was a gentle collaborator – until he killed one of my darlings! I’ve never been so brutally edited, and I wasn’t shy about expressing my discomfort at the sight of my work on the cutting room floor… In some way, I think I actually enjoyed that treatment – being stripped back to the bare basics, albeit painfully.”

Jesca will be playing at a host of festivals in the UK and Europe over the summer, while she’s set to tour the UK in October. You can also read a full interview with her in our late summer issue.

Stonechild is released on Memphis Industries on 5 July. Her UK tour dates are:

01 Oct – Leeds, Brudenell Social Club

02 Oct – Bristol, Fiddlers

03 Oct – Manchester, HOME

04 Oct – London, Barbican

05 Oct – Cambridge, Storey's Field Centre

07 Oct – Gateshead, Sage

08 Oct – Liverpool, Leaf

09 Oct – Dublin, Soundhouse

11 Oct – Glasgow, Oran Mor

12 Oct – Edinburgh, Pleasance Theatre

13 Oct – Birmingham, Hare & Hounds

31 Oct – Oxford, The Bullingdon

Victoria Rodrigues O’Donnell visits Lee Krasner: Living Colour at the Barbican in London.

The Barbican is currently showing the first European retrospective of Lee Krasner’s work in over half a century. From early self-portraits, to wartime window displays, charcoal life drawings and vast abstract paintings, the exhibition features almost 100 works spanning her lifetime, many of which are being shown in the UK for the first time. Forget the myth-making and violent splashes long-associated with Abstract Expressionism, here is an artist whose Modernist roots led to a career tenaciously experimenting with colour, shape and form.

Lee Krasner was born in 1908 to Russian parents who had emigrated to Brooklyn, New York. Like many other Eastern European immigrants at the turn of the century, Krasner’s family fled anti-Semitic violence and travelled to the United States in the hope of a better life. Although she could not pinpoint the origins of her desire to become an artist, Krasner was determined to forge an independent living from her art and had decided on doing so from a young age. In an interview, she recalled: ‘I made no economic demands on my parents so in turn they let me be… I was not pressured by them, I was free to study art.’

Krasner had places at a number of prestigious institutions, including Washington Irving High, the only school in New York at the time to teach art courses for girls, and the National Academy of Design. The development of both her self-portraits and life drawings from this period are one of the most important aspects of the exhibition. Not least because tutors often found her output mediocre or would refuse to believe she could paint something like Self-Portrait (c. 1928) at all. Perhaps the most significant influence on her was studying under Hans Hofmann during the late 1930s. Hofmann was a German artist who had known Picasso, Matisse and Georges Braque while working in Paris. As a result, Krasner was taught a Cubist framework that she both respected and resented, particularly his propensity for making suggestions or corrections directly onto a student’s work.  

The exhibition begins with Krasner’s series of ‘Little Images’, abstract works painted following her move to an area of East Hampton called Springs in 1945. These paintings aren’t quite the spontaneous, sweeping brush strokes associated with Abstract Expressionism. The application of paint feels minute, calculated and precise. The emerging patterns are reminiscent of those that Eduardo Paolozzi and Nigel Henderson would go on to make together ten years later. However, the most fascinating work in this section is Mosaic Table (1947). Consisting of mostly blues, oranges and greens, Krasner constructed the table top using coins, keys, broken glass and costume jewellery. The table sits proudly in the centre of the space – a stark difference to its origins as an old wagon wheel salvaged by Krasner during a bleak winter.

This tendency to collage or rework pre-existing creations runs throughout Krasner’s career and regarding this, she is known to have said: ‘I am not to be trusted around my old work for any length of time.’ When low and frustrated, Krasner had the habit of tearing up works – both old and unfinished – and repurposing them after a few weeks away from her studio. These new pieces, comprising of materials like torn newspaper, shreds of burlap and patches of paint, were shown to critical acclaim in 1955. Krasner would go on to do a similar series of pieces in the 1970s, this time using an old portfolio of life drawings from her time at the Hofmann school. Brightly coloured, large-scale works like Blue Level (1955) and Desert Moon (1955) have evolved into carefully composed shapes that slice across the canvas in a reinterpretation of her Cubist training.

The rest of the show feels impassioned and urgent, as if an electric current runs through the canvases. Whether it’s the enormity of her ‘Night Journeys’, painted during a bout of insomnia following the death of her husband, or the eruption of colour and gesture in her ‘Primary Series’, Krasner engulfs the viewer. Paintings like Icarus (1964) and Siren (1966) are particularly dazzling once you’ve just been looking at the restrained palette in Polar Stampede (1960).

While visitors walk around the exhibition quietly contemplating the works on display, it’s only in the final section that you begin to hear a chorus of giggles erupt among the audience. They are all sat or stood around watching an archival film montage of interviews with Krasner. At a memorial held for her, the playwright Edward Albee said that Krasner ‘looked you straight in the eye, and you dared not flinch’. Upon seeing how sharp-tongued and direct Krasner is in these film clips, one leaves knowing exactly what Albee meant.

A number of critics have praised this long overdue recognition of Krasner’s place in the art historical canon, and yet in doing so, they have continued to discuss her work in relation to other, particularly male, Abstract Expressionists. Yet, I think the exhibition captures the sheer range and depth of her career in a way that couldn’t make her stand out more from her contemporaries, male or female. Looking back on her career, Krasner summed herself up perfectly: ‘I was a woman, Jewish, a widow, a damn good painter, thank you, and a little too independent…’

Lee Krasner: Living Colour is at the Barbican until 1 September 2019.

words: Holly Williams

A comedian and actor, Doon Mackichan has worked as a stand-up and in influential TV comedies such as The Day Today, Brass Eye and Smack the Pony. More recently, she’s appeared in Toast of London, Two Doors Down and Pure, and has given acclaimed performances on stage in Twelfth Night and Jumpy. She also sings vocals in the jazz quartet Sea Crow (hence the outfit…). Her latest role is in David Mamet’s new play Bitter Wheat, alongside John Malkovich.

What can you tell me about the play?

It’s about a Hollywood mogul – people will recognise Weinstein, but it’s also any controlling, predatory man at the top of his game. It looks at how he operates – and how he falls. I’ve got the difficult task of playing his wing-woman, his PA. I have to find out who I am, to have allowed certain things to slip through the net.

Although I was lucky enough to talk to a woman who had been [Weinstein’s] PA for a few years – and a lot of the women didn’t get involved in the hook-ups. They knew he was a sleazeball, but they say they didn’t really know the extent of his predatory nature.

Do you buy that? Or do you think they were deluding themselves?

I do buy it. They knew he was lecherous, but they never thought it was rape. I have to believe those women, in my heart. They were all very bullied people; not many people stayed a very long time.

Do you think that, with #MeToo, we’re seeing practices changing in what young actresses are expected to do in auditions or on set?

I remember when it broke, feeling a massive relief. There were so many unprotected actresses, I was almost thinking about going into drama schools and saying to girls: look, you do not need to do these nude scenes, you do not need to be standing on a table with your breasts out while 40 crew are walking around.

I think women are going to be able to say ‘I’m not very comfortable’ or ‘I don’t want to do that’ now. It just feels that a door has been opened, to not be seen as the difficult one if you say something. It’s the beginning of a sea change – I hope.

Is it something you’ve had direct experience of yourself?

I’ve always said no to nudity unless it was going to be a radical lesbian feminist film! If I’m working for a kickass woman, I’ll definitely get my tits out – but not for a horrible old sleazeball. I’ve been in quite a few auditions where I’ve said ‘well is this really necessary?’ and then there’s been a rolling of the eyes. I’ve said I wouldn’t be nude and then I get on set and I’m asked to drop a towel… I was pressured, made to feel like a prude.

And I’ve tended to keep away from storylines that involve violence against women unless it’s dealt with in an incredibly careful or different way. We don’t have to keep seeing it – we’ve seen enough! It’s so exhausting, so debilitating, so bad for your self-esteem. If men saw the amount of rape we see, they’d be like ‘oh fuck this, I’m not watching Game of Thrones, I’ve had enough’.

Going back to Bitter Wheat – some people have raised their eyebrows at a #MeToo story being told by a male writer…

I think it’s really important for women to tell their story – they should be commissioned. But Mamet is Mamet and he’s written it very quickly and he’s got a play on. It’s definitely the man’s story – but it looks at why he got away with it, how he operates: buying the critics, treating the writers like shit, bullying all his staff, hitting on young actresses… It’s about control and power.

Yes, it would be great if a woman had written it. But she hasn’t. So until a woman has written a play about it, we need to celebrate that it’s a really important story that needs to be told, now. I hope it gets all the conversations going, and makes people at the top go: ‘Christ, I can’t get away with that.’

What’s the tone of the play – is it a comedy?

I’m glad I’m going to be in the room, they probably hadn’t bargained for me! Because it is all down to tone, isn’t it? There’s humour in it – but it’s humour about a man who is flailing, and losing his grip. And that can be funny. But I know there was some controversy about it being referred to as a farce. There’s nothing farcical about rape. It’s not the subject of farce. That’s not anything I would be involved in, and if I feel uncomfortable with the way the story is being told I will make myself very clear. And if I’m very uncomfortable, I won’t do it.

You auditioned with David Mamet. What is he like?

I really liked him a lot. I thought he was a real powerhouse, he had great humour. I liked his no-nonsense direction – and I thought I would be able to say what I wanted. So fingers crossed it does go down the right road.

Do you think that laughter is a good way of taking on some of the more horrific things in our society?

Well, I’ve done ‘the most offensive television programme ever made’, the [2001] Brass Eye paedophile special! After that I was blanked, I couldn’t go to [collect my children from] school for a while. But when we’re dealing with taboos, it’s all down to the tone. We agreed, Chris Morris and me, that the way paedophilia was sexualised by Fiona Bruce on Crimewatch was just unacceptable: this sexy way of talking about it with a husky voice and a raised eyebrow and lip-gloss. It was really important to skewer it.

And laughter is also a good way of going ‘god almighty, that’s awful’. But it’s a fine line, to not make it just light or ridiculous – or to be at the expense of the female.

Do you feel like the nineties was a particularly important time for comedy?

We just had our 25-year reunion for The Day Today. It made us feel very old – but what a gang. We just a happened to be put in a room and told to start improvising. We did On the Hour for the radio and then that turned into The Day Today and then that turned into Alan Partridge – it was just this ball rolling. It was more open to letting people experiment, and giving people money, then.

Do you think the fact that comedy was seen as a man’s world affected how Smack the Pony was perceived?

We’d all been feeds for male shows for years. It was great to make the straight women the funny women – to turn it on its head, everything we hated about male sketch shows. We just made our own set of rules.

Really French and Saunders were the only other female comics at the time and it was bit like ‘oh well, we won’t get anyone else.’ Same when I was on the [stand-up] circuit – they’d say ‘sorry, we’ve already got Jenny Éclair’. Sadly, it’s still pretty much the same, after 30 years.

Why do you think that is?

I don’t know, it’s terrible. Every woman I know pleads and begs me to bring Smack the Pony back, because there’s not been enough like it, to take its place. It’s still the most ridiculous battle. There are women on the circuit, they’re just not on telly.

Do you get stage fright doing a play – or has stand-up cured you of that?

Stand-up has cauterised every nerve in my body. When you’ve done that in the Tramshed in Woolwich in front of 250 squaddies, nothing will scare you.

Bitter Wheat is at the Garrick Theatre, 7 June till 14 September

Here in the Oh Comely office, we have been devouring Candice Carty-Williams’ debut novel, Queenie, darkly comic, we were with Queenie every step of the way. Here author Candice tells us about her first tattoo…

At 22, I suddenly decided that my life would be better if I got a tattoo. I knew absolutely nothing about them, so popped into the dodgy parlour round the corner from the my house that still exists and, to this day, has never had another customer but me. I walked in, was hit by the smell of weed, neither of the men who ran it looked at me and, after asking if I could have the outline of a heart on my stomach, one of them printed out one of those literal old school Microsoft Word heart templates and buzzed that onto my stomach. Now that I think about it, that parlour was potentially a front for drug dealing but I’m no snitch so refuse to comment further or give away the location.

I had to hide this tattoo from my nan, head matriarch, because I’m the first person in my family to get any tattoos. When she eventually saw it, she kissed her teeth and said, “if you were going to ruin your skin you should have gone bigger than that.” Challenge accepted. Not put off by my terrible first experience but ever-so-slightly wiser, my second tattoo was properly researched, thought about – I had a consultation and everything – and went to a legit parlour on Frith Street.

Two day later I stayed at my nan’s, hiding tattoo number two because I wanted to present it when it was fully healed, but the jig was up. I found this out when I was trying to eat my toast. “Can?” She called from upstairs. “Yes?” I answered, expecting to be asked to do one of a hundred chores she had lined up for me. “What’s this in the bed?” she shouted down. “What?” I asked as I walked up the stairs. “Show me,” she said, not looking at me, but instead looking at the black and red tattoo scabs that had peeled off in the night. “It’s nice, isn’t it?” I asked, holding out an arm. And that’s how we both almost fell down the stairs and broke our necks, as she chased me round the house – an exciting and legendary day in the Williams household.

To celebrate a break-up and my freedom, having heard about an amazing tattoo artist in Shoreditch, I went for a consultation with a picture of a castle that was maybe the size of your average post-it note and, two weeks later, left with one covering my entire thigh. The tattoo artist mentioned that most castles have names, and wondered what I’d call mine – we had a lot of time to talk, as this one took four hours. “What’s your middle name?” I asked her. “Elizabeth,” she said. “And my surname is Taylor.” Thus, all are welcome to visit Elizabeth Taylor Castle on my right thigh.

When I went to LA a few years ago, there was a tattoo parlour near the place I was staying that looked exactly like an LA tattoo parlour should look, so I basically ran inside, lifted up my shirt to show my first tattoo and said, “I think it’s time to cover this up” and, never one to go small (at my nan’s loose suggestion), had a four-hour session with a tattoo artist who also happened to be the lead singer of a rock band. It was the most American experience of my life to date. He would keep saying “tell me when it’s, like, feeling gnarly?” and said “right on” and high-fived me when he asked whose name I’d like in the new sailor banner he’d just inked on my stomach and I said “Candice”.

My current favourite tattoo is my latest one, SOUTH on my left arm. Again, probably too big. So much research went into this one; I asked a friend who knows loads about fonts what the best one to use for this tattoo would be, and he said, instantly, “Uh, how about the one designed specifically for south London street signs?” It doesn’t really get better than that, does it? Especially as I get to explain that fact to every single person who asks what it means, or to every family member who trolls me by hilariously saying “Is that in case you forget where you’re from?” as though they haven’t all heard each other say it before.

I’m planning my next tattoos as I write this. I have no idea what they’ll be yet but I can guarantee they’ll be big, they’ll be meticulously planned, and they’ll either get me chased around a house or targeted for bants in the family group chat.

Queenie is published by Trapeze and is out now.

In a brief pause on her whistle-stop book-signing tour, our book club editor Terri-Jane Dow caught up with author Samantha Harvey over a cup of tea in a bookshop basement to talk about Samantha’s new novel The Western Wind, covering story structures to how faith and secrets vie for power in the tiny 15th-century parish of Oakham.

The Western Wind, a novel told backwards, looks at faith and power in a tiny 15th-century parish. Oakham’s wealthiest resident, Thomas Newman, is seen floating in the river on Shrove Tuesday, four days after his disappearance. A Lent visit from the Dean means that Oakham’s priest, John Reve, needs to find the murderer, when there perhaps isn’t one, and needs the Dean to leave before he finds anything more disturbing going on. Samantha Harvey’s latest novel is not a who-dunnit, but a why-dunnit and, by moving the focus from what could have been a straight detective novel, the result is something far more absorbing.

Terri-Jane: What drew you to write about this 15th-century village?
Samantha: What came before anything else was an abstract idea about wanting to write about confession. I went for a walk, and the concept, and the character of John Reve, the parish’s priest, came to me, and the idea of the story going backwards. Then I had to find a time and a place for it. I wanted it to be a time where confession was the social norm, and I ended up, really against my better judgement, in the late 15th century. I wanted the village to be somewhere that was on a potential trade and pilgrim route, but couldn’t exploit that because it didn’t have a bridge. So I looked at a map and invented Oakham. I could tell you exactly where on a map it is, but it’s not there.

T: The structure of the novel was so compelling. Why did you tell the story backwards?
S: I hadn’t meant to write a reverse narrative. I felt like it was a bit gimmicky, but it had come to me so solidly that when I tried to do it the other way, it wouldn’t work. I thought that I could take the readers expectations and subvert them, and make them less interested in the what and more in the why. As a reader, I’m not that interested in the gasps or the big reveal, but the workings of the human heart and mind are endlessly complex and endlessly renewing themselves.

T: There’s a sense Oakham is within reach of progress, but just can’t get to it. Reve supports the idea of a bridge, but he still wants to stay at the centre of the village, and he can’t have both.
S: Reve wants Oakham to modernise and thrive and flourish, but not if that threatens his position of power in any way. I wanted him to be a character who behaved as most of us would behave. Medieval priests would have this enormous power and trust from their parishioners, but also have immunities. You can’t go to Hell, you probably aren’t going to even go to Purgatory. Why would you ever want to lose that status? It’s your ultimate insurance against a sorry afterlife.

T: The book describes a ritual where Reve has to stand at one end of a boat and one of his parishioners at the other end, so that he can be weighed against a ‘regular man’. Even though it’s theatre to the extent that the other man has stones in his pockets, there’s a flicker of doubt in him that he’ll pass the test.
S: It must have been a peculiar thing. He will have known, as all priests of course know, that they are just like other men; they’re flesh and blood; they’re not halfway to the angels. At the same time they must really have believed that they were the mouthpiece for God. What a strange paradoxical position to always be in. The idea of the whole thing being a theatre that you have to play along with, but you also have to believe in it as if it weren’t theatre.

T: There’s a running theme through the book of the power that the church has in the village; before Thomas Newman’s death, he’s been away travelling and come back with some strange ideas, like that maybe he doesn’t need a priest.)
S: I wanted to look at that question of grief and loss, but also to look at divine power and how that was rationalised. That entirely Catholic society of the 15th century was very complete. If you would abide by it, the church gave you everything. It was your religion, it was the safety of your soul, or your body, of your afterlife. It was your insurance and your education. If your priest was trustworthy and cared for his parish, it was quite a complete system. But if you wanted to ask questions, or bypass your priest, it didn’t work so well.

T: The visiting Dean brings a much stricter version of that faith with him. He starts out as an unlikeable figure, but by the end, you realise that he just knows about some things that shouldn’t be going on.
S: I never saw the Dean as a nasty character, but I wanted him to come across like that in the beginning. His and Reve’s character arcs form a cross, and the Dean goes up in your estimations as Reve loses some grace. That’s the way we all are: complicated and flawed. Telling the story backwards meant I could tell the story from where they ended up, and then reveal things about them. I wanted to play with the effect that time has on a character. It was also quite fun, for the first time in my writing life, to write a villainous character. All of this is from Reve’s point of view, so of course his interest is in depicting the Dean as an adversary. And then we see that the Dean has more depth to him.

T:  Reve justifies his actions as protecting Oakham, when really he’s just saving himself.
S: There’s the dual side of his character as man versus priest, but he’s also a self-centered individual and a person who has genuine compassion for his parish. Without a strong priest, a parish would be quite vulnerable. He’s caught between those two sides; for himself over a parish which is being corroded by a threat to his status. It’s not just his job; if he’s no longer needed as a priest, then does that mean he’s no longer safeguarded? Everything is at stake for him.

The Western Wind (Vintage) is out now