RECLINING on the sofa in her grand Edwardian hotel suite, Annie Clark seems immaculately composed as she recalls the first strange stirrings of her seventh album.
“I had a sense that I wanted to be pummelled by music,” she says matter-of-factly, holding Uncut’s gaze. “Who knows if I was reacting to things I’ve done in the past, or things that are around in the culture, but I wanted to be just pummelled. Shaken like a rag doll.” She pauses for a moment, maybe for effect, maybe considering her words carefully, possibly pondering Brian Eno’s maxim that art is a safe space for violent experiment, a plane you can crash then walk away from. “I really wanted to explore that feeling of digging your fingernails into your thigh,” she concludes. “You know, just so that it bleeds a little…”
She looks like she means business. At various times over the past two decades under her nom de guerre St Vincent, she has manifested in strange guises, like some renegade Timelord or Thomas Pynchon’s elusive, apocalyptic world-spirit, V. One moment Bride of Frankenstein cult leader, the next cosmetically disfigured American gothic schoolmarm. From pill-popping suburban housewife via glamazon dominatrix to louche ’70s hot mess…
Today on a drizzly spring evening in Holborn, her dark hair is neatly parted and pulled back into a simple bun. Her white blouse and long black leather coat are offset by girlish white socks and black heels. She is, however, as sweet as Texan apple pie. “Making journalists crawl was as masochistic as it was sadistic,” she says with a smile and a shake of the head, recalling her youthful attempts to “deconstruct the promotional interview” (installing interviewers in escape rooms; recording stock responses on a dictaphone). “I ended up spending 12-hour days in paint fume rooms. Nowadays I’m like, ‘Nah, don’t reinvent the wheel – let’s just have a
