Ladyhawke Is Back with Wild New Album

Pip Brown, better known as Ladyhawke, ARIA-winning maker of synth-pop hits such as Paris is Burning and My Delirium, is back with a new album. Wild Things was created in Los Angeles and is out on 21 March. Brown talks to the Sydney Morning Herald’s chief music writer Bernard Zuel in California.

For someone whose second album was about emotional more than physical extremes – calling it Anxiety made it clear she wasn’t hiding anything – and who withdrew from contact and confrontation in part because of Asperger syndrome, it wasn’t just a matter of wishing depression would loosen its grip, Zuel writes.

“It was a real conscious effort for me: a year and a half ago I said I have to change my life otherwise I’m going to make the same record,” Masterton-born Brown, 36, says. “So I stopped drinking, got really healthy, got in a really stable environment. I think living in LA is really good for me as well.”

Now that’s not something you hear often. Not entirely unfairly described as a centre of shallow lives and grasping ambition, Los Angeles does have sun, but it has plenty of shadows as well.

“It’s a place to hit rock bottom but then really come up,” Brown says. “It wasn’t really why I moved here; I moved here because it was exactly halfway between Europe and New Zealand and I wasn’t ready to come home, but I didn’t want to live in England any more. But there were all these adult decisions and as soon as I changed all that stuff, that’s when I wrote my album. It came really easily.”

Wild Things is released in Australia on 3 June.

Original article by Bernard Zuel, The Sydney Morning Herald, March 11, 2016.