Interview
Interview
Lucia and the Best Boys: “Music is about connecting and keeping that human element alive”
Lucia and the Best Boys' singer Lucia Fairfull opens up on how her heritage, community and friendship fuelled her new album, Picking Petals
Expressing oneself authentically through music is often the North Star for artists, despite the varying factors that frequently get in the way of that becoming a reality. That’s the reason the late, great Dolly Parton resonated so deeply amongst artists of myriad generations and music genres, including Lucia Fairfull – the magnetic singer of Lucia and the Best Boys. Speaking to Lucia over Zoom from her home in Glasgow just a day after Dolly’s passing, she was understandably in a reflective mood about the country legend.
“I remember watching a documentary some years ago where she talked about coming up with the riff or melody for ‘Jolene’ with her long nails. I thought that was fucking crazy. It really inspired my songwriting: you can do whatever you want. Nothing needs to be done in the way people expect it to be done.”
“I was also struck by how she carried herself in interviews,” Fairfull added. “She’d laugh off the way people spoke about her in such a graceful way; she was never bitter. It was almost smug, because she knew she was fabulous. She was an inspiration to everyone, musician or not. People took so much from the way she carried herself as a human being in public. She was such a star at heart. It can be difficult to be completely yourself in interviews, but she was instantly witty. You can’t fake that; it has to come from who you are.”
It’s the core sentiment of being true to herself and her heritage that Lucia ran with on her recent album, Picking Petals. Largely written in varying bothies dotted around the Scottish countryside in which she grew up and recorded in Mogwai’s Glaswegian townhouse turned Castle of Doom studio, Picking Petals sees Lucia weave the rich mythology and drama of trad music into her soaring, synth-driven baroque pop.
Balancing vulnerability with chest-beating choruses and gothic pomp, model-musician Fairfull leans fully into her witchiness, echoing the likes of Stevie Nicks, Bat For Lashes, and even fellow Scots legend Annie Lennox – with a nod to Kate Bush which she discusses.
Ahead of her UK tour in October, which opens with a homecoming show at Glasgow’s Barrowland Ballroom, Fairfull opens up about how community and friendship fuelled Picking Petals, why CHVRCHES’ Lauren Mayberry and The Last Dinner Party’s Abigail Morris were the perfect collaborators, and how her connection to the Scottish countryside shaped her creative vision.
This album feels like a real unapologetic acceptance of your heritage. Was it a conscious decision to make this a personal album?
Albums are complete reflections of where you are in life, at least for me. Burning Castles reflects that time. I don’t regret how it sounds – I’m still very proud of it. I really put myself out there and let myself explore new things, regardless of whether it was what people expected from a first album. But it was a product of its time. Before it came out, we were in lockdown and live music didn’t exist. Those songs didn’t get to evolve and flourish in a live setting, which is imperative for a band. The demos lived on computers and nowhere else between that point and making the record, so it ended up incredibly synth-y. I really enjoyed exploring that, though, and I don’t think I could have made Picking Petals without doing so.
After your first album, you learn so much about yourself as an artist and as a human. I naturally came into myself through that campaign and its tours: going out with Garbage, touring with The Last Dinner Party, speaking to Shirley Manson – such a wise woman – meeting people, having conversations and growing. I’m now 30, and releasing an album at that age feels pivotal. So this is a long way of saying that it wasn’t necessarily a conscious decision. It was simply where I was and what I was making naturally. Now that live music is back, I’m inspired by who we are as a live band and wanted that to come through in our music again, because we can do that.
You’ve just come back from a tour throughout the Highlands. How important was it for you to perform Picking Petals amongst the landscape that inspired the album?
It was really important. I’d wanted to do it for a long time, but it’s much harder to schedule, route and arrange than a regular tour. A lot of the venues and spaces are community-run, and it’s seasonal; they aren’t hosting gigs every day of the week. It felt right to celebrate the week the album came out in the place where most of it was born. Being in the Highlands was very special for me.
Music is about connecting with other people and keeping the human element alive, but it’s also personal. I love being up there. It’s where I feel most creative and most like the best version of myself. I wanted to celebrate putting the album out in those places, but also give back to the community, the people and the land. I wanted to thank that landscape and that part of Scotland for the drive, inspiration and freedom to create.
I also think it’s a shame that rural places have to miss out, or that their audiences have to spend money travelling to major cities to see artists. It’s already difficult to tour major cities. We didn’t make money on the Highland tour – though you rarely do. We broke even. It wasn’t a money-maker; we did it out of love. That was really evident once we got there. Some people had never heard of us, but were excited that something special was happening in their community. Others were grateful that, for once, they didn’t have to travel to us. We’d curated an intimate, stripped-back show for them, and people travelled from the other end of the country and even from Europe to come to those shows. Which was mind-blowing. There were so many reasons why it was worthwhile, and there were only more after we’d done it.
Why did Picking Petals feel like the right album title? I know it was largely conceived in the countryside – I can picture you writing in thistle and gorse.
There’s a beautiful thistle illustration that Ally from the band did inside the vinyl, so you’re right. The flower I’m holding on the front cover is a love lily, which I felt represented the album well. There are a couple of reasons for the title. ‘Picking Petals’ was about the third song we wrote for the album. While I was singing the vocal on the demo, I felt an energy come over me that I hadn’t experienced before in songwriting or as a musician. It felt as though it unlocked part of my voice. I felt deeply connected to the lyrics, the feeling and the emotion of the song; it felt like something I’d wanted to write for a very long time. It was also the first time I’d gone away with my band to write. That wasn’t because we don’t love writing together; it’s just how our system had naturally worked. But in that moment I unlocked this energy, and it set the tone for writing the rest of the album: this is where I’m at and this is what I want to write.
‘Picking Petals’ could almost be the title of any song on the album. There’s a real sense of maturing, as naturally happens when you grow with your music, but the phrase also has youthfulness. For some people this may be a coming-of-age album; for me it isn’t, though that feeling is rooted in the lyrics. There are many different angles of romance in them. The songwriting can have a dark edge, but there’s hope in the instrumentation too. ‘Picking Petals’ summed all of that up under one umbrella, which is why it became the title.
Yves Rothman produced the new record, who has a track record for drawing out dramatic, gothic performances from the artists he worked with. Were there any musical touchpoints you discussed before entering the studio together, either sonically or in terms of mood?
This is the first time I can say I’ve made an album that wasn’t necessarily inspired by other music. It was more inspired by community and place. I deeply love many musicians, and they’ve paved the way for me; they’ll always be in the back of my mind as a North Star. But I wasn’t thinking, “I want to make something like that.” I love traditional Scottish music, but there wasn’t one particular artist in mind.
When Yves and I first went in together, it was for a writing session, and I think we realised that we come from the same place when it comes to writing music. At the same time, we both add our own fuel to the fire. The first thing I did with Yves was write ‘Back Inside My Heart’, the opening song on Picking Petals. We come from the same place, but we bring different perspectives: he’s based in LA and I’m based in Scotland. Bringing that together was electric almost instantly. He got it, but he could also add to it. He is very visual, like me, and likes to be part of building the world as the album is created in the studio. It isn’t just about how something sounds; it’s also, ‘I see this, I see that.’ That visual side is imperative to my creative process, so it was great to work with someone who understood it.
The drum intro to ‘You Look Like Somebody Loves You’ sounds like a nod to Kate Bush’s ‘Hounds Of Love’.
It’s hilarious that you clocked that. When I say there wasn’t a specific musical reference point, I mean we weren’t making playlists or listening to references while writing. But as a woman in music, I’m naturally inspired by those massive icons who shaped music for us. Their voices are powerful, they went their own way and didn’t care about the noise around them: Stevie Nicks, Kate Bush, and Bat For Lashes as a more recent artist who went in her own direction while making iconic pop songs.
We did have the conversation: ‘Is doing that ripping Kate Bush off?’ Eight years ago, I might have thought, ‘I can’t do that. It’s cringe, and people will come for me.’ I see it differently now. Everybody will hear it and know it’s Kate Bush. You can’t rip Kate Bush off, because everybody knows it’s Kate Bush – it’s a nod to her. At one point we asked whether we needed to change the drum part, and I thought that would change the whole song for me. I love that it reminds me of the moment in ‘Hounds Of Love’: “It’s in the trees. It’s coming.” It’s such an iconic moment. It’s cool to hear a song and instantly connect it to an artist who drew inspiration from similar places.
Kate Bush was so whimsical. Her music has always felt tied to land and nature to me. Perhaps it wasn’t as visual for her as it is for me, but so many of her lyrics feel connected to landscape, and that’s how I perceive her. I also think of the way she carried herself as a character and persona. I didn’t want to remove the nod because I don’t see it as copycatting; it’s an expression of love.
You mentioned female music icons who naturally enter your psyche. You’ve spoken about Lauren Mayberry really understanding the sentiment behind ‘Lonely Girl’. How important has she been to your musical evolution?
Whenever I think about that, I go back to being 16 and working at Forever 21. No disrespect to anyone who works in retail – I commend you – but it definitely wasn’t where I was meant to be. I had just left school, decided to study music at college, which lasted about three weeks, and needed to do something. The shop had the same playlist every day. I would wait for ‘The Mother We Share’ to come on because it was the one song I didn’t mind hearing over and over. Lauren was always so bold about singing with her accent, and I hadn’t heard many Scottish women doing that. I didn’t do it at the beginning because it wasn’t natural to me. It came over time, and voices change. But I could tell she was Scottish. Then I researched CHVRCHES and started listening to them. Seeing the frontwoman of a band achieve such huge success with incredible songs mattered to me. They were artists of my generation who tastefully combined eighties music and modern pop, which I thought was really cool.
At a time when I wasn’t sure a young Scottish person could succeed in music, that meant a lot. Early in my career, people always asked whether I lived in London, when I was moving there, or told me I needed to move there for anyone to see me. That’s what ‘Lonely Girl’ is about too. Lauren on that song felt like the glue; it made sense to have her on it. I can’t imagine her not being on the song. Even before she was, Eve and I had the same light-bulb moment in the studio: “Lauren Mayberry should be on this song.”
There’s a bit of a reunion of sorts with Abigail Morris on ‘Big Romance’. What’s the backstory with the song and why was it the right time to release it on this record?
I wrote ‘Big Romance’ before Burning Castles, when I was about 22 or 23. It was meant to be on Burning Castles; we spent time in the studio with it and everyone thought it would be one of the big singles, but we couldn’t make it sound right. I didn’t feel satisfied or happy with it. It just didn’t sit properly with me. I wasn’t going to put it out for the sake of it. It previously sounded like a massive pop banger, the production was entirely different. But it didn’t feel right, so I took space from it. If you work on something too much, your feelings can become skewed and jaded. I still cared about the song and wanted it to see the light of day.
During that time, Abi would always hint, “I love that song so much. You need to put it out; you need to finish it.” Before she was in The Last Dinner Party, she played keys in our band. She loved singing it with me, and I loved playing it with her. She added an element of fun: whenever I turned around, she’d be at the microphone as if we were doing karaoke. It was hilarious. It gave her a sense of freedom – not necessarily because of the song’s sentiment, but because of the feeling it carried. Eventually I finished it, partly because she pushed me. Then she asked whether she could sing on it, and I thought: “Why hadn’t I thought of that? Of course – that’s a great idea.” She’s helped drive me to continue in so many ways.
We give each other lots of advice. She’s a safe space for me in this industry, as a musician and as a friend; we have an understanding of each other that is special, and we both feel that way. Lauren and Abi appearing on these songs was the first time I’d properly collaborated with other artists on my own tracks, other than remixes. It was really special. Those two women are so prominent in this album. Their presence matters to me and makes complete sense. Everyone probably has people in their musical career they can turn to for anything. Because this album is so based around love, it adds another personal element: these are people I love and who have been there for me. They are part of why I could make these songs, so it made sense to have them on the album.
Your UK tour in October opens with a hallowed show at Glasgow’s Barrowland Ballroom. You’ve played there before with the Bay City Rollers, but this will be your first headline show there. How does that feel as a hometown show?
It’s fucking wild – honestly, fucking wild. The Barrowlands is such a moment, not just for Scottish artists. Any British or UK-based artist knows how special it is. It’s one of the most iconic venues. The way it’s preserved inside makes it feel as if you’re stepping back in time; it has a timelessness. It’s sentimental for me because I was born and bred here, and I saw some of my first gigs there. My parents ballroom-danced in that room. One of my first big shows as a singer was supporting the Bay City Rollers there. It’s a full-circle moment.
Having the second album out, celebrating it at the Barrowlands and being able to play these songs live in that space feels rare and special. I get to share it with the people who make it possible for me to do this. We’ve never been more excited for a run of headline shows. It’s a reflection of how far we’ve come and how incredible this album feels, and a way to thank everyone who has supported us through such a long journey. It’s going to be class.
