The New Cue #373 April 15: English Teacher's Lily Fontaine
The New Cue #373 April 15: English Teacher's Lily Fontaine
"If you’re finding things cynical in life then you’ve got something to respond to."
Good morning,
Welcome to your weekly free edition of The New Cue, officially recognised by The Federation Of Rating Days as the only good thing about Mondays. We keep it on our mantelpiece. Yes, that’s right, the three of us live together, Men Behaving Music Journalist-y. Today we’ve got a chat with English Teacher’s Lily Fontaine as the singer and guitarist tells us about her band’s excellent debut record and we help her overcome the disappointment of the band doing so well that she had to turn her back on the idea of becoming a music journalist. No room at the inn anyway, Lily, you’re better off!
Before we get to the chat, here’s a reminder that in May we’re hosting the launch for Simon Goddard’s new book BOWIE ODYSSEY 74 at the world famous Social, in London. Tickets are available here and below is a fancy poster with all the essential details:
We’ll see you on Friday, don’t forget to tell your friends about this great Monday remedy you’ve discovered…
Enjoy the edition,
Ted, Niall and Chris
Start The Week With… Lily Fontaine
Back when English Teacher’s Lily Fontaine spoke to Niall at the beginning of March, the singer and guitarist was still fretting about what the reaction to the group’s debut album would be like. She needn’t have worried. In the time running up to its release last week, This Could Be Texas has received some of the most ecstatic reviews of the year. Deservedly so – it’s a brilliantly inventive album fizzing with ideas but never feels overthought, where intricate art-rock gives way to soulful ballads and unhurried grooves. I’ve loved the band (hello, this is Niall, sorry for talking about myself in the third person at the beginning of this paragraph) ever since hearing the original version of R&B back in 2021 and each release since has taken the Leeds quartet in subtle new directions. It’s culminated in This Could Be Texas, a special debut album. Let’s get stuck into it with Lily…
Hello Lily, how’s it going?
I’m OK, thank you, yeah, not too bad.
We’re about a month out from the release of your excellent debut. Where’s your head at right now?
It’s weird that people are now hearing it. It’s quite surreal. It’s been a long time coming. I go through waves of dreading it and being excited.
What’s there to dread?!
Judgement! If it isn’t received well, that would be sad. But that’s just art, isn’t it? That’s just music.
I don’t think you’ve got any need to worry, it’s going to be received very well. Tell me about the process of making it.
In terms of writing it, the writing process started maybe five years ago because some of the songs were some of the first songs that I wrote back when I was at university. Where my head was back then and where my head’s at now is so completely different. It’s strange. I do wonder if you can tell which songs are from then and from now. When we were writing as a group with the newer songs and recording it, I think we were quite intimidated by the idea of doing a full-length album. It was a bit of pressure and I wouldn’t say that the songs came together easily, especially because we all had different ideas about what we wanted and we were all a bit all over the place with where we were living so it was kind of stressful, but that made it just more of a proud thing to create.
What’s the oldest song and what’s the newest song and what’s the difference in the way you approached them?
I don’t know if I wrote The World’s Biggest Paving Slab or Sideboob first but those two were the oldest songs because I wrote them for my uni course and that was basically just me in my bedroom with Logic and a guitar or a keyboard and just doing it myself. I think the newest song was The Best Tears Of Your Life and that was completely different. That was all of us in the room, writing it together. That song, me and Doug sat down and composed the basics of it together and then we took it to the rest of the band and fleshed it out. And then Marta Salogni [producer] in the studio added her take on it. She really influenced the song. Writing it wasn’t even finished until we left the studio. So yeah, it’s wildly different composition processes for those two tracks.
How had you changed lyrically?
At the start, I was definitely writing about different things, because a lot of what I was writing about was stuff that I was feeling then. That was very much nostalgia about home because I’d just left where I grew up in Colne and moved to Leeds. Those themes still leak in but I don’t talk about home in a very direct sense anymore, I’ve got other things going on that I write about now. I really like some of the lyrics on the older stuff. I definitely prefer the lyrics on Sideboob to the lyrics on The Best Tears Of Your Life, so maybe I’m getting worse!
Haha! What are the main lyrical themes running right the way through?
It’s feeling in-between, so not having a home, be it literally or be it racially or in terms of sexuality, or in terms of art style. I think sonically and lyrically, I’ve realised that a lot of the songs are about not really feeling a sense of comfort, not really having a home in terms of decision-making and in terms of the different areas of life. I think it does bleed into the sonics as well.
R&B seems like it’ll be the emblem of early-years English Teacher, in that it was your first single and then you revisited it with a new beefed-up version for the album.
It’s a weird one. I was so unsure about redoing it. But yeah, I definitely see that as very early days English Teacher. I don’t know if I relate sonically to it that much anymore but I’m really grateful for it. It did a lot for us as a band.
What are the main things you’ve learned in the couple of years since more and more people have been talking about the band?
I feel like I’ve changed so much and I feel like I’ve learned so much about the industry. I’ve become incredibly cynical. My confidence onstage has been a massive thing. I feel like I’ve learned how to be a frontperson in these years. I was performing with the band before we got signed or before we put R&B out, around Leeds. At that point, I was still in a position of feeling a bit shy on stage and a bit uncomfortable whereas I feel like I’ve learned how to be me as a frontperson.
On becoming cynical, what’s been the most surprising thing to you about the industry?
I feel like there’s a lot of things that people don’t talk about, like the whole way that everything works and releases happen and stuff. It’s quite closed off, the way that money moves and things like that. I think there’s a massive lack of investment in musicians - no musicians I know have any money, people who are doing really well. That really surprised me. I know everyone always says like, ‘Oh, if you’re a musician, you’re not going to earn money’ but I didn’t realise that you can be signed to a major label and be relatively successful - not me, I’m not relatively successful, although maybe I am, I don’t know! - but I didn’t know that you could be signed to a major label and be earning less than minimum wage. That’s the thing that’s made me quite cynical. I just don’t think it should be that way.
Cynicism is a great springboard anyway, always a good starting place.
Yeah, because it inspires you to actually try and make change. And also as a writer, it gives you things to talk about, at least. If you’re finding things cynical in life then you’ve got something to respond to.
What’s the most ridiculous thing expected of a band in 2024?
I’ll tell you what’s ridiculous and this isn’t us anymore but starting out when you’re a support band and you get asked to play a show for 20 to 50 quid. That’s ridiculous. That’s the most ridiculous thing ever. But right now, I feel like I’m so lucky, I get things like a rider, which should be normal but I feel grateful for that. Starting out and you got paid petrol or a taxi but you’ve got to pay for all the little bits that things cost, hiring stuff, whatever, and then you just get like 20 quid. That’s not fair.
I feel like English Teacher are in a good place to judge where the grassroots scene is at. It’s been a very old school rise – a few singles out on indie labels, live shows, a major label deal, it’s felt like a slow-moving, organic thing…
I like that you’ve said that…. that’s how it’s felt to me. Personally, I’ve been a musician for 10 years and then as a band, we started in 2018 under a different name, so it’s felt to me like we’ve been doing this for ages and ages. It literally has been through the grassroots scene. We’re not just saying that for show or because we’re ambassadors for Independent Venue Week or any shit. The whole reason why we recorded R&B is because a music service in Leeds told us to apply for some funding that enabled us to record it and playing the local venues is how I practiced being a frontperson and how the band started to get known in Leeds, getting onto a support show in Leeds at Headrow House and then the promoter at Brudenell heard through word of mouth that we were doing that and was like, ‘Do you want to play on this show?’. It’s been very by the book, and I also never expected to get signed either - you expect to get to a certain point and then it all just kind of dies off and you get a normal job.
Talking of which, the success of the band has robbed you of the career that everyone secretly wants, which is to be a music journalist.
Haha, how did you know that?!
I found some of your articles when I was doing my research for this chat. What was your interviewing style like?
I was heavy on the research. I liked to have more of a conversation rather than question, let them answer, question, let them answer. I was more feeding off what they were saying. But I didn’t train in journalism or anything so I don’t know if that was a particularly effective style but that’s just what I did.
That’s what I’ve always done and it’s fired me to middling status.
I really enjoyed it. Talk about ultimatums, there was this point just before the pandemic where I was working for a really small publishers in my hometown, making the free magazine that you get in the hairdressers and stuff. I was interning for free one day a week and loved it and she offered me to be the editor of one of their magazines, but I was also considering moving back to Leeds to work on the band. I was like, ‘What do I do? Do I go down the path of fully throwing myself into becoming a journalist or do the band?’. I chose the band. So I could have been on the other side of this!
I think you made the right choice but we’ll always welcome you back into the fold.
I’d love to, I love writing so much. And I do miss it. I got to do a piece for DIY recently and that was really nice. If you ever need anything, I’d love to!
I think you’ll have your hands full for a while. Thanks for your time Lily!
Thank you, see you later!
ND