Listen
to George Pringle
George Pringle calls herself a diseuse, a French word that the dictionary
defines as “a woman who is a skilled and usually professional performer of
monologues”. Pringle is certainly a performer of monologues — her two
records to date, February’s Poor EP, Poor EP Without a Name, and her new
single, LCD I Love You But You’re Bringing Me Down, feature the 23-year-old
Londoner delivering a succession of wry, arch, humorous or deliberately
mundane observations about modern life in a dispassionate drawl. (The latter
is a play on a song title from the most recent album by LCD Soundsystem, who
Pringle believes have “gone all pop”.) But skilled and professional she is
not, as she is happy to admit. And, since her emergence earlier this year,
that is an opinion shared by a sizeable section of those who have heard her
music and/or seen her live.
She is, then, a divisive figure: to her fans, her rudimentary recordings —
made using the home-studio software GarageBand — are an intriguing and
ironic response to the way that most pop music is prepared and polished for
the marketplace, and to the social-networking, constantly self-documenting
world we now live in. To her detractors, Pringle is just a posh girl
“playing the part of a real troublemaker”, but lacking either the talent or
the lyrical acuity to create anything profound. Message-boarders and
bloggers, the people Pringle (who counts herself as one) believes she is
commenting on, have been brutal in their assessments. “Self-centred
narcissism,” raged one. “Utterly repellent.” The musician’s penchant for
provocation doesn’t help: remarks such as “We need synthetic melancholia
right now” and “I’m so sick of folky singers” throwing further fat on the
fire.
Pringle accepts that such statements are bound to cause trouble, but doesn’t
think this excuses her critics’ attacks. “There have been a couple of people
online who have created false profiles to harass me,” she says. “It’s weird
that people can get that irritated before you’ve even got a proper record
out. It’s not like I’m being forced down their throats.” In any case,
producing heated reactions was, she says, rather the point. “Initially, I
did want to make it something that was really challenging to listen to —
like, why would you ever want to hear this? At the start, it was meant to be
mainly provocative.”
Pringle says she is getting used to the flak, both online and at gigs. On the
subject of the former, she is characteristically crisp and resolute: “People
were going, ‘Oh, the production’s so bad,’ but that was intentional. I
wanted it to sound circular, like nothing was happening. That was meant to
be a comment on my generation, that we just sit behind computers, being
boring. And we really are: we can’t be bothered to make anything happen. We
communicate more than ever, but about nothing. Everyone is constantly
blogging, blogging, blogging. I really wanted to comment on that in my
music.” She has come to relish the opposition. “It’s the only thing that
gives me an element of power,” she says. “They’re slagging you off, but at
the end of the day you’re doing it, and they’re not. They haven’t got the
guts to do it.”
Her live shows, the early ones especially, proved equally fractious. “I’ve had
so many bad experiences. Like, ‘Why has this person got a laptop? Why isn’t
she singing?’ And you can curse yourself for having breasts. Remarks like,
‘You bitch, get ’em out’ — I’ve had a few of those. But I’m getting better
at it, I’m into my Boadicea phase. It’s horrible, because I’ve had to harden
up.”
Before studying art at university, Pringle went to boarding school, a fact
that snipers have added to their lists (alongside “pretty and posh”, as she
puts it), but a period the musician feels was the making of her, in ways
both good and bad. She was, she says, “a fat kid at a school where there
were a lot of problems with anorexia, so it was a bit of a nightmare”. On
the other hand, the 24/7, life-as-school-playground mentality she acquired
there has given her sufficient grit to stick to her artistic path. And the
discipline and routine have both aided her approach to her degree and, now,
her music, and given her something to fight against. “I always had that
regimented thing. I’ve still got it. So to do something artistic that’s
quite masochistic is incredibly liberating.” By masochistic, she means the
method by which she launched herself as a musician, self-releasing her first
songs free, online. “I’ve put myself in the biggest playground in the world.
Why the f*** would I do that?”
On Carte Postale, a song on her first EP, Pringle runs, listlessly, through a
series of reflections about her life and those of her contemporaries that
are alternately throwaway, daft, sad and bleak, flitting between these with
an ADD-like rapidity that nails, lethally, the short attention spans of the
internet age. To criticise Pringle’s work, as some do, as amateurish
songwriting seems perverse. In what way could a piece of music containing
the following lines possibly be described as a song? “I became the perfect
party apprentice, with a PhD in sitting on kitchen counters and drawing my
cheeks in and shooting you looks that I don’t even mean. Hips that grind to
scratchy indie hits and shoes that stick to nightclub floors . . . Well, you
couldn’t understand why I can’t. You’ve never been up at 4am with the fear.
You’ve never laid on your bedroom floor half-blind and you wouldn’t love the
girl that wakes up perspiring beer.”
It makes much more sense viewed as the next step on from her degree — in other
words, as conceptual art. The limited-edition EP came hand-wrapped in
specially designed artwork, tied with a ribbon. It was never intended for
the charts. That aspect of what Pringle creates, a virtue to begin with, is
now, she believes, causing her difficulties. Record labels are sniffing
around, but may, she speculates, be hesitating because “I think maybe they
don’t know how to market it”. Her cussedness sounds like it could be a
barrier, too. “I’ve kind of felt, ‘Why do I have to play those games?’ I put
out my first single myself. A lot of record companies want you to bend, to
be something else. Because I started my career negating everything, from
song structure to the way records are put out, why should I change now? But,
realistically, I’ll have to, because I need some money. I’m a bit of a
spoilt brat, though. I want to do everything my way.
“You think, ‘People are writing about me, but I’m broke.’ And it’s worse if
you’ve got a posh voice — people assume you can’t be broke. But I’m not
going to let that get in the way. Basically, I need to find a way to shit
gold.”
Assuming the bullion fails to materialise, Pringle will have to continue
putting out records cheaply, taking her laptop on the road and releasing
music bleached, musically, of emotion, but lyrically absolutely alive with
it. Pretty and posh she may be,but she’s also sharp, complicated, ambitious
and savvy, producing work that is so far beyond the average tunnel-vision
indie,it's almost a genre of its own. Her next tour visits libraries, where
this notably literate artist will perform surrounded by books. With luck,
she will also be surrounded by some fans, and the nonbelievers will stay at
home. She has high hopes for it, after some miserable toilet-circuit treks
in the past. “I won’t be in a Travelodge,” she guffaws, “weeping into my
whisky.” Which sounds, I realise, like a line from one of her . . . I was
going to write “songs”. Pringle’s achievement, and her problem, is that
they’re a little more complex than that.
LCD I Love You But You’re Bringing Me Down is out now on Trouble. Pringle’s
library tour with Dan le Sac vs Scroobius Pip begins on Friday in Walsall
It rests its head on your shoulders and whispers in your ear
