Ditch the filters, sound and visual, and grab the bottle of bleach for the start of a drastic reinvention. That’s part of process to burying Beth Jeans Houghton and birthing Du Blonde. Like her music, she is raw and real, making an unusual figure and bold second beginning in an industry that likes to manufacture female artists down to the nail varnish brands they promote.
Welcome Back to Milk makes the Du Blonde debut a dazed infused trip into Cali-punk before cruising into West Coast Psych and pulling into the garage.
If we start to deconstruct Beth, what can I find and how fucked up the whole process could become?
Oh My God… I am very dark. I think everyone has really disgusting sick thoughts all the time.
Tell me more, on what level?
Like super dark, but society makes everyone feels like they shouldn’t have them, so they never tell anyone what they are thinking.
The other day, I was in the bathroom and I had this really awful thought, and I was like, “Aw, that’s terrible, I am such a horrible person” and the next second my last tampon was in the toilette, “instant karma”.
Your reaction is that it’s something disgusting and dark, not funny and normal. What do you think provokes that, is there a trigger?
I usually think that things are funny enough. I have a best friend called Rosie, and from the moment we met I knew I was going to love her forever. The first time when I came to her house we were eating steak in our underwear in her backyard, and I hadn’t finished and she started squeezing ingrown pubic hair. And I was, like, “I love you”; I wished that everyone was that free.
I like your fur, on the Welcome Back to Milk cover. What was the whole idea behind it in terms of aesthetics?
It was a last minute decision.
Fuck Brazilian, let’s be hairy!
Yeah, before that shoot I had been growing my pubic hair, just to see what it would be like and then just before that shoot I’m like “Fuck it, I’m shaving that off”, not because I thought that I should but I prefer not having pubic hair, cause I started stinking more. Then I was like, “Oh fuck, I should have just left it on!”. I had this fur coat and I was like, what if we can just make just a merkin out of that? It’s funny; it can take you so long deciding on the cover artwork but this just happened.
I chose not to Photoshop out any of my stretch marks, bruises or anything. I had some and they were like, “yeah it’s nice, but don’t you want to touch it up?” And I’m like, “Excuse me?! It’s my stretch marks. Fuck you”.
Everything is such radiant nowadays; it’s really about reworking the concept of beauty. It’s like I don’t mind having like scars. It’s more interesting.
I think that in terms of deconstruction, the past two years I’ve got to a point where I had so many people trying to analyze me, in terms of what I say and what I look like. The past six months just have been, like, “OK, who am I?” I totally forgot who I was. It’s such an unhappy place to be when you monitor yourself. It’s like, I am not a bad person, I haven’t done anything wrong, so I shouldn’t feel bad. So why do I feel bad now?
People tell me what not to say and how to project myself as a girl, and I just thought, “I don’t want it”, you know, like, being told not to mention feminism or anything, then you gonna have people thinking that you’re an annoying feminist or whatever it is. I don’t care, I would rather die having presented myself and what I believe in, than to have couple more people like my music because I didn’t say something that offended them. Why would I offend someone? You know that’s their issue not mine.
First of all I don’t think that “feminism” is a bad word.
I know! I was just with this woman the other day and she is, like, “You know I am not gonna say that I am feminist.” I just thought, “Why aren’t you? Don’t you want to have equal rights?”
I was reading an interview and they were talking about how they were feminist and how all of these young girls are doing wrong by showing their skin or trying, like if they are selling sex. It’s like you don’t know what people’s intentions are, to me the album cover is hilarious, I thought it was funny. In the music video, you can see my boobs while I dance around, I was not thinking behind that, it just happened that my shirt was opened at that time that I danced. And people online said “You have the body of an eight-year-old boy” bla-bla-bla. I know! And I am totally fine with that.
It’s like being less a woman if you don’t have boobs or whatever?
Exactly, I just think that feminism is about doing what you want to do and anything that you’re comfortable with. If you want to sleep around, that’s fine, make your own choices. Just because Miley Cyrus wants to roll around in her underwear, doesn’t mean that all of these millions of mothers can say that she is a bad influence, like their children who are making wrong decisions. They have to be teaching their own children to make their own decisions. It’s not a bad person’s obligation to protect them the way you want them to; it is your obligation to make the right decisions. When I see Miley Cyrus I don’t think that “Aw, she is, like, baring her body”. I think, “Oh, that girl is having so much fun!”
Carrying on with your album cover, what caught my attention from the beginning was a certain kind of nihilism present in your face, in your facial expression. It’s very libidinous, I think it’s very sexy and at same place it’s paradoxical.
I think, for example the sandwich picture, I like that because it was just shot while I was eating the sandwich randomly, unplanned. It was ugliest I looked within all the pictures and just what I wanted. If you can project the ugliest side of yourself and put it out in the world, it’s, like, you can’t do any worse.
Your album title “Welcome Back to Milk”, is strong and quite ambiguous, like very opened to interpretation. For you personally I suppose it means more like rebirth?
No. It’s just something that my friend said, and I liked it. I like to have names for records that don’t apply to anything in the album because it’s too stressing for me to sum up a record in a name. At the time, I worked in a café in Newcastle and the guy who played bass on the record also worked there. I had been constipated for a week, nothing at all worked and he was, like, “Aren’t you lactose intolerant? I’ll make you a latte”. So he made a latte and wrote on it “Welcome back to milk”.
Personally I was thinking more about a mother with the milk reference. Regarding the album, I know that Jim Sclavunos produced it and this was another fact that I was, like, “Yeah, I fucking love this girl!” How influential was Jim on the whole process on your rebirth, and on your revaluation as an artist?
I was at that point which is, like, five or six producers before that and just having trials. I wanted to sound like a live record, like, I don’t want any synth or to adjust the guitar. I wanted to be simple and I don’t want anything on it that I can’t play live.
I was referencing all of these bands I listen to and the producers said, like, “Oh, I don’t know that band” and I would say, like, “I don’t want any auto tune or any effect on anything”. Then I would go in and record, and the next day I have the track back they auto-tuned my vocals to make it sound feminine. Basically it was their idea of what I should sound like. It’s just so frustrating. I got to the point, because I’ve already recorded the first version of this record in LA and I just trashed it. I was so over everything, thinking that I need a job in office…
My last chance basically was Jim and I met up with him: we had a great conversation about all of my references and it was, just really refreshing, because I was waiting for someone who already knew what I wanted to do.
So in the certain way he helped you to bury Beth?
Definitely, I think the whole process of making the record was exhausting. By the end of it I did not have any options, but just to be my complete true self. I want to make people want to move. The drums he came up with in “If You’re Legal” was definitely very inspiring.
Another surprise I discovered on your album was Samuel T. Herring. How did that happened? It was unexpected to hear and at the same time, it works so well.
In 2011 I saw him play in Newcastle, it just blew me away. Seeing him play live is just insane; it was just as powerful like as going to church. Two years later I was in LA and my producer said “what else do you want to record?” And I said “There is this guy and I would like to sing with”. And he said, “OK, we’ll get in touch”. I’d already spent ages trying… I am really good at stalking people, but we don’t have any friends in common… That night, this is so weird, he started following me on twitter and I was, like, “What the fuck?”
We had a month to plan, so we decided that he will fly to LA from Baltimore, and pick me up at my house to drive to the desert. We never met before. I like the idea of living my life like an American road trip movie. He flew over, the day before we met, I was on phone to my mum, like, “Mamma, what if he’s going to be a murderer, it’s in the middle of the desert, and my phone does not even work out here”. But he came and all went on so well, we did like a road trip of the west coast and then he came back to the studio and in one take he just made it up, on spot.
What do you think about the phrase “There is no such thing as importance”.
I would not agree because I think that there are a lot of things that are important to me. I think that I realize the importance of importance.
In a certain way it’s “use the importance to achieve the transparency”
It’s important to me to know what’s important to me so that I could continue to live.
Interview by Anna Barr & Andriy Zozulya Davidov
Photos by Andriy Zozulya Davidov at Alba Opera Hotel in Paris
