New Zealand singer-songwriter Flip Grater's latest album is the product of toughing it out in the French capital, she tells Lydia Jenkin
Life as a wandering minstrel seems to suit Flip Grater. Despite a couple of years living from one house-sitting stint to another, and then as a broke musician in France, as she sits in the sunshine outside an Auckland cafe, she looks chic and relaxed, dressed all in black. If it wasn't for the Kiwi accent and lively laugh, you might even mistake her for a Parisian.
And the album she's created on this sojourn has benefited from the lifestyle too. Pigalle, her fourth record, is named after the notorious Parisian district in which it was recorded. It's filled with gritty, gleaming, dark stories about all sorts of romantic characters, and musings on her choice to leap out of her comfort zone.
"Basically, a couple of years ago, I had this sense that as much as I love New Zealand, and I love how easy and safe and wonderful it is, I had this sudden fear grip me that being single in my 20s meant that I needed to be challenging myself more - that I could just become kind of stagnant and not grow, not write anything new. I just wanted to challenge myself. So I went, 'Well, if I'm going to be broke in Auckland, I might as well be broke in lots of different places,' so off I went, from one house to the next."
She puts the sentiment very eloquently in The Quit, the opening song, which was written one night between two apartment-sitting stints in Paris, as she made the decision that even after all the house sitting and travelling, she hadn't finished with her adventure.
"I was in a shitty hotel with ugly walls and the whole thing smelled like 100-year-old dust, and I just sat there and thought, 'This is great, this is what I want, this shitty city, and this shitty life, and I actually want this challenge of being somewhere that's beautiful and also difficult', so that's when I decided I wanted to stay in Paris.
"A couple of people have mistaken The Quit for a suicide song, which is worrying, but it's really not - it's just the whole thing about not being too comfortable."
The year in Paris was hard at first. She wasn't living actually in the city and often didn't have the 2 needed to catch the Metro. Her guitar got stolen, her manager and booking agent left, and even buying bread was a trial. Kind of like Down and Out In Paris, without the London bit.
"It totally was down and out, super down and out, and I'd kind of romanticised the idea of being down and out, and I thought, I might as well be somewhere broke that it's at least romantic to be down and out, but it's actually quite shit, no matter where you are," she laughs.
But it was great for her songwriting, and her year wandering from Parnell to the Wairarapa, to Argentina, Los Angeles, Italy, and France had been very creatively fruitful - to hear her tell the stories behind the songs is almost as entrancing as the music itself.
An isolated country house in northern Italy produced the inspiration for Justin Was A Junkie.
"I hadn't realised I would really need a car to go anywhere, so I was sort of stuck in the middle of nowhere. So I would just get up, walk around, walk down to the little village full of old Italian men and get a coffee. I'd walk around the vineyards in the area, walk back up to the house, write all day, maybe have an aperol spritz in the evening, drink some wine and sleep. It was quite a strange existence.
"And in that frame of mind you start thinking way back and of people you've never heard of since, and you wonder what they've done, where they are now. I was remembering back to some people I knew as a teenager in Christchurch, kind of digging through these hazy half-memories. So I wanted to tell a story about these people and these moments."
Of course it wasn't all lonely time spent stuck inside her own head - a trip to Argentina while she was dating an Argentinian actor afforded her the opportunity to experience Carnivale and learn of a custom that fascinated her enough to inspire Diggin' For The Devil.
"We were visiting these dusty old villages up north, and what they do for Carnivale is people dig all these holes in the ground, and that lets the devil out of the ground for a week. And then everyone dresses up as the devil and behaves badly. There's parades, and dancing and singing and drinking, and they drink this wine called Vino Torro, which is the bull that I'm talking about in the song - "I just want to ride that bull" is about this cheap nasty red wine. So you have this kind of debaucherous week, and then they fill all the holes in and take their masks off until the next year. And I just love that whole idea, so I wrote those lyrics on the plane when I left."
That wasn't the only song written on a plane.
Brilliant single The Smell Of Strangers takes on a whole new meaning when you find it was also nutted out in airspace.
"You know when you're in that very intimate space with a whole lot of strangers on a plane, and you realise that it's really quite bizarre, sharing a sleeping space with all these people you don't know and don't talk to. It's so weird. And then, of course, it got me thinking about prostitution and intimate acts with strangers, and I wrote the lyrics down on a piece of paper while everyone was sleeping around me."
The experience of living in Paris got better, too. She forced herself out to meet some people, found some musicians and a studio to record in, and through a little gigging, some kind loans and a good deal of crowd funding, pulled together enough to make the album.
It may have been made with a producer she didn't know and a bunch of musicians she'd only just met, but it seems she made serendipitous choices, because they're now her friends, and through the experience she also met her French boyfriend.
"It was just one of those magical things, when you take a gamble but somehow it works out," she smiles.
The brothels and guitar shops, the ghosts of Edith Piaf and Serge Gainsbourg and the close scent of Moulin Rouge, which all inhabit the streets around Pigalle, turned out to be the right recipe for Grater's songs this time round, and it seems like an album that could only have been written with a little age and experience.
"My voice certainly has four years more whiskey in it," she laughs when asked if it feels like a more aged album her last.
"I think I've always wanted to be a 50-year-old singer-songwriter somehow - I've always wanted to be Marianne Faithfull, right now.
"I'm still 20 years away probably, but I'm happy that I feel more able to write songs like that now."
Who: Flip Grater
What: Fourth album Pigalle
Where and when: Performing at Queens Bar in Dunedin on April 11, at the Wunderbar in Christchurch on April 12, at the Wine Cellar in Auckland on April 24, and at Hilltop Tavern in Banks Peninsula on April 25.
- TimeOut
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