One To Watch: Freya Beer, music's new glam-goth poet
I first wanted to be a country music star,' says Freya Beer, which is something of a surprise given her Louise Brooks via Morticia Addams look. 'My parents played Dolly Parton and Johnny Cash and that's where my love for music began. But then I was bought Horses by Patti Smith in my early teens and that changed everything… music and poetry.'
Smith makes more sense as an influence than Dolly Parton for this rising star musician and poet, who is sitting backstage at the London Palladium ready to support John Cooper Clarke. The poems she reads that night on a huge stage to a pretty blokey crowd are personal, vulnerable stories about womanhood and each one feels like a little victory. On record, her persona becomes much louder, her songs melodic-alternative rock of the Garbage or Joan Jett variety. And while her heroes remain poetic outlaws like Dylan Thomas, the aim is to hit the charts with her music.
She describes it as having a 'smoky kind of mood', and her new single Cry Baby certainly has that 1950s B-movie glamour to it. 'I really like when you listen to Lana Del Rey's music, you're transported into her world because she's created this whole aesthetic. For Cry Baby I was really inspired by David Lynch's film Wild at Heart.'
Beer was born in Ealing but grew up in Dorset, and wrote songs alongside her poetry. When she was a student she interviewed the aforementioned Clarke in Salisbury — 'just after the Novichok poisonings, it was very dead and eerie' — his manager listened to her demos and she recorded her first single, Dear Sweet Rosie. A move from Dorset back to Ealing followed, where she found a new music scene and pulled a band together.
Despite her growing poetry and music following, she also finds the time to do her own show on Islington Radio, called Goth Disco. Recently she presented an episode from a bird hide and has interviewed Chris Packham about getting people into nature for the good of their mental health. Which doesn't sound very goth. 'I wouldn't say I'm a goth,' she insists. 'But maybe I'm giving a new perspective on it. I do like 'goth disco' as a term.'
Indeed, any labels being thrown her way aren't really getting to her. As she heads off further into the creation of her own world, she says outside noise becomes irrelevant: 'No matter what you do in your career, there's always going to be someone or something which will try to stop you pursuing your dreams. I think accepting that I can't please everyone is really important.'
Freya Beer's new single Cry Baby is out now and she is currently on tour, playing The Shacklewell Arms on July 11, dice.fm
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