Releasing An Album From Lockdown
Katie Harkin
Over the last few years I have been writing a solo album, my first. I worked on it in fits and starts, in between touring and collaborating with other bands. This record comes out on the 24th of April into a very different world than the one that gestated it.
When I first started working on these songs, I lived in the Peak District, the UK’s oldest national park. Not far from my cottage was the village of Eyam, made famous during the bubonic plague. In 1665, after receiving a box of cloth from London containing fleas from plague-infected rats, the villagers quarantined themselves to slow the spread of the disease. Over two thirds of the villagers perished. Their sacrifice protected surrounding communities of the North from sharing the same fate. The adjective “self-quarantined” was first used in 1878 to describe their actions. The drones on this record were directly inspired by the howling moors that loom over the villages of the Peaks, though I couldn’t have imagined while I stretched out those sounds in my ‘home studio’ (box room), the resonance that Eyam’s story would have now, as my album is released.
When the pandemic was declared I was on tour, opening for Torres. It was my second tour in a row, or third, depending on how you look at it. It was an encore lap of Europe, the first round having been with Sleater-Kinney performing double duty - playing with them and opening with my own band. Gauging the seriousness of the unfolding crisis while operating with the ‘normal’ levels of tour exhaustion was a difficult combo to handle. We were all doing our best to monitor official advice, communicating with friends also on tour and also having doubts, our industry still operating, led by governments in denial. Looking back, the escalation is clear. On the Sleater-Kinney tour, I winced as house engineers spoke into my mic without asking (I’ve long brought my own for hygiene reasons, pre-pandemic). By the London Torres show I was only touching elbows at the merch table. By Denmark half the presale ticket holders didn’t show up. By Berlin show #2 I was booking emergency flights.
Katie napping in the dressing room, Hamburg. Photo by Erin Manning.
Danish ferry bathroom sign. Every day was a familiar warning in a different language.
In Berlin, Mackenzie and her band had gone for dinner while I soundchecked. I checked my phone and saw a text from my friend Zia saying that the WHO had officially declared a pandemic. We had been playing the board game Pandemic together this winter, but that joke wasn’t funny anymore so I didn’t make it. I quit the tour when Mackenzie got back from eating, but it was irrelevant; Trump’s announcement of a travel ban a few hours later cancelled everything on our behalf. After much scrambling, we all got home safe. Tour losses totalled, unsold merch returned, album release shows cancelled, travel insurance denied (“COVID-19 was a known event since late January 2020”), but I’m lucky; I’m okay, and there are countless people working to keep me and all of us safe.
In the absence of government leadership, I was struck by the compassion and clear comprehension of Gareth Southgate, the England football (soccer) manager. “Now is clearly not the moment for us to take centre stage,” he wrote back in March. “The heroes will be the men and women who continue working tirelessly in our hospitals and medical centres to look after our friends and families.”
As I promote the release of my album, and contemplate what’s appropriate to keep doing as an artist against the backdrop of global mourning on a colossal scale, I keep circling back to his words.
Last year I co-founded the creative community Hand Mirror with my partner Kate Hewett, through which we are releasing my album. We had grand plans for the release, including queer parties in independent venues, important spaces that are now threatened. Throughout my life, the support from my music community has been invaluable. Now, people have lost the ability to go to those places where they feel safe to be themselves. It’s a challenging situation with no definite end in sight, and it is likely to signal an end to many spaces which have previously provided solace, particularly to those belonging to marginalised communities. There are many ways to support community spaces and I encourage you to do so if you are able. By supporting the infrastructure that provides vital income for musicians, your help will directly benefit the artists you follow. As a starting point, my friend Rod Thomas (aka Bright Light Bright Light) - himself a tireless advocate for his community - has started fundraising for LGBTQ+ venues under threat. You can follow and support at his site.
As we look to the future of what our lives as creatives will be like during this crisis, we are seeing immense pressure to continue to create - a damaging and unreasonable expectation which my friend Ian Wheeler wrote about in detail for The New York Times. In short, though, even if we all somehow write amazing songs in lockdown, our income is challenged if there are no spaces left in which to perform them in whenever restrictions are lifted.
In spite of this, music’s ability to foster mutually buoyant connections is something I am taking comfort in, and am determined to work to support. For me and Kate, music and culture provided a kind of scaffolding for our emerging identities as young people, and continue to do so as we move forwards in our lives. Starting Hand Mirror was a statement of intent; if we can build the scaffolding to support ourselves, then we can offer that structure to others. While our plan for events surrounding the touring of this record have changed, the current crisis has certainly solidified our desire to work to that intent.
Of course, this has meant looking at alternative ways to make our hopes for Hand Mirror a viable possibility. For us, one of our first steps has been to launch a subscription service with Patreon. Through this, we hope to be able to continue to grow, and to connect to those interested in being part of what we're building, even as the parameters for performing, writing and creating new culture continue to shift. Our plan remains to turn Hand Mirror into a space for self reflection which can in turn support the work of others. Please get in touch if you’d like to be involved in any way via www.handmirror.online.
Katie Harkin is an English musician and songwriter originally from Leeds. She was a founding member/songwriter of Sky Larkin, a touring member and collaborator of Courtney Barnett, Sleater-Kinney, Waxahatchee, Kurt Vile, and Wild Beasts, and she releases her debut solo album in April 2020.
