Dreamweavers: Ballet School's Rosie Blair on Berlin and Bella Union

Ballet School vocalist Rosie Blair discusses the ambient pop trio's roots, how they found their spiritual home on Simon Raymonde's label and why they'll always be a work in progress

Feature by Katie Hawthorne | 11 Nov 2014

Rosie Blair, the vocalist and general mastermind behind Berlin’s avant-pop trio Ballet School, is relentless. Over the phone, her strong Northern Irish accent only emphasises the fact that she’s quick to swear and even quicker to laugh. Although she’s by all admittance completely exhausted, her steely determination is an intimidating, impressive tour de force. The three-piece, completed by guitarist Michel Collet and drummer Louis McGuire, released their first full-length album, The Dew Lasts an Hour, this September as a result of signing with famed indie label Bella Union. It follows last year's Boys Again EP, which brought Ballet School onto the international stage, introducing their 80s infused, left-field pop that’s dressed up in pastel but delivered with bite.

Bella Union, co-founded by Cocteau Twins’ Simon Raymonde and Robin Guthrie, although now run solely by Raymonde, is the definitive spiritual home of any band that conjures otherworldly, abstract music. However, Rosie is quick to resist any suggestion that this matching of minds is anything other than the culmination of a long, hard slog. “It’s been such a journey, man. I don’t know how it is for other bands, but this has been a colossal effort, a Herculean effort.”

Moving from her native Northern Ireland to Berlin in a determined bid to make music more than a ‘hobby’, she met Collet in a U-Bahn station – fittingly, they bonded over a shared love of the Cocteaus – and then tried out several local drummers before finding the perfect match in McGuire. “If you really want it, you’ve got to have laser precision,” she sighs. “You’ve got to be so fucking driven. Your life comes to a halt, it comes to a fucking halt, and everything else is just non-existent. You’re just your band. I’ve been living like that for so long.”


"I don’t know how it is for other bands, but this has been a herculean effort” – Rosie Blair


So if Ballet School come across as glossy, that’s the product of a whole lot of elbow grease. When she talks about the vision the band have for their future, Rosie’s language shifts between perfectionism and pragmatism. For the rest of the week, Ballet School will be working day and night in a new studio hired in Berlin’s trendy, converted Spittelmarkt, which she describes as an “ex-commercial, really expensive office building that’s become completely derelict. It feels a bit like being in a museum.” Ahead of an extensive US and European tour which kicks off a few days after we speak, the trio are reworking their set to include more material from Dew and “just the shit that makes it a full show.” This is no small task in itself, but Ballet School are constantly, obsessively preoccupied with smoothing the edges: “The songs can always be better, the writing can be better, the singing can be better, the set can be better…”

Thanks to Rosie’s intricate, sky-high vocal gymnastics, there’s been no shortage of comparisons to a certain Elizabeth Fraser, and she gushes that working with Raymonde “is still just not normal to me. I get almost… embarrassed? I can’t handle it, I’m just such a fan.” But Bella Union is proving to be a haven: far from feeling intimidated by the label’s incredible heritage and current roster, which includes the likes of John Grant, MONEY and The Flaming Lips amongst many, many more, Rosie gratefully enthuses that their support network is “extremely nurturing.” “It’s just wonderful to be in that environment,” she says. “You feel safe, and there’s so few times in this business when you can really feel safe. To be on a label where you really feel that, no matter what happens, ‘Simon [Raymonde] will know what to do!’ … I really, really, really need that in my life, that… pastoral care.”

It turns out that Raymonde even took on the track listing for The Dew Lasts an Hour; the trio, feeling far too close to their project, asked for his “completely objective opinion.” Rosie managed to set aside her ‘fan’ attack to overrule the label mogul just the once, though, describing that “he wanted to put a single up front, but I insisted. When we wrote [Slowdream] we were like, ‘we’ll open our album with this, set a vibe.’” And it’s true, the track sets the scene for an album that builds in pace, strength and self-assertion.

Biographies on Facebook, Twitter and Bella Union’s website situate the band as self-identified pop, with Rosie resolutely declaring “I never thought pop was a lower form of art.” Noisily passionate about her love for artists like Whitney, Mariah and “an artist we all know is about to cross over,” Grimes, she elaborates on her “own personal theory” of contemporary pop: “I just feel like it’s a free-for-all: you really can recreate pop in your own image right now. It is whatever you say it is.” Talk then turns to Miley Cyrus collaborating with The Flaming Lips, and the pin-point precision of artists like Kanye West who “cherry-pick” the talent of underground musicians, “making quite obscure references, being influenced by quite credible things.” 

Ballet School are supremely conscious of their own place within the industry: far more underground than mainstream, for now at least. Rosie questions, “if I'm not going to be the arbiter of, um, obscure but wordsy music, then what role do I have to play?” It’s unsurprising, then, that when trying to ask if Ballet School would be keen on collaborating with “pop princesses,” the question’s barely finished before she leaps in: “Yes! Yes, definitely. That would definitely be completely a number one objective. Without a fucking shadow of a doubt, number one.” She puts on a sugary, high-pitched voice, “You want songs? You can have songs. I got songs!”

Their adopted hometown of Berlin has a long-established reputation as a melting-pot, an artistic haven. Cheap rent, cheaper beer and an overwhelming number of DIY venues render it the perfect place to experiment with the weird and wonderful – as Rosie puts it, “No-one bats an eyelid at anything.” Ballet School have enjoyed a rapidly growing local fan base for several years already, assisted in part by their interaction with the underground scene. They’re a fixture in line-ups for festivals in the capital, like the recent Berlin Music Week, and regularly bounce off the work of other similarly avant-garde local artists. Rosie name-drops the spectral electronica of Better Person as a particular favourite, and then excitedly remembers that a recent Ballet School remix of another adopted Berliner, DENA has just become available on Soundcloud. “Being in Berlin just means I can really retreat into my imagination,” she concludes. But it’s not only the music scene that she finds inspiring: the band’s aesthetic is a constant work in progress that’s ever open to adaptation. She half-shyly explains her current obsession with YouTube beauty vloggers – “There’s a whole subculture going on, it has its own lexicon, its own observances and rules. I’m very outside of it, but I’m fascinated by it.”

As Rosie tells it, both their album title and Ballet School as a band name itself operate as metaphors for the loss of innocence. Connotations of freshness and grace overlay the realisation that age is accompanied by a necessary trading in of naïvety. Whether conjuring the heart-fluttering anxiety of a crush in Heartbeat Overdrive, or knowing exactly when to get down with Lux, the trio are writing from a place of sharp intent and acute self-awareness. 

“The thing that art should do is extract meaning from experience,” posits Rosie. Over the last few years she’s endured family heartbreak, having lost her mother to cancer: “It really changed me as a person. Watching someone I love go through something so horrible, and yet remain so full of love…” she says, steadily. “It was so humbling. When you’re in your early twenties, what do you know about life? Not very much, really. I just felt that I’d got given one of life’s secrets… something that you’re going to need to know. I just wanted to make music from that point, using that information, using that pearl I’d been gifted with. This is what it’s all about, so… let’s go.”  

Ballet School may sound – and look – delicate, but that pastel-shaded façade belies an iron core. They see their recent success as a challenge, a reminder to work harder, to experiment further. Rosie summarises, “it’s actually quite confrontational to be soft, and to be gentle. I don’t want to have to smash someone’s face into the wall to get respect: I’d rather just ask you.”

Ballet School play Glasgow's Broadcast on 12 Nov and Liverpool Shipping Forecast on 13 Nov On The Dew Lasts an Hour is out now on Bella Union http://www.facebook.com/balletschoolband