Look Up: Pixx interviewed

“It still feels kind of unreal, but it’s definitely happening, so...”

Hannah Rodgers laughs, sounding remarkably sanguine for someone whose debut album is dropping at only 21. It’s a sunny spring evening and the young Londoner has just finished her pasta. Two years after her Fall In EP – a release which turned heads with its sincere, dreamy psychedelia – and fresh off a steady tour schedule supporting some of the best alternative acts in the game, Pixx talks us through her upcoming LP The Age of Anxiety.

Developing the sound of that first EP, Rodgers has created an album of many colours. The psychedelic textures remain, laced with near-punkish guitar lines and her personal, emotive lyrics, but bolstered by synthy electronics and energetic percussion. It’s a harder thing to categorise – and to its credit. 

“That was one of the aims I had with the album, where I did kind of feel like everyone was trying to fit it into a genre,” she explains. “And with me I’ve never really had a specific genre in mind for myself, or ever thought that I had, like, a crazily favourite genre of music. So with the album, I think of it more like a mixtape – it’s a combination of all of these different styles.”

The album also offers a change in perspective. "[Fall In] was very much centred around my own relationships and my own emotions. Over the last few years I had more of a desire to write about things that weren’t just my own experiences, and taking a bit of a broader look at what was going on around me and focusing on that.”

Graduating from presitigous Croyden institution the BRIT School, Rodgers' new outward-looking gaze made her increasingly aware of the more worrying tendencies of our modern age. “I have this obsession with the fact that we are in an age of technology swarming over everybody,” she elaborates. “When I look at younger people now, I think, Jesus Christ, they’re growing up and the first thing that they get their hands on is an iPad.”

So we’re all doomed? “I think there’s hope!” she insists, laughing. “I don’t think it’s all bad. There are some really amazing advantages to the technology that we have; people can create music and art and movies and stuff that really are quite amazing to watch. But I’ve always taken it quite seriously in my own head, and I make sure that I always step away from it every now and then. Get back to mother nature vibes, and just actually look up. I feel like no-one’s ever looking up anymore.”

Look up, like from a screen? “Yeah,” she confirms. “We can spend our entire lives reading about things that are going [on] in other people’s worlds, in the political world and the environmental world, but really, the best way to be close and to understand these things and to have empathy for them is to actually be a part of it. It is scary when you realise that everybody’s locked away in their own little technology worlds – it can be very isolating.”

We know that Rodgers has an ecological sensibility, having seen her selling handmade upcycled merch at her gigs. “I think I’ve still got some in a box somewhere. I’ve been to shows my whole life and been like, 'Why the fuck are these people selling t-shirts for £30?' Actually – now that I’m a musician I kind of understand why!

“But I wanted to not do that­ – particularly when I didn’t have an album out. I‘m someone who buys everything second-hand – I very much believe in recycling things, and I just decided that the best way for me to get my name out there was to put the effort in and make some handmade Pixx t-shirts and stuff, which actually went down really well.” She pauses. “I should maybe get back on that...”

We remark that she appears to be growing in confidence on stage, citing the difference between her more timid show supporting East India Youth in 2015 and opening for Glass Animals in 2016. 

“It’s strange, since those shows that you’ve seen us at, we’ve now got a live drummer – which has made a huge difference for me. Before, when I went on stage I was terrified. I didn’t really ever feel that comfortable being in front of lots of people. As time’s gone on I’ve started to embrace it a bit more and realised that I do just morph into someone else on stage. It’s a really great outlet for me ­– I feel like I’ve found a lot more passion for that kind of thing.”

We ask what might have brought on this change? “It’s probably partly performing music that is a bit more upbeat! With the EP it was always quite downbeat and sad,” she laughs. “With the album it’s very much a different thing. It’s like a journey for me every time; I like the fact that I can use my stage presence to show people what the song’s meaning is.”

She adds that the addition of live drums has also helped in the song creation process. “I didn’t necessarily have a clear vision of what I was gonna be doing; I didn’t ever want to be limiting the way I was writing my music based on how I was going to transfer it into a live set; that never really stopped me from just going mental and doing whatever the fuck I felt like at the time. As time went on, suddenly realising it wasn’t easy to perform these songs, I got this drummer. And it’s a massive game-changer because I’ve managed to rebuild the whole live set. It’s nice to have a different version of the songs that we perform live now – I think people are quite often surprised with what they get when they come to a Pixx show!”

Rodgers has always been songwriting – “from a young age I was locked away in my room with a guitar, just constantly writing music” – but the biggest catalyst in her musical trajectory came in her enrolment at the BRIT School. “It’s a weird one actually, because before I was at the BRIT School I was at an all-girls convent, essentially. It was a pretty intense experience, surrounded by girls, and we had to wear brown long skirts and cream socks that look like football socks... [Then] I was suddenly surrounded by all these crazily creative people who were just bouncing off each other and just doing what they wanted to do. It’s nice at that age to suddenly realise that you can actually go out and do it, y’know?”

Since then, it’s been a wild ride, including her first European tour early in 2017. “We went on tour with Austra – she’s just fucking amazing, an amazing woman. It was really nice to be touring with another girl. We played in this amazing old theatre in Paris. It was for a festival (Les Femmes s’en Mêlent) – pretty much only female artists – which was really really good. I’d never played in Paris before, I wasn’t really expecting anyone to come, and it was actually a really great show.”

We ask if appearing at that festival is part of a conscious move to be involved with efforts combatting the industry’s systemic gender imbalance. She says it’s definitely important to her, though until touring with Austra she’d never really worked with another woman before. ("Let's Eat Grandma just did a remix of my track – I love those girls; super young, super talented, [and] just doing it for themselves, just fucking killing it!" she adds.)

“It’s a frustrating thing. I think female pop artists do have a tendency to oversexualise themselves. It’s a really disappointing and sad thing they have to do, or seem to think that they have to do, and I think it’s a bad, bad message to young girls who are growing up. They’re not teaching them to have respect for themselves. If you’re a female pop artist, you don’t have to be half naked dancing around with loads of backing dancers to be good. There are some crazy expectations that are put on female musicians.

“When I was at BRIT School actually there were no girl bands. It was all the boys who were in bands. Not many of the girls actually played instruments – lots of the girls there were just singers. Again it’s that weird thing where it’s like, why was it at that point these girls thought that they shouldn’t learn an instrument?”

The evening sun starts to fade, so we wrap up: what’s next? “I’m absolutely buzzing to get working on album two to be honest.” For all the the modern day unease informing her debut, Pixx remains a pragmatic optimist – looking up.