Flying the nest: Interview with Wallis Bird

The beats come thick and fast, the singer whoops like a 10-year-old after a sugar overdose and the bass grooves with the kind of raw primal energy that begs to be danced to. It’s Wallis Bird, but not as we know her. Never one to stick to any particular genre, the Enniscorthy native has taken her game to a whole new playing field with her fourth album, Architect, which sees her grabbing the dancefloor with both feet. It seems she’s found her inner raver.

“I’ve always had an inner raver,” she grins. “I kinda dance until my feet fall off. It’s a style that I hadn’t gone down before and I didn’t really mean to, but I started hanging out with a lot of people who were house DJs and house musicians and I started getting into their mentality, thinking about the make-up of house music and it somehow seeped into me and started off the writing process. Then, the title Architect came to me and it all fit with houses and architecture: all these little cliché moments that tie a project together.”

She’s obviously not afraid to confound expectations, then?

“Fuck it, life’s too short,” she smiles. “I like too much music to just stick with one thing, right from when I started writing.”

Admittedly, her albums to date are all stylistically different, incorporating elements of jazz, folk with rock and straight-forward singer/songwriter fare, whatever that is. But Architect is a massive stylistic leap in a vastly different direction, like David Guetta releasing a ukulele album.

“Thanks, I think,” she muses. “It’s a different mindset. I kind of got a bit complacent with the same chords, the same rhythm patterns, stuff like that.”

It’s certainly a very physical record, which saw Bird “put down the guitar and use my body as an instrument”. It’s also no coincidence that Bird’s new style of writing happened at the same time as a change of city, from the English to the German capital. “I felt awful in London,” she recalls. “I wasn’t exercising. I wasn’t gigging much. I wasn’t writing. So mentally and physically, I was just stagnant. I had no songs written in London, so I went to Berlin with an empty slate. I started writing with a serious pulse, I started going out and searching out other rhythms and I stuck with house music.”

Rather than being daunted by the blank canvas of Berlin, Bird found it inspiring. “I had nothing written in advance so I just went in and pressed record,” she admits, “and literally, the majority of the songs on the record were splurges, which made it a very easy process, much more so than with any of the other records.”

So it was very immediate?

“Yeah,” she agrees. “I gave myself a time-scale, which I had never done before. I didn’t want to spend too much time mulling over something. I thought, ‘it has to be immediate’. Plus, I was quite busy living life. I had just moved country and it just became a holiday every single day and I decided to knuckle down, set myself a time-scale to have a master in my hand by a certain date and go for it.

“I went dancing all the time,” she recalls wistfully. “I’d work for a week, then take a week off to find something to write about. I knew I really wanted to party. I was newly single, fresh off the boat and I knew I had a lot to release.”

And what better place than Berlin?

“They are mad over there,” she grins. “It’s wonderful. It’s a real true space. The city is just covered with graffiti because everybody feels like they have the time and place. It’s kind of a poor city, so it’s really open to artists moving in and taking over more rough and bitter sides of the town. The living quality is amazing. The houses and architecture are beautiful. A regular run-down house has four-metre high ceilings, a lot of light and space. It’s very inspirational.

“The bars don’t mind if you come in and want to have a session. They never close. It’s a real night owl city. It’s super-continental. It’s right in the middle of everything. Nearly every band passes through there, so it’s just always on. It doesn’t mean to be, but it’s always on.”

So she fit right in?

“I jumped at it,” she admits. “I was living in London for six years and there’s just no community there. It’s very cold.”

By contrast, she found a sense of community in Berlin straight away, where she shares a living space with two other Irish musicians. “We wanted to get a place big enough to be a communal space to invent. We went over with incentives to just fucking make stuff happen and sure enough, we did. I’m only starting to get sleep now,” she laughs.

For what is essentially a break-up record, Architect is not a ‘sitting in the corner, wallowing in self-pity’ affair. In fact, it’s the opposite: a ‘fuck you’ statement of intent that takes the sentiment of ‘I Will Survive’, adds some house beats and glow-sticks and takes it to an all-night rave in a Berlin basement.

“There was the break-up of leaving London, break-ups of relationships, starting afresh,” she considers. “But I left with excellent ties. I tend not to leave anything go sour. So it was a case of leaving with a fine cut and moving on with a clear head. The canvas is new. I went back to my old self again, stuff I love doing: playing really crap pop music loudly, pulling down the blinds and dancing my ass off to hardcore techno, just being wild...”

It’s not just about hedonistic nights out, however. One song, the Prince-like funk of ‘I Can Be Your Man’ sees Bird examining sexuality in what is essentially a reaction to Russia’s draconian anti-gay law.

“This is a first world country treating humans like that is just absolutely disgusting. It is terrible, what is happening, and nobody should ever have to go through any pain or hurt, be it physical or mental,” she muses. “But what has come out of it is a huge sweep across the western world to ask what is happening? What is the separation between man and woman? What counts as a man and woman? What are we supposed to be emotionally? What is sexuality? It is wonderful to have these questions asked.”

She has followed the controversy here at home, as well, as Pantigate saw a more modern, liberal Ireland stand up and start to be counted.

“It’s wonderful,” she enthuses. “Ireland is reinventing itself or re-judging itself. I see so much solidarity going on. It’s putting everything into place. It’s questioning authority. It’s questioning what censorship is and how easily it’s done. It’s questioning the legality of words. I’m sorry Panti had to go through it and had to be the scapegoat for it, but somebody always has to be the martyr, really. But it’s gone worldwide.”

Much of the album beats with an unashamedly pop heart, like lead single ‘Hardly Hardly’, the glorious energy of ‘Communion’ and, particularly, the pure Europop of ‘Gloria’. Does she want to be a pop star?

“Ah sure, fuck it, why not?” she laughs. “I love pop music. That song [‘Gloria’] is a real nod to Gloria Gaynor. It’s also a nod to the orchestral craziness at the start of a pop song, these songs that empower people or make them want to get up and dance. I knew I wanted to go down the route of that ‘70s disco pop, funk, sensory overload. A lot of this record was written to make myself get up and fucking exercise, to dance, do some labour.”

Architect is released on April 11. Wallis Bird plays The Academy, Dublin (April 25); Monroe’s, Galway (26); and Half Moon, Cork (27)