“When I first listened to Nick Cave, it was definitely not the music that I would usually listen to,” she explains. Nell admits that she’d never listened to any of Cave’s music before Coyne made the first suggestion, but they were soon going back and forth with song suggestions, with ‘The Ship Song’ in particular capturing Nell’s attention early on.
It was like, ‘Woah, is that actually me singing? How did this happen?!’” “Wayne said, ‘I really like this song by this artist Nick Cave, it’s called ‘Into My Arms’, do you want to try it?’ So I learned it and recorded it and sent it with the raw vocal down to Wayne and a couple of weeks later, he sent it back and he had completely put a twist on it and it sounded so cool. Both sides were determined not to let the moment pass entirely, though, and the final concept was eventually settled on last summer. The original plan for Nell to travel to the Lips’ home studio in Oklahoma City to record a set of her original compositions was scuppered by Covid. I feel like it’s easier for me to understand as a younger person and to deal with it.” “He gets excited to be hanging out with Wayne. “My dad can’t wrap his head around it, he’s definitely mind-blown,” she says. By the time Nell moved with her parents to Canada at the age of five from her native Leeds, she could already have been considered a Lips fan – thanks to her dad’s encouragement. A fan of The Flaming Lips since his teenage years, he has been playing his daughter the band’s music on road trips from early on in her life, with Nell naming ‘The Soft Bulletin’ as one of her earliest memories. If this is all a little strange for her, then one can only imagine how surreal the experience is for Nell’s father, Jude. I feel like I’ve got sort of used to it, but when I stand back and try to take it all in, it’s like, ‘OK… what?’” “If I sit down and think about it, it’s definitely mad,” Nell now admits. “He said he loved my voice,” Nell remembers, and before long, plans were drawn up for her to spend studio time with the band.
#THE FLAMING LIPS GIRL IN AMBER TRIAL#
Through their correspondences, Coyne learned of Nell’s own musical creativity and encouraged her to send over a handful of Flaming Lips covers, including ‘Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots’ and ‘She Don’t Use Jelly’, as a trial run for a possible project together. I just love it.”Įven more remarkable, then, that at the time of her first interaction with Coyne, she had only very recently begun playing guitar and writing her first songs. One person who happens to agree is Cave himself, who wrote on his site: “Nell shows a remarkable understanding of, a sense of dispassion that is both beautiful and chilling. The teenager’s delicate, mysterious vocal performances demonstrate a knack for storytelling that far belies her years – let alone her experience level. The record features nine covers of Nick Cave songs sung by Nell and backed by the band’s elegant, understated arrangements. It was the start of an extraordinary string of events that now culminates in Where the Viaduct Looms – a full-blown collaborative album between the two parties, out now on Bella Union. “We thought it would be one of his agents’ numbers or something, but it was his actual phone number.” After a brief chat, she wrote him a letter and was surprised to receive a swift reply along with a phone number and note requesting that they stay in touch. “I couldn’t believe it.” Evidently, Nell’s exuberance left an impression on Coyne.
“He came over to us and said, ‘I recognise you because of your costume!’” Nell recalls. As the band’s frontman Wayne Coyne took to the stage for the soundcheck this particular night, however, the girl in the parrot costume happened to catch his eye.
Usually, she’d find her way down to the front row and sing every word. This wasn’t Nell’s first time watching The Flaming Lips: she had been attending their shows with her parents regularly since the age of ten and had worn this particular parrot costume once or twice before. As the 14-year-old prepared to go to see The Flaming Lips, one of her favourite bands, play in Calgary, she’d just wanted to be part of the regular explosion of colour and mayhem that the Oklahoma band bring to every performance.
Nell Smith could never have known how important picking out a parrot costume would turn out to be. The teenager reflects on the remarkable turn of events that led her to record an album remotely with the iconic rock bad during the pandemic.
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