Many filmmakers’ richest relationships are with the musicians who score their work. The haunting, otherworldly atmosphere of Werner Herzog’s early features owes a good deal to the eerie, almost mystic soundscapes of the German band Popol Vuh. No film by French auteur Claire Denis would be complete without the brooding tristesse and hushed tactility of Nottingham-formed Tindersticks and their charismatic frontman Stuart Staples. Darren Aronofsky’s itchy, propulsive films—Pi, Requiem for a Dream, Black Swan—get their power from Clint Mansell’s insectile sound designs.
Fewer filmmakers themselves make music. An exception was David Lynch who, in the two decades before his death this January, recorded more LPs than he directed movies. He once said that seeing the Beatles play live as a teenager made him aware that music was “fantastical, almost like fire and water and air” and he became mesmerised by the sight of “girls shuddering, crying, screaming their heart out”. That insight into music’s uncanny power is evident in almost every scene in Blue Velvet or Lost Highway. It’s something he tried to capture, with varying success, on albums such as Crazy Clown Times (2011) and The Big Dream (2013), both of which are dense stews of blunted blues, haunted rockabilly and interstate gothic.
Closer to home, British exceptions include Mike Figgis who started out as a trumpeter before going on to make Internal Affairs and Leaving Las Vegas. Then there’s Carol Morley (Dreams of a Life, Typist Artist Pirate King) who used to be in Mancunian band TOT, and Sam Taylor-Johnson whose cover of The Passions’ “I’m in Love with a German Film Star” was produced by Pet Shop Boys. In the present moment, Peter Strickland (Berberian Sound Studio) runs the antic Peripheral Conserve label and records as part of The Sonic Catering Band. Turner Prize-shortlisted Luke Fowler is a part of the avant-disco Glasgow collective AMOR.
Then there’s Sally Potter. She has long been one of this country’s most restless and fearless independent directors. Her features include The Gold Diggers (1983), starring Julie Christie, which doubles as an ambitious exploration of women’s place in 20th-century cinema and as a study of money in itself. She’s best known for Orlando (1992), a sharp, galloping adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s novel that gave Tilda Swinton the role of her life. Because Potter’s career is so long and so protean—she’s also made an impact as a choreographer, performance artist and writer—it’s easy to overlook her life in music.
In the 1970s and early 1980s, Potter was part of London’s fertile fringes—an unruly metropolis of jazzbos, experimental filmmakers, disobedient dancers, feminists and squatters, political refuseniks. They were living at the edges of their skin, making art in a recessionary world. Alongside hallowed performers such as Maggie Nicols, Lindsay Cooper and Irène Schweizer, Potter sang and played alto saxophone at hundreds of events across Europe as part of the wildly adventurous Feminist Improvising Group. She sang in The Marx Brothers, a trio she formed with Cooper and Georgina Born. The rousing soundtrack to Orlando was one that she herself wrote in collaboration with David Motion.
Still, it took until 2023 for Potter to release her first solo LP. Pink Bikini is a journey through time, after Aldermaston and before Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, to her adolescence. She looks back, more in diaristic curiosity than in rage, alive to her teenage awakenings. “I’m a Ban the Bomb girl,” she sings. Memories: of reading Camus and Sartre, of a teacher telling her to wear a skirt so that she can look pretty, of studying LP sleeves where “the women seem to hover like ghosts around their men”. Melodically, the songs carry traces of troubadour folk, of Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan; lyrically they’re as sharp and self-scrutinising as modern memoirs by Viv Albertine and Tracey Thorn.
Filmmakers are often drawn to music because there are fewer people they need to work with. It’s easier to be direct. That’s very much the case with Potter’s newly released Anatomy. It’s a suite of songs about how to stand tall when, all over the planet, nature is being degraded. “Coming Home” melds the personal and the political. (“I do not have a daughter, I do not have a son… but I’ve always known that you were there at the edge of the field,” she sings about a felled tree.) Potter’s diction is just so precise, with wisps of smoky theatricality that recall Marianne Faithfull’s Weimar-themed Twentieth Century Blues. The album closes with “The Fall”, a rejection of passivity or cynicism, a call to arms. “You must do what you must do / And if not—then who?” It’s a question that may well be her life motto.
