Could 2011 be the year the music world embraces the chunky sax solos and terrifying troll noises of Planningtorock?
It's 2007 and Janine Rostron is performing in the unlikely venue of the lobby of the British Library in London. A one-woman project known as Planningtorock, she zig-zags across stage in a pair of giant trainers and a retina-frying shirt, half-rapping, half-wailing a song called Bolton Wanderer in which she describes her journey from her childhood home in the north of England to Berlin. The crowd, hovering on spiral staircases and propped between wall art, seem as confused as they are exhilarated.
Four years on, she remains confusing and exhilarating. After a bold and buoyant debut album, 2006's Have It All, last year she collaborated with Swedish art-pop duo the Knife on Tomorrow, In a Year, an opera about the life of Charles Darwin. A populist she is not. But with her new album W (on which she plays almost every instrument), Rostron could be about to break through to a wider audience. If Fever Ray's icy brilliance tops critics' polls, and the music world can take the warped goth of Zola Jesus to its bosom, then Planningtorock's own take on contorted electronica fits naturally into 2011's sonic landscape. Just call her Bolton's answer to Grace Jones.
Still, the first thing Rostron says is that she has no idea what to call her music. She has a think. "My favourite instrument is this Yamaha keyboard. And I use a lot of the staccato strings." She stops and ponders further. "There's a lot of sax on this album, which sounds so synthetic on a Yamaha. It's really aggressive and chunky. I love it." At this point, the twinkly mood music playing in the cafe is enlivened by a cheesy sax solo. "See!" says Rostron, delighted. "Everything sounds better with a sax solo!"
If Have It All was a journey of self-discovery, then her second album is about what the 31-year-old found upon reaching her destination. W (the title is deliberately meaningless) is the sound of a woman who has utter conviction in her art, something in particularly poor supply in pop at the moment. "Is it?" she asks. Well, doesn't she get depressed by the likes of Jessie J being shoved in our faces? "Who?" You know, the one who looks like Madonna, Rihanna and the Pussycat Dolls rolled into one. She wrote that Miley Cyrus song, Party in the USA. "Who's Miley Cyrus?" asks Roston. She's not joking, either. As a child, her mother took her to see Stockhausen, and her first musical memory is hearing the sound of strings on a classical record: "I was so moved, and I had no idea what was making me feel these things."
Rostron's school days were troubled. "My sister was autistic," she says, "so I spent a lot of my time getting into scraps with kids who picked on her." At 14, she told her parents she hated school and didn't want to go back, to which they agreed. Already a keen violinist, Rostron turned the house into a makeshift studio and spent the rest of her teenage years messing around with reel-to-reel recordings. At 18, she went to art school in Sheffield, and in 2000 gravitated towards Berlin, where she has lived ever since. "I never knew how liberating it could be to be a foreigner," she says. "Suddenly, everything you think is important is not important any more because you're in a different culture."
In early Planningtorock videos, Rostron is often obscured by gigantic headgear resembling a horse's skull. For this album, she wears a prosthetic nose, which gives her an uncompromising, gladiatorial look. Between the severe aesthetic and the propensity for pitching down her vocals so that she sounds like a terrifying troll, you might accuse Rostron of taking herself too seriously ? but you would be wrong.
"I just went into a toy shop in Berlin and bought some putty. I was in hysterics when I put it on!" However, there's a serious intent behind the look. She quotes a statistic about the dearth of female songwriters in the music business. "Women tend to be the face of everything but they have no control, no input. If you think about a man, you immediately think, 'What does he do? What is he thinking?' With women, it's just, 'What does she look like?'"
Though it makes an artistic and political point, the obscuring of Rostron's voice and face could well prove a barrier between her music and the mainstream. Yet its quality deserves to rival that made by any other pop star ? even if Rostron couldn't care less.
? W is released on 16 May by DFA.
Jennifer Garner Poppy Montgomery Evangeline Lilly Lisa Marie Keira Knightley
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