Eight Questions with Holiday Sidewinder

PHOTO BY THOM KERR

Holiday Sidewinder is back and in a big way with the first three singles ‘Escape & Retreat’, ‘The Last Resort’ and most recently ‘Ripe’ from her upcoming album The Last Resort. Creating her own island universe, Holiday brings us all on a summer holiday with this new sound in a way that certainly could pull our Northern Hemisphere readers out of their winter blues. Holiday tells us about her new album, new sound, tour and an autobiographical script! 

Pleaser: Can you tell me a little bit about the new track ‘Ripe’? What was the inspiration? (It makes me feel like I’m on a Euro summer trip) 

Holiday: The inspiration was actually a “vine-ripened watermelon” on a menu in Euro summer! A friend of mine told me the difference between a vine-ripened watermelon (juicier, more flavourful) and a watermelon just grown on a vine and picked off before it’s fully ripened. I thought it was a good metaphor for the dating pool and it made me laugh. Usually, if something makes me laugh, I put it in a song. 

P: What can we expect from this new era? (Yacht Pop is the perfect description!) 

H: Deep, dark, stormy waters, in a humid, beautiful and powerful paradise of song! I wanted the album to be like the party scene in Call Me By Your Name. I want to be able to play the record in resorts all over the world. 

P: You said that ‘The Last Resort’ is the most personal song you’ve written, what was the experience of writing and recording this track?

H: I don’t know if I can talk about what was happening for me the week I wrote that song, which is why I put it into song really. Unimaginable heartache. I love turning darkness into lightness, and blanketing sad lyrics with happy melodies, blending reality with fantasy. It was the beginning of this escapism world of the island resort that I wrote the rest of the record around and having that fantasy to pour myself into during a crazy time was the silver lining to a dark cloud, that music always is for me. I wrote it on the floor of my friend Ben’s studio in London. I was temporarily living in a house where all the furniture was covered in plastic. I knew it was special the second we finished it. 

P: I love that you did your own artwork for the singles/album cover, how did you come up with this concept?

H: I’d already been referencing all these 80s and 90s surf brand graphics, like Mambo, Gecko, Hot Tuna, Gotcha etc…lots of fluid colourful hand drawn branding, and then I came across a book on Bali Party Flyers in the 00s when I was in Bali, and one of hand drawn fonts on the flyers just clicked for me. I found it therapeutic to draw freely, and doing the artwork motivated me to put the music out. It makes it unique.

P: How do you think your sound has changed since ‘Face of God’?

H: Face of God was never really my sound because it was a collaborative record with Nick Littlemore, so it was more its own stand-alone thing we created together and just released under my name. The Last Resort is an evolution of Forever or Whatever, retaining some of the 80s influence, but deeper lyrics, braver sounds and more me, more complex. Exactly what a sophomore should be. More calypso. More breeze. Some of the mythical elements of Face of God have leaked into this record too. 

P: You’ve been on some incredible tours, what is your favourite thing about touring? Do you have a favourite story from tour?

H: I’m on tour again right now, and it can really be a rollercoaster. You go into survival mode, a rolling stone. My favourite thing is that your day (and this huge group effort of all these people; crew, venues and audiences) revolves around this one moment of the day where you're in a flow state. Just pure electrifying living in the moment. I have too many stories!! Too many years on the road! There will be a book. Just last night I got food poisoning and was puking on the bus and ended up in ER in Leeds (the waiting room full of drunken punch up victims) and the bus had to go on to Sheffield without me. It’s drama. 

P: Were there any outside influences for this album? Books, films, music, art? 

H: I had this strange thing for the last few years where I could only listen to reggae music, I made a playlist that was on repeat called ‘Sitting in Limbo’ (below). An album called Glorious Fool and another called Well Kept Secret by John Martyn were big influences. Then I was living in Thailand and Cyprus during the pandemic when these holiday resort towns were abandoned, ghost towns. The clubs boarded up, hotels literally crumbling apart, only locals left under these oppressive weird times in these beautiful joyous places usually besieged by tourists. That contrast really inspired me. 

P: Reader’s favourite question: If you could write the soundtrack to any film, which would it be?

H: The autobiographical script I’ll write one day!! I’ve been writing my own film with these albums for years, I think a film needs to be written to the soundtrack! But I imagine it over Tequila Sunrise or Postcards from The Edge or something like that.