{"id":185389,"date":"2025-10-02T16:31:07","date_gmt":"2025-10-02T16:31:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/185389\/"},"modified":"2025-10-02T16:31:07","modified_gmt":"2025-10-02T16:31:07","slug":"imogen-heap-were-making-a-horrendous-job-of-existing-maybe-ai-is-the-next-stage-of-evolution-imogen-heap","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/185389\/","title":{"rendered":"Imogen Heap: \u2018We\u2019re making a horrendous job of existing. Maybe AI is the next stage of evolution\u2019 | Imogen Heap"},"content":{"rendered":"

Social media has repopularised your song Headlock, but how did it feel 20 years ago when you had to create, advertise and market the Speak For Yourself album almost entirely solo? Samgams
Back then if you were lucky you got into NME or i-D magazine. The only real coverage I got was in the techie music mags, but then Hide and Seek was in The OC, Headlock got on the radio and I started getting recognition. If only we could have had TikTok and all this free promotion 20 years ago \u2026 but if I\u2019d received then the kind of attention I get now, I might have made different life choices, so I wouldn\u2019t have changed anything.<\/p>\n

Did you really remortgage your flat to finance Speak For Yourself? AD2023
I spent four years making an album in [the electronic duo] Frou Frou on Island Records, but it never recouped so I never saw a penny. Making another album with that label would have felt like taking your best dress back to the dry cleaners after they burned it. After I got out of that deal, no bank would lend me any money. Then I realised that my two-bedroom flat in Waterloo I\u2019d bought for \u00a3120,000 was worth a hundred grand more a year later. I remortgaged it to make the album and never looked back. Funnily enough, after all the attention on TikTok recently I\u2019ve just received my first royalties from Frou Frou after 25 years.<\/p>\n

More than 20 years ago, you recorded and toured with Jeff Beck<\/a>. How did the collaboration come about? Ben1976
I met Jeff when I was 19 at a songwriting camp in [the Police manager] Miles Copeland\u2019s castle in the Dordogne. I was much younger than everybody else and socially awkward so I got pretty drunk. I was sitting outside playing guitar very badly to myself and Jeff said: \u201cLet me show you some shapes.\u201d I said: \u201cWow, you\u2019re good!\u201d Later that night I ended up drunkenly driving a golf caddy around the estate and crashing into Miles\u2019s mum\u2019s prized terracotta pots. A week later I got a message from my manager asking: \u201cDid you meet Jeff Beck?\u201d He told me he was this really famous, legendary guitarist \u2013 I had no idea! \u2013 who wanted me to sing on his record. I sang his gorgeous Nadia as best I could and did some shows with him. He was a sweet man and I loved him so much. A lot of people from that generation are just so grateful to have been able to do what they loved all those years, and their egos are very small in comparison to the amount of fame they had.<\/p>\n

\u2018If only we could have had TikTok and all this free promotion 20 years ago\u2019 \u2026 Imogen Heap, London, 2006. Photograph: Nigel R Barklie\/Shutterstock<\/p>\n

The Listening Chair is a unique, autobiographical song, intended to update [with an added minute] every seven years. How hard was it to distill a seven-year period into one minute? Coopertapes
I don\u2019t know if I did it very effectively, but I sat in a physical listening chair and asked audiences: \u201cWhat\u2019s the song that you feel still needs to be written?\u201d There were hundreds and hundreds of different answers, but all relating to their ages. For anyone aged 0-7 it was single word answers like \u201ccat\u201d or \u201cpiano\u201d, from 7-14 it was fun, 14-21 was about wanting to be themselves and 28-35 \u201cI\u2019m in the wrong job and that maybe I shouldn\u2019t be with my partner.\u201d I never got around to 35-42 because my sister died in my 42nd year and I just couldn\u2019t do it, but I\u2019m about to release the final piece, a 13-minute fiesta called I Am, about who I am now. The Listening Chair is all true. The line \u201cWonderbra thrown around the German classroom \u2026 I\u2019ll never live it down\u201d is about the time my best friend \u2013 who wasn\u2019t then \u2013 took my stupid padded bra out of my drawer and threw it through the German classroom window. Then everyone threw it around. I was mortified.<\/p>\n

How did you get the idea for The Happy Song? It reliably cheers my one-year-old whenever I put it on, so thank you. Madi22
The baby milk company Cow & Gate wanted to create a piece of music that would make babies happier, so they put me in a room with scientists, psychologists and 50 babies. I iterated various bits of music depending on their reactions. My two-year-old daughter Scout started some of the melodies. We\u2019d taken her to the Transport Museum so that\u2019s where \u201cbing bing on the bicycle, beep beep in the car\u201d comes from. The sound at the beginning is her laughing at my friend\u2019s cat. Kids love The Happy Song, but it calms stressed-out parents, too.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Were you really a rebel at school and if so what were you rebelling against? k4ren123
I feel awful now for some of the things I did. The last straw came when I told the matron to F-off and they expelled me, but they still needed me to be the jewel in the crown for the end-of-term concert, so I ended up living in the headmistress\u2019s house and she was really kind to me. I just found boarding school insanely boring. I was recently diagnosed with ADHD and autism, which might explain why I\u2019ve always wanted to shake it up and do new things.<\/p>\n

How many hair colours have you had? toniaaa
Probably more recently, actually, all kinds of green and stuff. When I was younger I had issues around my body, so like I\u2019d wear leg warmers to make my legs not look so skinny or wear over-the-top costumes with feathers. For the longest time I\u2019d back comb my hair into a huge bush because I felt my head was too small. It\u2019s only in the past six years I\u2019ve realised I actually like my hair \u2013 I just needed to stick some layers in it.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s been 11 years since your last proper album. Will we ever get a new one? Paula485
Well, I did the Harry Potter album [The Music of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child \u2013 in Four Contemporary Suites], and a couple of years ago I made the music to an Audible podcast called Climate of Change with my zoologist\/film-maker friend Dan O\u2019Neill, who gave me a bunch of sounds like insects croaking underground, which we turned into a double album. I just got bored of the song structure, but now I\u2019m really excited about freestyling and making up lyrics in the moment. I\u2019ve spent thousands of hours caged up in the studio and I\u2019ve missed a lot of life. There will be a record shortly which will be the final piece of that old world but I\u2019m more excited about creating music in real time.<\/p>\n

\u2018I\u2019ve spent thousands of hours caged up in the studio and I\u2019ve missed a lot of life\u2019 \u2026 Heap plays in Los Angeles, March 2025. Photograph: Rolling Stone\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

In 2014, Taylor Swift invited fans to her Rhode Island home to hear her new album 1989 while she plied them with cookies. It seemed a very Imogen Heap<\/a> thing to do. Had you discussed audience engagement when you collaborated on the closing track, Clean? McScootikins
No. I think, like me, she just appreciates the reactions of strangers. I\u2019m constantly dragging people to the studio going: \u201cCan I play this?\u201d It\u2019s touching to see if something you\u2019ve just finished resonates with others. I\u2019ve had lots of fans round to events at my house and I\u2019m sure her fans are as nice as mine.<\/p>\n

Last year, the Guardian published a piece about your ambition to use AI to enhance your live performances. Fans expressed concerns. Is it still ongoing? trev_trev<\/p>\n

A hundred percent. When people think of AI they maybe think of this conscious brain making all the music while I\u2019m sitting there being a puppet. I see it as a collaboration. Say I\u2019m in a park and there\u2019s dog sounds and a bus going by. AI might identify the key or some natural rhythm that\u2019s happening and potentially shape the music, which will help me have more time to be human. At the moment, with what\u2019s going on in the States and the Middle East, we\u2019re making such a horrendous job of existing, so maybe AI is like the next stage of evolution to help us make sense of everything. It\u2019s not the devil. I\u2019m still gonna make music and it\u2019s gonna be great.<\/p>\n

Michael Caine famously said of his role in Jaws: The Revenge, \u201cI have never seen the film, but by all accounts it was terrible. However, I have seen the house it built, and it\u2019s terrific.\u201d Is that how you feel about Jason Derulo sampling Hide and Seek on the multimillion selling Whatcha Say? McScootikins
I\u2019m not possessive over my tracks and I love it when people give them a new lease of life. I wouldn\u2019t put that song on to listen to but I don\u2019t find it offensive and it helped pay for my mortgage. I\u2019ve had strange successes \u2026 I\u2019ve never had a direct hit, but I\u2019ve had tentacles into hits. My music gets played in all kinds of places and I feel so lucky because I can still walk down the street unrecognised, having a great time.<\/p>\n

The 20th anniversary remastered vinyl reissue of Speak For Yourself is released 17 October on Megaphonic Records<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Social media has repopularised your song Headlock, but how did it feel 20 years ago when you had…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":185390,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[49,48,75,341],"class_list":["post-185389","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-entertainment","tag-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185389","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=185389"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185389\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/185390"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=185389"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=185389"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=185389"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}