Charlie Austen, songwriter #8

Charlie Austen is a one-woman band  playing carefully crafted original songs on the folk-soul-rock spectrum and supporter of fellow musicians. Joyful, with groovy tunes and a very entertaining presence on stage, she is a radical as well as a personal, thoughtful songwriter. She shares an example of her lyrics with Jude Montague. Charlie is based in Hastings and is performing at The Pig, Hastings, on Friday 15 November.

Four Tiny Frames

‘It was inspired by a magazine article describing how photo booths (invented, or at least made available to the public, from around 1927) became significant in the gay community as the first place many couples could safely have a photo taken of themselves. The piece was accompanied by pictures of 2 men kissing in a photo booth and describing the act as being “quietly radical”. In this country at least, it was illegal to be homosexual until 1967, and to take a photo you would have needed somebody with photography equipment and somebody to develop film.

‘The simple act of documenting your relationship with the person you love would therefore have carried a significant risk for most couples until photo booths became available. I found this very moving and noted down some details, along with a possible song title ‘four little boxes’.

‘Later that year I was in Manchester for a songwriting retreat with some friends and I brought this concept up as a potential idea to be worked on. We wrote the first verse, pre-chorus and chorus together. One collaborator in particular, Tanja Jaeger, with whom I have worked on several things, insisted that we work hard to distil the emotional essence into the chorus with personal details and use the sensory elements of the photo booth experience, familiar to so many, to draw the listener in from the start of the song.

‘I think this is a great example of how collaborative songwriting can work to bring the best out of a concept. I used to write songs alone, but have found that collaborating with the right people can really help to bring new perspective and elevate a song, as well as making the writing experience more playful and fun.

‘It may be useful to note at this point that I myself am gay. Section 28 (the banning of books from schools containing portrayals of homosexuality) was in action until after I left school and I am still discovering the effects that this lack of representation had on me personally, along with several generations of others. There has been some progress on LGBTQ+ rights in recent years, but we still have a long way to go. For example, a few more countries have legalised marriage for homosexual people, but this brings the total number to around 40, roughly 25% of the countries in the world, whilst there are still 60+ countries where homosexuality is illegal, including several where it is punishable by death. There is also now draft legislation from the UK government to ban teaching about gender identity in schools, and in Italy, the country my wife comes from, the right-wing government have been removing non-biological lesbian mothers from their children’s birth certificates.

‘I had left Manchester with this half-finished song that I sort-of liked, but wasn’t entirely happy with, and then abandoned the concept for a while out of frustration. Later, with some of the more recent developments mentioned above, plus the repealing of Roe v. Wade in the USA, I was struck by reminders that progress does not always move forward. Homosexual and genderqueer people have always existed throughout history and there have been periods of greater tolerance, but these have often been undermined by new agendas, sometimes resulting in almost complete erasure.

‘All this propelled me to finish the song. The second verse came pouring out in a whirlwind of emotion and anger, and I feel that was the missing piece that made the connection between the personal and the greater significance of these concepts in the world we live in.

‘In terms of its musical content, I feel that this song nicely brought together several elements of what I am trying to achieve as a musican. I have spent many of the last few years touring with Nine Below Zero, a blues-rock band, where I was surrounded by fantastic musicians with a great deal of experience in the genre, so was lucky to have the opportunity to dig deeper into my love of soulful vocals.

‘Having absorbed so much, as well as writing and recording an album with them, producing something for myself in that style felt totally natural at that point. I had also been working on my one-woman- band setup and I feel this is the first time I was able to fully utilise all the elements of that (suitcase drum kit, harmonica solo, submarine pickup & octave effect to emulate bass, plus other guitar effects to give the impression of organ/pad).

Four Tiny Frames

Hidden in plain sight I know a place where it’s alright to make a scene with you.
A coin in the slot, a click as it drops and we’re stars in our own little world, for a minute or two
So won’t you come with me tonight, we’ll let the flash light up everything we’ve been keeping from view.
It’s just us and the lens, there’s no need to pretend once that curtain is drawn, well, we know just what to do

Lean in, don’t blink
just feel, don’t think
4 – 3 – 2 – 1

Four tiny frames
We have only this moment to try to contain
Every stolen glance, every smile,
every walk in the rain
All that we are in just four tiny frames
The danger is this, you see:
We let these things fade with our memory and we don’t leave a shred of evidence behind
Then the history books can pretend that we were only ever really good friends,
when the truth is that I was wholly yours
and you were truly mine
We were quietly radical
Oh my love we were magical
In our very ordinary way
And I wanna leave more than a trace of us,
I want them to stare in the face of us and to know, to know that we were always here, and we’ll always remain, so

Lean in, don’t blink
just feel, don’t think
4 – 3 – 2 -1

Four tiny frames
We have only this moment to try to contain
Every stolen glance, every smile,
every walk in the rain
All that we are in just four tiny frames

Four tiny frames
We have only this moment to try to contain
All those years of our years, of our laughter, our passion, our pain.
All that we are in just four tiny frames

 

Charlie Austen website

Charlie Austen is performing at The Pig, Hastings on Friday 15 November, doors 8pm, free entry

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