Nerina Pallot's Personal Best

NERINA PALLOT: There’s actually a link between these two songs, which is why I wanted to talk about them both.

BEST FIT: Let’s start with "Oh Berlin", which isn’t a track I was familiar with before now as it was a standalone single that you released in between your sixth and seventh albums.

I’m kind of glad that you don’t know it that well. I started writing it in 2011, around the time of Year of the Wolf. I had started to work on the German version of The Voice for one season as a co-coach, which is like a sidekick to the main coach. Do not ask me how I got involved with it, but somehow I did [laughs].

What happened was, when Universal Records put out Year of the Wolf, they thought it would be a perfect combo for me to promote my new album by being on German TV all the time. So I was like, okay, fine, and I did the show. It was a real eye-opener. I’d previously done work on these shows in the UK, doing the music for the contestants, but it was quite different watching it all happen in real time. I only did one season as I had some concerns about how these shows treat the contestants, but at the end of it, they asked me to stay on in Berlin and work with a writing camp to write singles for the contestants.

I found myself in this fancy studio inside this plastic hotel that was really pink. Not pink in a cool way, but in a way that was purpose built to appeal to people in the entertainment industry, which is always the worst possible idea. It was so clinical and so at odds with the creative experience. I remember sitting in this pink studio, day after day, trying to come up with pop hits and it was just the most hideous experience. But I remember walking back to the hotel one day and singing “Oh Berlin”, because I was feeling kind of like, “How did I end up in a pink studio trying to write bangers for a 17-year-old?”

I always had that chorus. It stayed in my head, but I couldn’t write lyrics for it properly until some years later –in 2018, I think – when I went back to Germany on tour. It was a weird European tour, and the Berlin show was not a good show. I got catfished in really dark circumstances. I thought that I was going to go and meet this terminally ill teenage girl. For months they’d been writing to the label saying, “Would Nerina come to my hospice?” and things like that. So when I was on that tour I said, “Yes, of course I will come.” But this girl didn’t exist. It was some weird, dark form of catfishing. I was feeling really sad about it, and everything – this and the weird shows – caused a bit of an existential crisis for the second time in Berlin. How dark is humanity that somebody would pretend to be a terminally ill 15-year-old girl? I mean, that is just so fucked. Anyway, I went home and I finally finished “Oh Berlin”. It’s about self-sabotage, about all the bad decisions I’ve made.

It’s incredible that you could pull something so artistically rewarding from all that. And that catfishing situation was definitely not your fault. You were only trying to do the right thing, the kind thing.

It was so strange. Just very, very odd. But the real reason I wanted to talk about it is because my friend Chris, who died in 2022, absolutely loved that song. He was obsessed with it. It wasn’t a massive hit. It didn’t do anything, really, but he loved it so much. He was always very supportive of my music and he understood self-sabotage. We are – were – both in the entertainment industry, yet really quite straightforward people.

A week before Chris died, he said to me, “I really want to hear the new record [I Don’t Know What I’m Doing]. I know it’s not coming out for a few months, but can you send it to me? You know, just let me hear a few tracks.” And I said, “Oh, I don’t know if it’s good enough.” I kept putting him off, saying “I’ve got a little work to do with it. When it’s ready, I will send it to you.” Well, then he died, right? He never got to hear it. And I have thought about that pretty much every day since, you know? Like, “Your friend asked for one little thing. You never gave it to him. He died. He might’ve really liked that record.” And then, of all the songs that his family chose to play at his funeral, they chose “Oh Berlin.” It was his favourite song of mine.

The first song I wrote for the new album was “And Here a Garden”, which is about Chris and being in his hometown in Glasgow for a show I had there a couple of years ago. Whenever I’d go to Glasgow, he would often fly out from London to come and see my show and hang out with his family up there. When I was writing “Regrets”, I was thinking about him as well, because [not sending Chris the record] was probably one of my most present regrets. You should always tell your friends that you love them because you just don’t know what’s next. I did not expect my friend to die so suddenly at such a relatively young age. It was such a shock. The new record is coming out on his birthday. I feel like, somehow, this is partly a way to make up for him not getting to hear the last one.

I want him to live on, you know, by saying his name, by talking about him. He was such a larger-than-life figure. Funny, brilliant, but never narcissistic. He was so self-critical in so many ways.

"Regrets", to me, feels like it has a message of not getting in your own way.

Yeah. I don’t know if you have a lack of confidence in certain things, but one of the things I’ve decided to do since turning 50 is to start owning stuff, like really owning it. I look back and I think, “You know what? I haven’t done so bad to get to 50, to have made eight albums, to be a functioning adult, to be a good wife, a good mother.” I’m gonna start saying, “Well done!”