Nine Songs: Nerina Pallot

This is why few can string together lyrics and melodies regarding raw emotions without first having felt something. In the case of Nerina Pallot, it’s this that led to her Nine Songs choices. Each is a different molecule banding together to form her creative atom.

It’s a pertinent time for such a conversation with Pallot. She’s a few days away from the release of her first-ever Best Of, Fire Escape Symphonies, a collection that follows the narrative of her career from the beginning to a brand-new song, “Come Bring The Sun” and a few days after we speak, she’s due to play the Royal Albert Hall to celebrate.

Pallot’s Nine Songs sketches the portrait of a little girl who fell in love with Kate Bush’s world-building, before finding the rocking roots of Steely Dan as a teen, all peppered with a lifelong affinity for Elton John’s unabashed melodic grandeur.

“They're very basic bitch songs, and there's nothing cool in there, but to me they are,” she gushes when I ask if there’s any through line to her choices. “These are the songs that haven't just shaped me as a writer, they've shaped me as a person. Everyone goes to music for different reasons, but I definitely go to music to hold my hand through life.”

Her journey began after signing to Polydor in 2000. Releasing her debut album, Dear Frustrated Superstar, a year later, it featured a striking half-portrait, her eyes staring outward. Viewed through the lens of two decades navigating the music industry, that poise morphs – a doe caught in the headlights.

“Before you have success, either critically or commercially, whatever neuroses you have are writ large," Pallot ponders.

Her own success came with her 2005 second album, Fires, which featured the anti-war protest single "Everybody's Gone To War". "I do wonder if sometimes, when there’s too much acceptance, it can numb that urge to create. You start to think you’re really brilliant, and I definitely felt that after my third album [2009's The Graduate] – I went into it thinking, ‘I’ve had a hit now, I know what I’m doing,’ and I don’t think I did. I should have worked with more people, rather than trying to do it all myself.”

From that point to the fiercely independent artist she has become since 2014, Pallot has been following a path of her own. This has included 2014's Year of the EPs, and a viral sync of her cover of Joy Division's "Love Will Tear Us Apart" on 2021 TV sensation Normal People. Few careers have survived setbacks and reinventions with a quiet persistence and stubborn devotion to the work itself.

Raised in Jersey, as a child she'd teach herself piano and guitar, eventually going on to study violin and opera. These early stages are equally as formative as her Nine Songs choices. It's a mix between the carefree curiosity of a child, twinned with the rigidity of classical theory that coalesced throughout her life, where piano-driven pop would become her calling card. It's a spark she refuses to let die.

That commitment to protecting her most childlike self was instilled in her by the photographer who shot that debut album cover – and also the cover for Fire Escape Symphonies – Andrew MacPherson.

"I remember we were doing a shoot in the supermarket in Los Angeles, he stopped halfway, and he said, ‘the thing you've got to remember, Nerina, your creativity is like a child, whatever your creative spark is think of it as a little kid that you have to protect at all costs. You wouldn't dump that child in the middle of a crack den in Harlesden, right? Keep that kid safe, whatever you do, whatever mad shit you get up to, make sure the kid is okay’, and the way Andrew said that to me, it's never left me.”

Over the course of eight albums, numerous songwriting credits, including for Kylie Minogue's 2010 album Aphrodite, she's grafted through thick and thin, and this moment is a chance for Pallot – someone who very much prefers to look forward rather than backward – to take stock.

“I'd like to say that I'd had some great sort of narrative arc in my life, but I really haven’t,” she laughs. “I'm still basically a grown-up version of a 15-year-old girl who sits in a room does a bit of drawing, does a bit of painting, does a bit of writing, and then shows her mates. I've got a few more mates who are interested in what I'm doing now, but I haven't really changed.

I lived in London for a bit, but I've come back to the countryside, and my studio is a room that just looks over woods, and I don't know if any of us change. That's my great pronouncement!”