Mighty Hoopla warm-up show!
Sometimes creativity and nostalgia can be happy bedfellows. As she works on her fourth album at her home studio, Amy Studt is also ready to look back. This summer, at festivals and events including London's biggest pop party, Mighty Hoopla, she'll debut a new live set drawing largely from her much-loved 2003 debut, False Smiles. It's an empowering full circle moment for Studt, who hasn't sung the album's enduringly popular songs for 20 years.
"I'm certainly at the stage of my life where I can really see the joy and fun of that first album," says Studt, who has built a peaceful life in Somerset with her husband and daughter. "In the past, people have come to my shows and wondered why I wasn't playing Misfit, so I just thought, 'Why the hell shouldn't I sing it again?'" Misfit, a loping pop-rock anthem with an explosive chorus, became the album's highest-charting single when it peaked at number six in June 2003. More than 20 years later, its nonchalant chorus hook still chimes with anyone who feels like an outsider: "You're superficial, I'm a misfit – but baby, that's OK."
False Smiles yielded another top ten smash, the wry and relatable break-up song Under the Thumb, which glides from reggae-flecked verses to rousing guitar-led choruses. Two further hits, the perceptive self-empowerment song Just a Little Girl and a peppy cover of Sheryl Crow's All I Wanna Do, cemented Studt as a spiky and dynamic new voice in British pop. But Studt, who grew up in a musical family in London and began writing songs at eight, was still figuring out her own musical identity. She signed her first record deal when she was just 14 and put out the album three years later.
"I think a lot of the magic in that first album comes from my naivety and openness," says Studt, who co-wrote its songs with collaborators including Ivor Novello winner Cathy Dennis and Karen Poole (Kylie Minogue, Becky Hill). "I would say to my producers, 'Just throw anything at me!' I wasn't thinking to myself, 'Am I the sort of artist who makes sense singing over a reggae beat?' It was all about fun and exploration." When she listens to False Smiles now, Studt is proud of how "massive" it all sounds – an anthemic quality she'll tap into at this summer's live shows.
As Studt bloomed as a musician, she became more involved in shaping her music sonically. Released in 2008, her second album My Paper Made Men saw her embrace a darker alt-rock sound on songs co-written with Eg White (Adele, Duffy) and Guy Sigsworth (Björk, Imogen Heap). Furniture is a piercing confessional about feeling undervalued in a relationship, while Chasing the Light delivers emotional catharsis over snarling guitars. "Here comes the sting the pain again, just open up and let it in, that's when the healing can begin," Studt sings. On the deliriously catchy Nice Boys, she pairs pop hooks with home truths: "Nice boys, they don't last."
Over the years, Studt has spoken candidly about her physical and mental health issues. A bout of teenage depression led to chronic fatigue syndrome, but she wasn't diagnosed as rapid-cycling bipolar until she was 25 – long after she'd also dealt with the cruel glare of the pop spotlight. Studt describes her third album, 2019's stunning, stripped-down Happiest Girl in the Universe, as "a document of the worst 10 years of my life". Entirely co-produced by Studt, it features hauntingly honest songs about depression, toxic relationships and her past need to self-medicate. On the lovely, Shangri-Las-gone-lo-fi single I Was Jesus in Your Veins, she wrestles with a loss of identity: "So what's up now? You've lost your way, you can't get back."
But crucially, the album also features glimmers of hope and healing. "And they may all laugh, and say that I'm foolish, but I'll never miss when I Iet the music play," she sings on the lovely, intimate Let the Music Play. Looking back at her past musical identities – from "goth" to "scruffy pop girl" – she says today: "I think I've always been the girl at the piano that writes the songs. Everything else is just window dressing."
In 2022, after she gave birth to her daughter, she experienced terrifying and overwhelming postnatal depression. But thankfully, as she works on a fourth album that is shaping up to be "cinematic" as well as "quite lo-fi in places", with the odd nod to Kate Bush, Studt feels at peace. She and her husband James Greenwood, a producer also known as Ghost Culture, have built twin home studios at their house in rural Somerset. His is fully treated for mixing and producing; hers is one large live room because she mainly uses it for writing and tracking. They are dug through and connected so that when they need to, they can simply swap spaces or use hers as the live room and record into his.
"So much of my life has been about battling – whether it's physical health, mental health, addiction, or just feeling like an outsider and like I don't fit in anywhere," she says. "But now, I feel like I've finally arrived at this really beautiful part of my life where it's just full of joy. I love being a mum and I feel like I can look back on that first album now and celebrate it." It's this new, soothed, sanguine Amy Studt that fans will reconnect with at her summer live shows. "I spent my twenties trying to be cool, but I don't care about that any more," she says with a smile. "I just am."