‘Fun’, the new single from northern outsider-pop project Dilettante, is out today via Launchpad+ / EMI North. Dilettante is the project of Leeds born multi-instrumentalist and Paul Hamlyn award winning composer Francesca Pidgeon. Known for her loop heavy live shows and contagious art pop, when not making music as Dilettante, Francesca also moonlights as a member of BC Camplight and enjoys slamming into people at roller derby.
The release comes with accompanying video made by Light in the Tower productions, where Pidgeon congregated her skate pals, old and new, to skate around Stretford Public Hall for the day and eat a lot of cake.
On ‘Fun’, Francesca says: “We’ve been calling this our ’feel-bad hit of the summer’ – it’s definitely feel-bad, we’ll wait and see if it’s a hit. It’s about that feeling of not having a very good time when you know you’re supposed to be; it’s the feeling I always get on my birthday where the pressure to enjoy myself sort of boils over and I end up having a meltdown every year.
“Lyrically, a lot of it came from my changing relationship with my only real hobby and one true love – roller derby. I’ve been playing on and off for about 8 years now and for the majority of that time it’s been the only straight up good thing in my life. However, for various reasons, I started feeling really unhappy in my team early last year and I just remember going to training and sort of having this nursery rhyme melody going round in my head, and thinking ‘I’m not having any fun, no I’m not’ which obviously became the chorus for this song.
“Musically, this is my first release where I’ve had other vocalists appear on a track. I had two of my bandmates, Caitlin LM and Kathy Pacific, come down and sing some backing vocals and we all hit some ‘percussion’ (i.e. old coffee mugs and radiators). There was also one point in the breakdown section where I told them to try a take where they actually sounded unhinged and like they were having a real breakdown and we all immediately ended up in this uncontrollable laughing fit which does in fact come across as completely unhinged in a much more effective way than I ever could have hoped when I suggested it.”
Dilettante return with their second album Life of the Party, Pigeon’s first totally self-produced record and her most personal one yet. Made in the confines of a converted freight container, the album is an outpouring of frustration towards societal pressures and the acceptance of realising she sees the world differently to others. “I went to see Poor Things and I really felt like Emma Stone’s character made sense to me,” explains Francesca. “She’s really literal and sort of just looks at the way polite society always does things and says, ‘why are we doing that? That doesn’t make sense, let’s do it this way’.”
Life of the Party is due out on October 11 via Launchpad+ / EMI North.
Life of the Party:
- Fun
- Easy Does It
- Stone
- To Make Me good
- Twice As Clean
- In The Taxi
- Cake
- My Toothpaste Ajar
- I’m In Love With Falling In Love
- Honey
- Life Of The Party
- The Stuff Dreams Are Made Of
