Independent road to success
SINGER Anita Lester was all set to head to London to record her first album but changed her mind after receiving some indispensable advice from the lead singer of The Flaming Lips, Wayne Coyne.
“Wayne told me to make your first album where you’re comfortable, because you need your support network. You don’t want to be waitressing for 10 hours a day and then start recording,” said the Melbourne singer-songwriter and former frontwoman of indie band Me And The Grownups.
“I needed advice from someone who’d been through it.”
Lester, 25, who is known as Lester the Fierce, is set to record her debut EP, The Summer Deluge, at home.
She met Coyne at a Melbourne bar when he asked to photograph her platform shoes. Shyly, Lester admits to the encounter’s thrill.
“We stayed up all night dancing and drinking. He listened to my music and gave me some amazing advice,” she said.
It’s not the first time Lester has received advice from other people and taken it to heart.
“I’m gonna say what I heard Bill Cunningham say: ‘I don’t have any desire for money except to live. Once you receive money you lose control’.”
Fiercely independent, Lester manages herself and said she just wanted to cover her costs, making her first single, Holland, available as a free online download with the whole EP to come once she ran out of hard copies.
The EP is a brooding, visceral experience matched by a beautifully cinematic video clip – the accompaniment to Holland and Lester’s big break.
“The main response has been to the music video, which has been such a blessing because I wouldn’t have had as much publicity,” Lester said.
Made as a gift by Who By Fire, a Melbourne production company, the stunningly filmed clip features Lester as a lonely raven with feathers strewn from her temples.
An old couple dances on the beach while a fish is violently gutted: all of this set to the melancholy lyric of Holland, an ominous folk song that is already receiving airplay.
While Lester is not adverse to pop (and moments in the EP do verge on its dreamy undertones) she said she wanted to remain true to her own sound, which was why she had not signed to a record label despite numerous offers.
“I need to have control over the first record that I do and I’m still feeling it out a little bit. I don’t think I’ll ever know 100 per cent, but at least it will be more definitive in my own mind,” she said.
LIVIA ALBECK-RIPKA
PHOTO of Anita Lester in the video clip for her single, Holland.
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