Thomas Needham interviews Courtney Askey about her latest musical project, ‘Court Jester’, and her newly released EP ‘I’m My Favourite Clown’, read our review here.
Photography by Robin Hardman
Why did you make the decision to debut under the new moniker ‘Court Jester’? Was this due to a stylistic change, to your approach to music, etc.?
“At some point at the end of 2024 I bought the Teenage Engineering Medieval Synth and that was pretty much when Court Jester was born. I had been playing a lot of Music League (which is a really fun online music game in which people submit songs each round to a theme and then vote for their favourites) and so I had been listening to a really wide range of music and learning new styles and rhythms and tones. I was just about to release my single Ghost Writer (as Courtney Askey) and I knew it was time for a big change. I’ve been performing music under my own name since I was 16 and I was feeling like what I enjoyed listening to and what I was making didn’t match up anymore. So I started to make weird little medieval inspired beats on my new synth and I put out a post on my Instagram close friends saying I needed a new name and my friend Louis replied saying that it had to be ‘Court Jester’. And with that, the new era was born. As soon as I had the name I started to look at all these old half finished tracks I’d made on Garageband and I realised I’d subconsciously been working towards something new and different for a while.”
What or who inspires you artistically? Why do you create art?
“It sounds pretentious but it’s actually kind of hard to say definitively what inspires me because kind of everything does? I think I’ve been in this state of just absorbing everything around me for the past year and then just waiting to see where it shows up later on. I have photos saved on my phone of like 2000s women poker players and Pantone colour combinations and surreal museum displays and I’d say they are equally as inspiring as what music I’m obsessing over. I’ve been interested in smashing different inspirations together and seeing what happens. For I’m My Favourite Clown I would probably list my biggest musical inspirations as the indie sleaze revival, instrumental post-rock and the contemporary art rock by acts like Cameron Winter and Elias Rønnenfelt. As for why I make things, I don’t know. I’ve been trying to work that out for some time.”
What has been your favourite piece of art that you’ve created and why?
“I’m still in the habit of compartmentalising my artistic and my musical output, but I’ve made some attempts at bringing the two together this year. I’ve spent a lot of time working on a musical composition that is made out of data collected from medical tests on my heart. The piece has evolved many times and the most recent performance of it which happened at LCB was a very cathartic experience.”
Are there other projects you look back on less fondly?
“I think there was a point in time where I would look back on the things I made when I was a teenager and cringe but I’m over it. You’ve gotta make the bad stuff to get to the good stuff. And now I can look back at the stuff I was making when I was like 18 and find things in it that I love because I was just really trying my best to make something fun with my friends. Even when projects haven’t turned out the way I wanted them to or expected I don’t necessarily see that as a bad thing because you always learn something from the experience.”
What was it about music as an art form that made you want to pursue it?
“I actually just really really love music so much that at times I think I was never meant to actually make it, I was just meant to listen to it. I think partially that comes down to feeling imposter syndrome and also the limits of my own skills. I feel like with this record that my relationship with making music has really changed. In the past I’ve felt like I’ve really laboured over songs to make them work and made them with the intention of them fitting into a certain sound or scene. When I was making the songs for I’m My Favourite Clown I just had an absolute blast from start to finish. The songs came about so easily and I just had so much fun completely disregarding genre or trying to fit into a certain category and just let them become whatever they wanted to. That’s one of my favourite things about making music- the path that making a song will send you on. I love how you can start with one idea and end up with something completely different. I started writing one song with the intention of it being this kind of anthemic bitchy dance track and in the end it turned out more electronic doom industrial. I love how you can just constantly evolve as a musician by being guided by the song and whatever’s in the back of your brain at that moment. I just love playing music and listening to music and writing music and talking about music. I love how it’s just its own language that crosses borders and background and everything really, and how we can all be moved by something even if we don’t understand it.”
What’s one song you wish you’d have written and why?
“Clap Hands by Tom Waits. The percussion in this song is so wild. I’ve never had a knack for percussion so I’m jealous of people who just have interesting rhythms in them. The marimba (?) in this song is somehow both restrained and overwhelming and it’s very compelling. It sounds like there’s three guys just playing items of furniture in the studio with beaters or something and it has a terrible guitar solo. The lyrics are just nonsense but in a really addictive way. Tom Waits is the best to ever do it.”
What are your thoughts and feelings on the current state of art and local music as an upcoming independent artist?
“I don’t want to be pessimistic but boy it’s brutal out here. I just finished reading Mood Machine by Liz Pelly which is a book about the rise of Spotify and how it functions. We all know Spotify is awful and it pays artists near nothing and then Daniel Ek invests his enormous piles of money into AI drone warfare. It’s like cartoon levels of evil. But what I found so interesting about Pelly’s book was how she ascribes the rise of streaming platforms to the flattening of musical variation. She basically argues that now artists rely so heavily on being playlistable for income that the actual sound of music has changed so that everything becomes palatable and more endlessly playlistable. Spotify sells moods rather than music because it profits the most on passive listening, and so artists are encouraged to produce music that is easier to listen to. I think, in part, this encouraged me to make music that is not easy to listen to at all. I’m only getting a handful of streams anyway, so why not? Now is exactly the time that independent artists need to be thinking about other ways to get heard, which is no easy task. Personally, I’ve always found streaming to be a bit like throwing out songs into the void anyway, so to be honest not much has changed for me. There’s a clear return to physical media and ownership over what we consume. A lot of people are done with streaming. I’m going to be spending more of my energy on making nice CD releases and DIY cassette releases now. The good thing about starting from scratch is that I’m in a good spot to just completely change how I do things. There’s a lot of good things happening locally, and a lot of new bands forming and changing how things are done. Look at the Unglamorous Movement, for example, and the sampler record that they made as a collective. I think it’s really in our interest to find our peers who think like us and work collectively and pool resources.”
What goes through your head when you are on stage? Do you have any particular memories from your performances that stand out in your mind?
“Being on stage and performing is such a singular experience to me. I actually really don’t have anything in my head when I’m on stage because it’s in my best interest to just be totally focused. In my daily life I have a really loud and exhausting internal monologue all the time and I’m, like, constantly thinking about what I should be doing with my hands to look normal or going over my mental to-do list. But when I’m on stage I just have an empty totally clear brain where I’m accessing this part of my memory where the songs live. My ideal performance is one where I can’t see the audience, and thanks to most stage lights I often can’t. I just don’t want to be really getting into the song and then look out at the crowd and see somebody yawning or checking the time because then the moment is just totally dead and I’m out of it.
One memorable performance that comes to mind is when I played Simon Says with my band back in 2016. We found out that actually we were playing the indoor stage which was just De Montfort Hall. That was the most surreal thing ever. The whole time I was just waiting for somebody to tell me it was a mistake and we weren’t actually supposed to be there. We stood on the stage and I looked out and the place was just huge and the lights were beautiful and I turned around and there’s a video projection of my face on the screen behind us. Realistically we probably played to maybe two hundred people but it was an amazing moment of feeling the history of the room we were in and how many bands had graced the stage in the decades before us. I’m very honoured that I got to have that moment.”
How do you feel about your debut gig at The Big Difference earlier this month? Do you think it was a success?
“I had a lot of fun. I love Big Diff and the great people that run it so it’s a really fun venue to play that feels like home. I had no idea how the songs were going to be received because it’s so different to what I’ve played before, but people seemed to like them?”
What was the process of self-recording your EP like over the last year? Could you guide us through your creative process?
“It was a learning process because I wrote, performed, recorded and mixed the entire record myself for the first time ever. I’ve dabbled with a bit of production before when making demos but to have the songs be the final result involved an awful lot of learning. I’m lucky to have a space at home that works well as a studio, so I basically set up all my instruments and was able to have everything ready to go at all times which really helped my productivity. Producing for me is quite a visual experience. I think I have some degree of synaesthesia because when I’m making music and layering tracks on each other it’s a very visual process for me, like I can see each sound as part of a landscape. I started off by looking at all the old ideas I had saved on my Garageband. I used Garageband to make the whole thing. I actually own Logic but I realised I prefer the path of least resistance and I did not want to learn anything even a little bit more complicated or I would give up. I knew I wanted to make a record that would be danceable, so that immediately started me off thinking okay, this one needs a really good beat behind it or this one needs speeding up. I also wanted all the tracks to come in under 3 minutes because previously I was writing a lot of long songs and I just really wanted something fresh. I gave myself those parameters which formed the basis of all of the songs, and then I disregarded them completely whilst layering up more instruments so that they’d have a more interesting sound. For example, TATT was going to start with a really pulsing sub bassy beat and then drop into something really dancey and electronic. I kept the stripped back opening, but I ended up swapping out the dancey ending for a weird crescendo of synth strings and vocals. That song has 18 vocal tracks! I’m kind of a “jack of all trades, master of none” musician in that I can get a sound out of a lot of instruments but I’m not technically good at any of them. So something that I did a lot for this EP was whenever I needed a specific sound or melody that I didn’t know how to play I would just sing it and then add 20 different plug-ins until it didn’t sound like my voice anymore. I also used a lot of secondhand instruments like a 90s kids keyboard, a slightly broken accordion, a Bontempi electric organ and a handmade flea market glockenspiel that all had a naturally discordant sound that worked when played without any expertise whatsoever.
I brought in a few musicians because I knew the songs needed their specific sound. Lewis Bates (The People Assembly) played bass on 3 of the songs, and I knew Lewis would bring a specific driving energy to those songs that they needed. Rory Booth (Dusker) came in to play some strange discordant guitar on TATT that you hear as the crescendo comes in. Icarus was the biggest collaboration of all. I asked Ray Parkes, who was the singer in my dad’s band Bocca in the 2000s, if he could record some vocals to make it a duet. He sent me those over from his home in Exeter. That same song also features the amazing cellist, Nellie Carnes, who I met when I exhibited my artwork in Lisbon. Our meeting was so serendipitous and we’ve collaborated on music twice now. The intro and outro you hear in that song is made out of the recordings of I think 7 cats that my friends sent me from all over the UK, so I’ve got to make sure the cat choir gets their mention too.”
What is the hardest part of the creative process for you? How do you deal with it?
“The thing I’m always fighting against the most is my own exhaustion. My health isn’t so great and I work a lot, so I really had to come to terms with the fact that some days I would only have an hour’s worth of energy to complete something and then it would be frustrating because I also had to learn how to do almost everything from scratch. So some days I’d go into the studio and just give up because I was so tired and experiencing a lot of brain fog and just unable to make it work. I’ve had to be really patient with myself throughout this process and that hasn’t been easy but I’m trying to be gentler on myself these days.”
What is your personal highlight from your EP?
“Probably the ending of Holdem. I think it’s a beautiful song. It has a ridiculous bagpipe synth ending that I find quite stirring and really nice harmonies. There’s also a vocal track buried underneath where I’m just shouting the words into my laptop mic and I really like how that turned out. Also just Hair Shirt because I never thought I’d be able to write a pop song and hey, look at me now!”
What message(s) do you wish to convey to others through your art and this EP?
“I never thought about a message or an intention whilst making it but I think one has appeared retrospectively. I did the majority of work on this EP whilst I was really struggling with numerous health issues. Whilst that was frustrating and isolating, I think that story kind of appeared throughout the lyrics and in the instrumentation. There’s a lot of crescendos and optimistic builds that are quite explosive. Whilst I was fed up and angry, I was writing of a future that looked better. Even though it’s quite doomy I think it’s more in the cathartic way because sometimes you just need to scream about something and then you’re fine.”
So… how do you construct(?) a hair shirt?… Why?
“Well, my hair shirt was a bit more conceptual than an actual hairshirt which was typically made from woven animal hair or scratchy fabric. I braided some hair extensions into plaits and sewed them onto a pre-existing pleather corset top. I wanted to create a garment that was sculptural and surreal that referenced medieval religious iconography and high fashion (specifically: the Schiaparelli fw 2024 show) and the artwork of the Surrealists. The song is titled Hair Shirt because hairshirts are worn as an act of penitence and mortification. The lyrics are about rehashing old painful memories for no good reason, and so the song is a kind of metaphorical hairshirt. I guess the idea is that you’re at a party and you’re a bit drunk and you start overthinking about your ex and so the natural conclusion is that you should suffer the hairshirt for your sins.”
What are your plans for the future following the release of ‘I’m My Favourite Clown’? How can people keep up with your work?
“I can tell you that I will be releasing another EP, hopefully quite soon. And the next one is going to be a dance EP. It’ll still be a bit doom, but it’s going to be way cheesier and sillier. You can follow me at @court__ jester (2 underscores) on instagram. Instagram is the pits tho, so you can join my Whatsapp channelfor occasional updates: https://whatsapp.com/channel/0029VbB6Zd22kNFiaFg9JC1N“