As she releases Fire Escape Symphonies, a retrospective of her musical story so far, the songwriter takes Steven Loftin through the songs that made her.
Songwriters spend their lives translating feelings into structure – heartbreak into a bubbling chorus, or a melancholic gut punch through a simple minor chord; it's all about converting humanity into song.
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!”
“The Man with the Child in His Eyes” by Kate Bush
NERINA PALLOT: My mum used to get these Reader's Digest's or some kind of record club she signed up to, and every month or two there'd be a ‘best of’, or what was in the charts. There was a ‘70s compendium, and this song was nestled between Captain Hook, whatever that terrible pop song was, and some other horrible pop song, probably Gary Glitter.
It's such an odd song, and I think it was long after Kate had had a hit with it, because I’d seen her on the telly doing “Wuthering Heights”, and had been a bit scared of her at this point. I was probably about 9 or 10 when this song came on, and I thought it was like no other song I'd heard in pop music.
I loved the oxymoron of the title, even though I didn't really know what an oxymoron was at that point. I just loved the world she created, because she's the original world builder, right? No one builds these magical lands of song like she does.
Then I connected the dots, and I asked my mum to get me another record of hers. I then learned to play this song, I picked it up by ear, and I loved the idea that it's very much about somebody not being able to tell anybody about it's a secret, isn't it? The idea that this love is secret, there's something very furtive about it, and it really played on my childhood imagination, of feeling a bit different from people I was around, and I thought it was a magical secret song. It was a dialogue between Kate and me, she was telling me all her secrets, and I loved it.
BEST FIT: So it was the lyrical level that entranced you?
Well, the music's really interesting. It's very English pastoral, probably Irish folk influenced, but that makes sense to what I was listening to as a kid, because I was classically trained, and I don't think I'd understood how I could take playing classical music to pop yet. I needed a bridge right at that point. There's something in the orchestration that is very classical with this pop song over it, but it's not really a pop song – it's just Kate Bush. She's doing Kate Bush.
I can see how someone like Kate Bush would be the perfect gateway for you. I love that. You can't write that connection. It's just going to happen.
He may not thank me for saying this, but my husband is left cold by Kate Bush. When I got tickets to see her, it was literally like winning the fucking EuroMillions. The other day I was talking about it to my lighting designer, because he's also a Kate Bush fan, and we're constantly obsessed with that show, and my husband said, 'I was so bored halfway through that show', so I said, 'I can't believe I married you' [laughs]."
“Come Down in Time” by Elton John
I just love him so much, I get a bit emotional talking about him. Obviously, as a kid, I heard all the pop stuff. I was obsessed with “Don't Go Breaking My Heart”, and all the big hits. I loved “Your Song”, and for a long time I'd have probably chose that song instead, but then I discovered Tumbleweed Connection when I was a teenager, and this song is so incredible.
Bernie Taupin can be a bit hit or miss sometimes, he'll write a song and you're like, ‘That is really cheesy, Bernie. What were you thinking?’ But this is such an exquisite lyric, and whatever Elton was doing that day, melodically, it's so beautiful. It's folk, and it's got a woman called Skaila Kanga on harp, but it's very similar to the Kate thing. It's the orchestration that got me, and it turned my head around about Elton John who previously I had down as Elton, the larger-than-life thing.
I didn't really understand that he actually was deeply serious, and around the same time I discovered Tumbleweed Connection I went to record fair and I found this white label EP before he was Elton John, I think it's Reg Dwight doing Nick Drake? [Mr. Reginald Sings Nick Drake] and so the penny dropped for me that he was coming out of this English tradition as well, even though he and Bernie were writing songs about cowboys and the American Plains, and it feels America.
I definitely had an obsession with Americana at a point in writing, but this is so English and so beautiful, and it's the power of him as an interpreter, because obviously he's a gay man, but this song is all about a woman, right? It's whoever Bernie was trying to woo, and you don't for a minute feel unconvinced by it.
But the other absolute killer part of it for me is the strings by Paul Buckmaster, who worked with Elton on the seminal records, but he did Space Oddity. He did all sorts of amazing arrangements in pop music, and I got to work with him for a few years. He's sadly dead now, but he was a wonderful, wonderful man, and everything I love about music is in this track.
Paul was always credited as an arranger, but what he was doing on those records is that he would write the drum parts, and he'd write the bass part. It was really old school. A lot of these records that people revere now, they don't fully comprehend quite how great the musicians were, or how trained they were, and that you were still living in the land of when people went to a session and they were doing three sessions a day to make a living, so they read every part, there was no fucking around for six hours to get one drum part.
So this track is everything to me. It's about the philosophy of ‘how do we make records. How do I enjoy making records? What am I? What is the pinnacle of excellence? What am I reaching for?’ If I had to pick one, it's this song.
Elton is an artist who’s often pegged with the poppier, greatest hits, but there’s a totally other side to him that’s a lot more underrated
People don't call him a genius, and they totally fucking should, because how many people have that level of commercial success over every decade and yet still make these moments of proper art? My feeling is that it came out of the years of hard graft on the roads as a gigging musician before he became Elton John. He was not big in this country first; he had to be big in America first.
We don't think about Elton as humble, not as a personality, but I think musically he's really humble, which is why he has his radio show, and why he's always hungry for music.
“Golden” by Jill Scott
I love her so much. I was obsessed with her first record [Who Is Jill Scott?: Words and Sounds Vol. 1. There was a song on that called “A Long Walk”, and that was my gateway drug. I went to see her live before I fully got into all of her music, and it was one of the best gigs I've ever seen in my life, it was at Brixton Academy around 2001-2002. I’d never seen anyone sing like that. Have you ever seen her live?”
Sadly, I’ve not
She’s insane, but the singing is not the reason she's my favourite; it’s lyrically as well, because it's really different from Kate and Elton. It's definitely about spirituality, not in a happy-clappy way, but what drives us, and when you see her live, she channels something, but she never over-sings.
She's not like Mariah [Carey]. I would pick her voice over Mariah any day, but the thing about Jill Scott is she knows what she's got and she doesn't overuse it, she doesn't do a million trills, but when she does do a lick, you're like ‘Oh my god, Holy shit, this woman's like Aretha’, but she came out of this poetry slam thing in Philadelphia and New York, so lyrically she's always been a cut above the big soul singers of the ‘00s.
It always sucks when you compare people in that area, but lyrically she's always been doing something really phenomenal, and “Golden” hit me at the right time in my life. It was after my first record, I'd been dropped by my label, and I was really not well. I wasn't well physically, I was depressed, and I really didn't know what I was doing with my life.
I used to cycle across London every day to work, feeling really despondent, but I would put this on and it kept me alive to be honest with you, for about six months. This song got me out of bed every day. She's got this big sister energy, and I always felt like she was speaking to me personally, ‘Keep going, get it together. You can cry for five minutes, and then you've got to go out there and be gangster.’”
I love that, because that plays back to that unspoken connection with the music. It's suddenly between you and her.
If things were going badly, I would put that on my CD Discman and I would make it through the day.
You need those songs that are crutches to help you
That’s the power of music, more than any medium. I don't really turn to a book to keep going or a movie, because you don’t have the time, do you? You need it in that 10-minutes, and nothing can do that like music.
“Crucify” by Tori Amos
This was enormously formative. It was all the obvious stuff, girl at a piano, confessional and also the religion thing. I think I responded to it because I was raised very Catholic. She’s kind of picking up that Patti Smith thing, ‘Jesus died for somebody's sins’, do you know what I mean? I think there's a thread through pop music with women grappling with religion and how it's fucked it up for them.
I discovered it one long summer in India. My mum is from India, so often in the holidays we'd go back to be with the family, and there was fuck all telly. My grandparents didn't have one, but if I went around to my cousin's house, they had a telly, and my fancy cousins had MTV Asia. And no idea why, but MTV Asia decided that all they were going to play was “Crucify” by Tori Amos.
I remember being obsessed with this song, and basically not going out in case it came on, but I also remember being shit-scared about my A level results in between the moments where this wasn't on. But then when I did get them, and they were great.
I got into college in London this was the first album I bought in Tower Records. The album had just come out, so this is my moving to London record, and the permission to be an artist. I was actually studying art at that time, and it was actually that year of studying painting and this record that was like, ‘Fuck painting, you’ve got to be a musician.’
That’s one of those special, formative records that’s suddenly a part of your life
It's deeply embedded. I have a physical reaction whenever I hear “Crucify”. It's my whole life in this one song.
Do you still have that original copy you purchased?
It's well thumbed. It's one of those records I'd take with me if the house was on fire. It’s survived many breakups and moves.
That’s another beauty of music, that tangible nature, something that’s literally with you through these times
Young people will never know the CD collection, or the joy of alphabetising a CD collection.
My three-year-old will eventually inherit my records, good luck to her
My son's 15, and he loves vinyl. If he likes the record now, he wants the album on vinyl, and he does play it.
There's a bit of a resurgence. People want that authenticity that comes with having a thing that represents that unspeakable connection.
I think it was Nora Ephron who said, ‘If you go around to a man's house and he doesn't have any books, do not sleep with him,’ but I was never that snobby about people's record collections, because my record collection is so hilarious! I’ve got things like a RuPaul album that I love. But I'm sure people used to go around to each other's houses, surreptitiously look at their CD collection and decide whether they really could be friends with them or not.
100%. That goes back to the days before the internet, when things were readily available, so you knew what things were, and you had to have a taste.
I would never pass the taste test [laughs].
“Reelin’ In the Years” by Steely Dan
I've known this song my whole life, because it was always on the radio as a kid.
Again, this is around the time I was getting serious about music. I'd gone to music college by this point, I was in London, and I had this erstwhile manager who, for some bizarre reason, knew the guy who played the guitar solo on this, Elliott Randall, who was living in Willesden. I don't think Elliot and I ever worked together, but I hung out with him for a bit, and he said he was in this band called Steely Dan.
So then I properly discovered them, and I joined that really tragic club of people who are fucking obsessed with Steely Dan. We're insufferable. It tips you into a land of muso-snobbery. It’s so insane that it can fuck you up for a long time, and then you find yourself in the land of transcribing solos while your mates are out on a Saturday night.
At this point, I hadn't really got into electric playing. I was playing acoustic quite competently, but now because I'd met the guy who plays this insane riff, and he'd shown me how to play it, I was like, 'Fuck yeah, I'm going to get an electric guitar’.
I started learning how to play electric properly, but also really paying attention to how records are made. I learned a lot about production on that Steely Dan track alone, but that whole album, Can't Buy a Thrill, which is when Steely Dan had not quite gone down the rabbit hole of being super slick.
What did that open up for you?
I think for me, it was because Steely Dan is not a rock band. People will say they are a rock band, but then if you're going to say something like The Strokes are a rock band or KISS, well, they're so fucking different. Steely Dan is an intellectual jazz outfit that makes rock records now and then, that's how I think of them. It’s one of the gateway drugs, it's similar to Kate Bush, and it’s not that I was afraid of rock, I just didn't respond to rock.
I didn't see David Bowie on TV and go, ‘Oh, that's fucking amazing’, I was like, ‘Oh, he's quirky’, and I didn't know how to understand rock, it wasn’t my bag, but Steely Dan brought me to the land of rock. They brought me to a place where I could… I wouldn't say love, but I could enjoy a White Stripes record. People wouldn't necessarily think Steely Dan would bring you to the White Stripes, but it was a way for me to understand how rock is made.
You needed it within your own framework to understand it?
It was still in the safe space of lots of chords, because I love lots of chords [laughs].”
“Ladies Who Lunch” by Elaine Stritch and Stephen Sondheim
Have you ever seen the documentary about the making of the broadcast Broadway recording?
No.
I really recommend it, even if you don't like musicals, it's got nothing to do with that. It's ‘how do you pull together the most insane people on earth and get them to make stuff in a really short space of time?’ Now, I caveat this with saying that I generally hate musicals. I am not into musicals, I will go under duress or to take a niece, but I wouldn't actually go to a musical out of my own choosing.
I don't think of Sondheim as a musical writer, he's one of the greatest lyricists that ever lived. What's really interesting to me is that he was a gay man who understood the female psyche as well as any female writer ever has.
With “Ladies Who Lunch”, when I used to listen to it as a young woman I was struck by the force of Elaine Stritch. I saw her perform this a couple of times, and as I've got older, I relate to it differently every time. It's a song for the ages and I’ve never stopped relating to it.
I can see how that would play out
It's so powerful. It’s a song that keeps me on track. It reminds me of not buying into the bullshit, because it's very easy to live a life for other people, and when I hear this song, and especially that line, ‘Everybody dies’, he never fucks around, right? He's not going to sugarcoat stuff, and with a glorious melody, and Stritch – she’s not the world's greatest singer, but she doesn't sing this like an actress either.
I saw her one woman show at the Old Vic. I went a few times, and the last time I went, I plucked up the courage to stand by the stage door – I’d never done that before or since – she’s the only person I've ever gone to the stage door for, and I got to meet her.
I think the words that came out of my mouth were, ‘I want to be you when I grow up, Miss Stritch’, she turned to me and she goes, ‘Honey, you got to do a lot of fucking living’.
I think that's what this song is, it's you’ve got to do living and it's hard. There's no cushioning in this song, but there's a bravery. It’s a song about raw, dogging, female life.
“A Case of You” by Joni Mitchell
This is true, basic bitch, female, singer-songwriter territory. I can't think of anything original to say about Joni Mitchell, or why she speaks to me, because everybody has said it before. I'm just going to say the same stuff everybody says, which is she wrote about feelings in a way that people hadn't written about.
I heard it when I was about 15-16. It’s not my favourite Joni song, but it's probably the most formative in the way that Tori Amos and Kate Bush were. It's heartbreak, rawness, the story is about James Taylor, and when you know that, the ‘I met a woman, she had a mouth like yours’, apparently that's Kate Taylor, James's sister. When you can put characters to it, it becomes even more poignant, because we all know it didn't work out well.
There's so much honesty in the song. I don't know many people who would write a song going, 'I'm frightened by the devil / And I'm drawn to those ones that ain't afraid’ I mean, that's a wonderful, succinct examination of her psyche and James Taylor's psyche at the same time.
Is associating real life with music something that you carried through your own work?
Not always. I think sometimes my battle has been having 50% of me be a commercial pop bitch, loving stuff like Kylie and Madonna, and desperately wanting to have humongous hits, and the other 50% really enjoying a Diamanda Galás record, or like the Sondheim thing, wanting to listen to difficult things or difficult subject matters.
I haven't always been honest, because I've been working with a pop convention and being like, ‘Don't bore us, get to the chorus, nobody wants to hear your angst and pain.’ It’s very rare that you can do that in pop, but the true geniuses do do that, they're not afraid, they somehow find a way to say really honest things, like “Love Is A Losing Game”, what a fucking song, right?
It's pop and its art and it doesn't happen very often. It’s a constant battle. I’ve been a bit scared and shied away from it. I hope maybe as I get older as a writer, I'm less cowardly, and I find a way to be more honest, but in a way that doesn't put people off, so there's always a tune.
That brings to mind Taylor Swift, someone deeply entrenched in honesty and real life, being an almost parasocial expectation
I'm not going to cast shade on her, because some of her songs have brought me immense joy, but I don't go to Taylor Swift for any great emotional catharsis, let's put it that way.
I know that there's a whole generation of women who are going to be massively shaped by Taylor Swift, and I don't want to diss on them, but I also feel like people go on and on about how much they put of themselves, and ‘it's all about this, it's all about that’, then you get to the songs and sometimes they're like, ‘you're not telling me anything, it’s very vague’
She’s a very emotional, vague poster in her songs, whereas Lily Allen is a case in point, isn't it? Her album is very bare. The mechanics of that whole relationship breakdown is there, so she's the other extreme.
“Birthday” by The Beatles
I am really tragic. I have to play this on my birthday every year.
Of course!
What I said about Steely Dan as a record that taught me about production, this is the album that taught me how to play every instrument. I heard this when I was around 19. I was in a flat in Camden, in a road I ended up living on for 11 years, bizarrely, and my friend's older sister's boyfriend put this record on.
It was around the time Oasis were coming out, we were lying on the floor in this flat, this song came on, and I’d never heard anything like it. I sat bolt up and I said to the guy, Paul – I can see him now, he was a guy who chain smoked Silk Cut’s – I was like, ‘Paul, this is fucking amazing, is this the new Oasis record?’ And he looked like he might actually cry. His face was just like ‘Nerina…This is The Beatles’.
It was like someone had literally taken my brain, put it in a car wash, shaken it about, and it changed my whole opinion of The Beatles. I didn't understand that The Beatles could do this. I knew some of the pop songs from it, but I hadn't grasped that it was all of them playing instruments, mostly probably Paul, by this point it was mostly the Paul McCartney show.
I hadn't fully grasped the incredible chance of four geniuses being in the same band… maybe not Ringo…let's say three geniuses, all at the peak of their powers, all of them insane songwriters, artists, charismatic, amazing musicians, but with all this energy, and it was pop. That summer I got it, and I started learning every intro, because I wanted to learn every part on it.
The bass is so great on so many of those bits, you know, “Sexy Sadie”, that's the song that taught me how to play bass. But when I heard “Birthday” it was so much fun, and it was a formative light bulb moment for me. With The White Album you've got the encyclopaedia of modern pop music on one fucking record. Show me a record that does this, because I can't think of one.
“Dancing Queen” by ABBA
This is probably my favourite song of all time. I just love it so much and I can't remember my life without this record. This is the first song I can remember loving as a little kid. It would come on the radio and I would lose my shit. Whatever I was doing, I had to stop and I had to dance, and embrace the power of ABBA.
I've never been shy about my love of ABBA. I've had to survive all my friends at school in the ‘90s. I've never betrayed them, and it's put me in a box, a lot of my friends question my musical taste, but I love it for so many reasons.
Emotionally, it’s the joy in my childhood. I had a strange upbringing, a bit of an unorthodox situation, and there was a lot of weird stuff with these odd moments of pure joy, and it was always when ABBA was happening. I remember feeling safe. My auntie loves ABBA, so she put them on for me, and I remember feeling safe at her house with my family around me, and I always felt like ‘it's all going to be okay.’
It's such a beautiful song. It does that thing of hitting the chorus with a minor, with this melancholy, it's so anti-pop in some ways because it's so melancholy in that chorus. I always say to my husband and son, ‘If I die before you guys, this is my funeral song, it has to be this song.’
Not to overshare too much, but my mum passed away last year, and this was her funeral song. She loved ABBA and loved to dance.
Oh, I'm so sorry. She sounds like my tribe. She had great taste.
I don't know how they did it, but they made a song so heart-breaking but also fabulously poppy.
It's that melancholy. It's the original happy-sad song. It might have been what they were writing through, because all their marriages broke up, but they kept going. They were like a really super functional Fleetwood Mac, weren't they? If we had to pick one song off this list, that's the desert island one.
This is a problem with getting old, you forget some of the cool shit you've done. I did the ABBA show in Hyde Park about 15 years ago with Benny and Björn. I didn't get to sing this, Kylie got to sing this – she's allowed – but I sang “The Name of the Game" and "S.O.S.” with the original band, Benny and Björn, and the BBC Concert Orchestra. It was one of those pinch me moments.
That’s the power of music, though, how being gatewayed via Kate Bush as a child meant you eventually shared a stage with half of ABBA.
It's mad, isn't it? Life is mad, but I think if anything, it's proof to just follow your passion and don't be ashamed of the things you love. When I first started in the music business, it was so mad, you were made or broken by the critical press, and I didn't play the game. I wasn't making that kind of music. I was never going to be an NME darling. I don't even know if I made a conscious effort. I just couldn't pretend that I really loved Radiohead. I like Radiohead, but I don't love…
I do not like Radiohead
For a long time, I was really like ‘Oh, I ought to say I love this’, but I'm proud of myself for not doing that, and now I definitely wouldn't do that. You’ve got to love what you love.
Sign up to Best Fit's Substack for regular dispatches from the world of pop culture