Filmmaker Sally Potter on her first album: ‘Part of me relishes being a renegade’

When the film director Sally Potter was 16, she wrote “filmmaker” as her occupation in her British passport. “Ha ha ha,” she mirthlessly intones as she tells me this, mimicking the derision her teenage self experienced when flourishing her travel document at borders.

She met with a similar reception in her late forties when she cast herself as lead in her film The Tango Lesson, playing a filmmaker who learns tango with a world-class dancer. Ha ha ha, scoffed critics, unwilling to entertain the fantasy of a middle-aged Englishwoman conquering the tango clubs of Buenos Aires.

Now aged 73, the director best known for her bravura adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s time-travelling novel Orlando is once again defying the years. The precocious teenager who risked ridicule by declaring herself a filmmaker has become a singer-songwriter who is belatedly releasing a debut album as a septuagenarian. It’s called Pink Bikini. 

“Who puts out their first album at this age?” Potter expostulates, anticipating the barbs. “I’ve always done things at the wrong age. Being too young to do stuff seemed to go on forever until I was about 42 and then suddenly I was too old. So I realised that age, and time itself in fact, are a kind of fiction to which are attached stereotypes, caricatures, all kinds of notions that we internalise about stages of life. Part of me relishes being a renegade in that particular department.”

Potter is actually a rogue element in all sorts of ways. Celebrated for her boundary-crossing approach to cinema, she sits opposite me at a table in her studio in London’s East End. This is her equivalent of Woolf’s room of one’s own, the necessary space for a female writer. It’s an enviable room too, light and airy, on the top floor of the former shoe factory where Potter lives with her husband. The walls are lined with books and surfaces are piled with arty clutter. The sound of children playing in a neighbouring primary school percolates through an open window. 

Behind Potter is a grand piano. Nearby are a set of electronic keyboards and a music stand with the score of one of Pink Bikini’s songs. The album is deliberately straightforward, a “small ensemble sound” as she calls it, involving acoustic and electric guitars, double bass, keyboards and drums. Potter recites her lyrics in a cabaret-esque sing-speak, telling stories inspired by her teenage years in the 1960s. 

This switch to song is a less abrupt departure than it appears. Themes from her films — bodily transformation, sexual awakening, authorship, double standards about female behaviour — run through the album’s tales of a girl approaching the borders of childhood and adulthood. With gypsy-jazz and café-concert inflections, its music is an intimate counterpart to the grandly scaled orchestral pieces that she composes for the screen. She’s an auteur, the cinematic version of a singer-songwriter, who not only writes her films but also often scores them. 

“A film is a world: you create a world,” she says. “It’s a great big mongrel synthesis of all the other art forms. Songs have this incredible allure because of their portability and simplicity of means, you’re not wasting people’s time. They survive incredible amounts of repetition. It’s an extraordinarily seductive form for a filmmaker who deals with hundreds of people on a set and enormous amounts of money even when it’s a low-budget film.”

Her life in music has deep roots. The grand piano in her studio belonged to her grandmother, a singer and actress who she remembers playing Schubert and Brahms on it. Potter’s mother, who is memorialised on Pink Bikini’s opening song as a 19-year-old cradling the infant Sally in 1949, was a music teacher who wanted to be an opera singer. Both mother and grandmother felt thwarted musically, prevented from pursuing their love for it as fully as they wished. 

“I really felt the pain of it on their behalf,” she says. “I sometimes ask myself the question, am I doing this for them? Or should I be doing this when they couldn’t? And then sometimes I think, well, this is partly how I learnt to love and listen to music.”

Her father, a designer, poet and political anarchist, was another influence. She remembers as a small child watching him sit in rapt concentration with old 78 records playing on a vintage gramophone. It was a study in how to listen. “Whenever I’m making a film I put a great deal of attention to the listening part of it, including the so-called silent moments,” she says. 

Apart from a stint in Wiltshire, she grew up in north London, between Gospel Oak and Kentish Town. In Pink Bikini’s song “Ghosts”, she sings about being a teenager in her bedroom obsessively immersed in Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen albums, yet also wondering why their record sleeves showed photos of anonymous, silent women, such as the uncredited Suze Rotolo on The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. 

“It was a nightmare as a girl to realise that as somebody who wants to make things, songs, films, whatever, you’re kind of present but without any status whatsoever except your attractiveness,” she says. “A terrifying realisation.”

While she pored over records in her room, Billie Holiday foremost among the favourites, her younger brother Nic was thrumming a bass guitar in his. He went on to join the prog rock band Van der Graaf Generator. Meanwhile, Potter came of age in a vanished London world of radical filmmaker co-operatives and feminist improvisational music groups. As well as pursuing her film ambitions, she worked as a dancer and musician in avant-garde troupes. She would sing, play keyboards and occasionally tenor sax — the latter “really badly. I shudder and blush — blush! — to even think of it.”

The guitarist Fred Frith, former member of experimental rock band Henry Cow, was among her comrades from those days. A frequent collaborator on her film scores, he performs on Pink Bikini. To record her vocals, she purchased a powerful Neumann microphone, a studio mainstay since the 1950s, “which I realised was a musical instrument in its own right”. 

Her songs carry a sense of longing rather than nostalgia, the desire for what lies ahead rather than a wish to recapture the past. “To make work you have to be fuelled by longing,” she insists. “In order to overcome the doubts that are inevitable, the fears of failure, longing has to be greater than the doubt. That’s my criterion for what I’ll work on next. Do I long to do it? Will I feel like I’ll die if I don’t do it?”

The words carry an echo of the impassioned teenager evoked so vividly by Pink Bikini. “Each of us lives in an incredible seething melodrama that we pretend isn’t happening,” Potter says, smiling. “That’s how I see it, anyway.” Or rather, that’s how she voices it, the film director who has recast herself as a singer.

‘Pink Bikini’ is out July 14, sallypotter.bandcamp.com

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