This morning, Louise Wener joined The Chris Moyles Show on Radio X.
In conversation with Chris Moyles at the team this morning, Louise Wener teased that she was writing and recording new music with Sleeper, saying that she was ‘loving it,’ and promising fans that the new material will be ‘amazing.’ Recalling the band’s last tour in 2017 – their first in nearly 20 years – Louise revealed how listening to Courtney Love helped to cure her of her crippling stage fright.
Key
Louise Wener – LW
Chris Moyles – CM
Dominic Byrne – DB
Pippa Taylor – PT
James Robinson – JR
CM: “Were you nervous about… So what was it, 2017 when you did the tour? And that was your first tour in years?”
LW: “Almost 20 years.”
DB: “Wow.”
CM: “I can’t believe it was that long.”
LW: “It was, yeah.”
CM: “Because it almost doesn’t make any sense. Because the tour was great! I mean, I saw you on the tour, and we had such a good night. It was so good! And you always kind of want to go, ‘Why didn't you do this before?’”
LW: “That’s what I thought when I did it. I thought, ‘Why didn’t I just do it?’ But I had stage fright for the first time ever on that tour.”
CM: “Really?”
LW: “Yeah, on the first night. I've never experienced it before. I mean, you get a bit nervous, but again, you get it's mostly sort of excitement, and you sort of need a bit of that before you go on; you need a bit of adrenaline.”
DB: “But then if it's a 20-year break, it's not surprising, I suppose.”
LW: “And I was not expecting it, so it came at me, and I was like, ‘I don't know how to handle this, because I've not had it before. So I don't know what to do.’”
CM: “What did you do?”
LW: “Do you know what I did? I listened to Courtney Love really loud on my headphones, and that sort of cured me. ‘Okay, right, I can do this. I’m going on now. Fine.’”
CM: “And did that work?”
LW: “It worked. Courtney cured me. Yeah, literally. I was like, ‘I’m just going to blast out a load of Hole.’”
CM: “That must be a scary thing though, all jokes aside, because if you’re like, ‘I’ve never had this feeling before?’”
LW: “Yeah. I didn’t have any sort of mechanisms, probably, that some people have if they know they’re going to experience that. And I was like, ‘I can’t do this, I literally can’t walk out there. I’m just going to go home!’”
CM: “And you’re on your own, because the rest of the band are going to be like, ‘Yeah, come on, let’s go!’”
LW: “You know, you’re a team leader, aren’t you? You know, and the rest of the band are like, ‘Oh God, what are we going to do? Like, she’s collapsing! What do we do? What do we do now?’ And it’s like, ‘It’s fine.’ And I was like, I walked out, put on my red lipstick, ‘Let’s go.’ And it was absolutely brilliant. And I’ve not had it again, thank God.”
[…]
CM: “Well, I’m really happy. And then will there be more music?”
LW: “Yes, there definitely will.”
CM: “Great!”
LW: “Yeah, it’s going to be amazing.”
CM: “Are you writing stuff now?”
LW: “Yeah.”
CM: “Are you recording stuff?”
LW: “I’m demoing stuff now, and it's coming about in a slightly different way that I'm not going to talk about too much, but I'm really, really loving it. I'm really loving it.”
