Once You Pop…
She’s the darling of the UK’s modern psychedelic movement, but Jane Weaver’s latest album sees her dive headfirst into pop. Produced on a diet of bygone Lebanese torch songs, 1980s Russian aerobics records and Australian punk, Flock retraces some of her earliest influences. She tells Prog why it was time to change pace.
Words: Dom Lawson Images: Nic Chapman
“I remember I had brown corduroy dungarees on and I was playing a Bontempi organ in front of the TV, trying to play along with Tubeway Army!”
Jane Weaver: “I’m always optimistic!”
I
f our lord and saviour Steven Wilson has taught us anything in recent times, it’s that pop music is nothing to be scared of. The history of pop is liberally strewn with artists who pursued a progressive path, whether overt or otherwise.
Similarly, progressive rock has
always
had room for a catchy melody.
Despite an increasingly impressive catalogue that proclaims a devotion to everything from wistful, acoustic folk to skull-rattling space rock, Jane Weaver is also a huge fan of pop. It’s a fact that her latest album, Flock, screams from the rooftops, albeit accompanied by plenty of the psychedelic songwriter’s trademark rushes of modular synth. A snappy and shiny collection of absurdly memorable pop earworms, Flock eschews the trippy meanderings of 2019’s Loops In The Secret Society and its cosmic antecedents Modern Kosmology and The Silver Globe. Instead, it conjures an uplifting and futuristic vision of pop, wherein the magic of the pop music that Weaver grew up listening to is reimagined with all the dazzling sonic colours of the modern age. Speaking to Prog, Weaver explains how childhood musical memories have informed her progress as an artist to this day.