Becky Hill spoke to UNCL about rebranding, the industry and reaching for stardom with her latest single “Space”.
Words: Katie Beaton
Described as “UK pop’s greatest secret weapon” Becky Hill has delivered vocals for some of the biggest UK dance tracks in recent years, featuring and writing on classics such as Gecko with Oliver Heldens, Afterglow with Wilkinson and Piece of Me with MK. She was the second most-streamed UK female artist in 2019 on Spotify yet is far from a household name. Becky Hill is now on a mission to transform herself from feature artist to solo pop star.
She describes herself as “very under the radar on a lot of people’s systems” with lots of people “know[ing] the songs I’ve been on but they’ve had no idea that I’m the one singing it and I’m the one writing it”. She’s hoping her new single Space will, “be the one to propel me into the forefront of people’s minds and cement me as a proper pop star in the UK and then I can start taking over the rest of the world”.
Her drive and self-motivation shines through over the phone and has characterised her whole career. Starting off on The Voice in 2012, a UK reality-TV singing competition, the show gave her no support after she left. This gave her “a fire under [her] arse” as she was snatched from stardom back to working in the pub, realising she’d have to rely on herself to get her career kickstarted. As she moves from one stage of her career to the next, she’s determined to not, “let the momentum slow down, even if there is a world pandemic on”.
Since her early days as a feature artist, Hill has always been deeply involved in the writing process, so writing for her own project felt “quite natural” as many of the songs originally intended for her album such as hits Peace of Mind and Back and Forth got picked up by other artists. She commented it was actually “weirder writing for other artists because you have to put yourself in their shoes” but that it was an extremely healing process for all involved. Comparing the experience to being like, “...like listening to your best mate crying... when you write about someone else’s experience you listen to them a lot more and… you can ask them is this how you feel, [it's] documenting how someone feels in that moment of time… cathartic”.
"... trust me enough to know I make good music - enough to listen to a solo song, rather than needing to see another producer's name next to mine"
Notably, her latest single Space has a different, less bass-focused sound to her earlier releases, even though it was produced by tech-house duo Camelphat. We can definitely expect this from the rest of her upcoming album as she wants to bridge the gap, “between being a pop artist and dance artist” and “show the full range of what [she] can do.” It’s her first single not as a feature artist and she’s hopeful that people, “trust [her] enough to know [she] makes good music to listen to a solo song, rather than needing another producer’s name next to mine”.
She feels ready to rebrand as a pop artist feeling, “like there is a ceiling in dance music that [she] could get to without feeling much of a challenge… and [she’s] always seen [her]self as more of a pop artist”. Hill sees pop music, “as more of a challenge because it’s a lot harder to make pop music then it is good dance music”, believing pop music relies, “more on the song”.
This controversial statement could be debated for hours; is the pop music-making process more intricate than that of dance music? What do our UNCL readers think?
Becky was also excited to speak to us about her new podcast, The Art of Rave where she interviews electronic music icons such as Groove Armada, Pete Tong and DJ Zinc who she describes as some of her “absolute heroes of people I listened to when I was a kid”. She felt that “when [she] started raving that there was a sense of missing there” comparing the constant scenes of “people filming their mates shuffling and the DJ playing” to “the anonymity of it all” in the past. The podcast aimed to discover whether she really had “missed out on the golden years of rave”. As the negative effects of social media are becoming more obvious and widely spoken about, the common romanticisation of the past is becoming even more ingrained in people’s minds and cultural discourse. However, Becky’s podcast pushes past this simplistic take, all of her guests had a completely different opinion, leading her to conclude, “rave is ever-changing, and it’s just as good now as it was then”.
"The fact that people don’t have the timespan to listen to someone’s body of work is really sad... it artistically and creatively limits an artist"
Becky’s debut album is due for release this March and aims to be an album, “that people could listen to in their bedroom as well as taking them to the dancefloor”. She wants “a song for every mood” which she laughingly remarked is easy to do when it’s been written over the past eight years. Promising “amazing pop songs with quirky left-field productions”, she’s determined to “show a different side to [her]” moving away from the dance tracks she’s known for and, instead, releasing a pop album quoting Robyn, La Roux, Bon Iver and Ben Howard as inspirations. Even though the album was made over such a long time span she insists it wasn’t hard to narrow it down as, according to her, "you know a shit song when you hear one… now I have 20 songs that I think are really good and that’s really hard, thinking should I save that for album two”.
Asking her about what she thinks about artists now deciding to drop projects that are getting progressively longer and longer like Playboi Carti’s 24 track extravaganza Whole Lotta Red, she argued that actually, people don’t want to listen to an album anymore. She contended that the “next generation isn’t really into albums… you can carry on releasing singles and never release an album. It’s very difficult to make people invest in you enough to get them to listen.”
I asked her if she thought that was a positive or negative change for the structure of music but she was adamant it was “proper shit”. Complaining that, “the fact that people don’t have the timespan to listen to someone’s body of work is really sad. I remember that was my favourite part about listening to music, that I got to know an artist I loved… now people don’t really give a shit about who you are and what you’re singing about as long as you’re singing a song that they like. I think it’s really sad that people don’t spend the time to listen to twelve tracks of someone’s album and listen to tracks that won't necessarily be on the radio. Some of my favourite songs are songs that were album songs rather than singles. It artistically and creatively limits an artist”.
She thinks this new trend towards instant gratification has a negative effect on people’s music, blaming this on the rise in streaming services, “if [a song] doesn’t grab someone’s attention within the first five seconds then you become an algorithm on Spotify… they want a good chorus that hooks them, they want to be able to sing it when they’re done and that’s it”. She immediately continued to say, “it was a shame with Overdrive, well I mean it wasn’t a shame because I got a number one, but it was Oliver Heldens that got more noticed then I did and I found it quite difficult over the years”. Reflecting after the interview it seems clear that this belief comes from resentment with her past career. It was defined by punchy dance singles, strong choruses and a role as a guest vocalist which meant she often didn’t receive the credit she deserved. The guest vocalists who define dance tracks often get pushed aside especially black female vocalists who can often be uncredited. Ride on Time is associated with Blackbox, not Loletta Hathaway, and vocalist Kelli-Leigh isn’t credited on either Secondcity’s “I Wanna Feel” and Jax Jones and Duke Dumont’s “I Got U”. She’s right that vocalists need to get more respect within the industry, however, this doesn’t necessarily link to or prove that the consumer’s attention span is changing. Nevertheless, her take is definitely very popular with publications such as Forbes claiming “Spotify Song Skip Rates Tell Us A Lot About Our Attention Span” and Psychology Today arguing “Pop Music Shows That Our Attention Spans Are Getting Shorter”.
Streaming services have definitely changed the way we listen to music but arguably in the way technology always has. Similar concerns about genre and attention span were being raised when radios first began to be mass-produced as songs had to be edited for radio length. Famously Queen was told Bohemian Rhapsody was never going to sell as it was too long. Time has proven that radio has changed the consumption of music without limiting the genres or styles of songs that are produced. It’ll be up to the test of time to prove whether these wide-spread concerns about streaming services are valid or just an op-ed freak out.
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