New York, NY (Top40 Charts) Today, award-winning filmmaker Sally Potter shares "Black Mascara," the latest preview of her debut album Pink Bikini, out July 14. Says Potter: "'Black Mascara' was one of the earliest tracks I wrote for Pink Bikini, an album of songs based on a look back over my shoulder to the despairs and longings of my turbulent teenage years; a time of change: the end of childhood, the beginning of life as an adult. "
Potter also directed the video for "Black Mascara," an uncanny and haunting black-and-white timepiece that finds a hula-hooping Potter on a shadowy street corner. As Potter describes it: "Making the video was a different kind of return. It needed to be made in the way I made films when I first started out as a teenager. Back then I had no money, training or equipment. The need to invent and imagine things out of nothing became part of a philosophy that I later named 'Barefoot Filmmaking'. It meant working with minimal means, borrowing gear and working with the goodwill and energy of a few beloved friends and co-conspirators."
Known for directing stars like Tilda Swinton, Javier Bardem, Elle Fanning, Salma Hayek, and
Laura Linney in films like Orlando, The Party, and The Roads Not Taken, Potter expertly repurposes her narrative skills on 12 original songs on the semi-autobiographical Pink Bikini. The Gentlewoman has already praised the "moody orchestrations, rousing protest numbers, and jazzy nods to Billie Holiday and Charlie Parker" that accompany Potter's varied and vivid depiction of what she calls "the key moments of the turbulent female years of transition from childhood to young adulthood that I experienced growing up in the 1960s in London."
Released earlier this spring, the "striking" (KCRW) "Pink Bikini" recounts a painful instance of slut-shaming. Says Potter: "When I was 16, I really did see a pink bikini in a shop window on the way to
Victoria Station... Later, in the South of France, badly sunburned in my fruitless attempt to get a tan, I went to the local disco and afterwards "lay on the evening sand" with a French boy. It seemed romantic but led to trouble and despair as I experienced the cruel double standards of the time."
On "Black and White Badge," the anxiety of the nuclear disarmament campaign finds a mirror image in the radical urgency of today's climate activists as Potter depicts bomb drills and Cold War paranoia from a young person's perspective. It offers a cross-generational bridge between different looming apocalypses
Sally Potter's films have won over forty international awards and received BAFTA and Academy Award nominations. Her 1992 breakthrough Orlando(1992) an adaptation of Virginia Woolf's classic novel starring Tilda Swinton, was followed by The Tango Lesson (1996), The Man Who Cried (2000), Yes(2004), Rage (2009), Ginger & Rosa (2012), The Party (2017), and The Roads Not Taken (2020). Last
September her short film Look At Me, starring Chris Rock and Javier Bardem, premiered at the Venice Film Festival last September. She was awarded an OBE in 2012 and her book Naked Cinema - Working with Actors is published by Faber & Faber. Her soundtrack albums have been released by major labels including Sony Classical, Deutsche Grammaphon, and Milan. You can listen to examples of her music for films here.
Potter had a life in music that predates her work as a composer for film. As a voice in the avant-garde scene of the late 1970s she was a member of the ground-breaking group FIG (Feminist Improvising Group) with whom she toured extensively in Europe. She also performed with
Lindsay Cooper's Film
Music Orchestra and collaborated (as lyricist) with her on the song cycle OH MOSCOW, performing in the USSR and East Berlin in 1989, before the wall came down. From the 1990s Sally moved away from improvised music and focused on the precisely structured scores for her films.
Pink Bikini
Mama
Ginger Curls
Black and White Badge
Army of Teens
Hymn
Ghosts
Black Mascara
Flames
Pink Bikini
The Secret
One Day
Dance Girl Dance
Album Credits
Music & Lyrics by Sally Potter
Lead Guitar & Electric Bass: Fred Frith
Drums & Percussion: Paul Clarvis
Upright Bass: Misha Mullov-Abbado
Keyboards: Sally Potter
Acoustic Guitar:
Laura Snowden
Acoustic Guitar: Giacomo Susani
Harp: Hattie Webb
Album Recorded at Jankowski SoundFabrik (Germany) and The Premises (London)
Engineering & Mixing by
Peter Hardt
Vocal Engineering by Marie Ormes
Additional Mixing & Pre-Mastering by
Marta Salogni
Mastered by Matt Colton
