I Blame Coco

Though not yet conceived when The Stone Roses released their era-defining album, Coco has a natural empathy with outsiders, thinkers and those that like to play the pop game absolutely on their own terms. She is free of compromise. Later that same night, backstage, she spoke with Alex Turner and was relieved to find another writer of his generation that was ‘totally real and totally lovely.’ They are words you could just as easily attribute to the 19-year-old future star as she prepares to launch her immaculately cerebral pop assault.

Coco is about to drop one of the finest long-playing debuts of 2010, The Constant. Having worked on the record singularly since the age of 15, slaving over those mega lyrics and the shape of the sound, she scrapped it all in the autumn of last year and re-wrote it to her own, exact specifications. Decamped to Sweden to work with one of the two major producers of The Constant, she changed the base contours of the groove from ska and reggae and found something new, more monolithic, ethereal and robust.

She had started thinking about the planet-straddling 80s pop-rock of early Duran Duran and Psychedelic Furs; that unique amalgam of intimate words and epic sounds that have been spruced-up and modernised by one of her contemporary favourites, The Killers (‘Brandon is awkward and angular. That’s sexy to me’). To a girl born in 1991, these 80s sounds were both alien and transgressive. The thought of that kind of music humming from the generic programming of popular radio excited her. Her producer Klas, notable for his sonic involvement with Robyn – another very singular pop star – agreed. Within two months they had fashioned a fresh mission statement for I Blame Coco. The sound of the interior life of a complex woman of 19 lost in another musical stratosphere. Bold and bright, personal and direct.

Coco says that she likes to visit new and unusual places when she is writing lyrics, something that has to happen in a particular manner for her. ‘The words come from specific places in my head. I don’t try and make sense of a lyric when I’m writing it at the time, only afterwards. It’s good to let the subconscious in.’