Sandy Dillon - "Nobody's Sweetheart"

“When I started out I was too young to be making this kind of music” says Sandy Dillon of her work. “I’m kind of comfortable as an old lady’.

The cover shot of Dillon for her last album, Nobody’s Sweetheart, presents instead a face of dramatic sensuality, somewhat reminiscent of Isabelle Adjani, but it’s true that the strength of Dillon’s lyrics, like that of Johnny Dowd’s, resides in their being songs of experience and paradise lost.

Dillon's first album for One Little Indian, Electric Chair (released 1999), combined elegant slide guitar and jazzy double bass with more dissonant electric and acoustic sounds to produce a collection of “mutated blues” songs that drew favorable comparisons with P. J. Harvey and Captain Beefheart’s Magic Band from some reviewers, and aggravated others who saw it as excessively morbid. Whilst songs such as “Pretty Trees”, with the lines: “I put lipstick on your face/Right before you got erased” have a sobering intensity about them, these reviewers seemed to miss the loony-tune black comedy of songs like “Powder Lady” (“You took away my boyfriend/I’m going to make your life end”), or "Too Much Fun", where a potential black widow killer starts to reconsider her plans after her intended victim is prescribed Viagra ("He's a rich man/I plan to kill him off for money(x2)/Maybe I'll do it Sunday, Now we're having too much fun").

Dillon’s second album for One Little Indian, East Overshoe (2001), focused more on the traditional strand in Dillon's music, using the influences of old blues and gospel music to soundtrack a collection of songs that work like a series of vignettes out of Barry Gifford or Flannery O'Connor, presenting a cast of discarded mistresses ("I'm Just Blue"), serpentine evangelists ("Send Me A Dollar"), factory girls ("Rescue Me"), psychopaths ("Hot Potato") and jezebels ("Girls Desperate Measures"). Like the blues music of Robert Johnson and Bessie Smith (or indeed the stories of Gifford and O'Connor), the darkness of the material is mediated by frequent touches of humour and self-assertion by the characters voicing their troubles.

Electric Chair and East Overshoe had been a musical collaboration between Dillon and her husband of 16 years, guitarist Steve Bywater. Steve suffered from MS, which had partially mutilated one hand, and his need to customize instruments combined with a love of the avant-garde had led him and Dillon to design strange musical 'instruments' out of anything from table legs to sex shop vibrators. Steve's influence suffuses those albums, where traditional jazz/blues instrumentation is combined with more dissonant and arabesque sounds from the 'toybox' to produce defamiliarised music. Steve died shortly after recording East Overshoe in 2001, and Dillon's bereavement was followed by a long bout of illness after contracting MRSA (what the newspapers call "The Superbug") during a stay in hospital. "I was in virtual quarantine for a long time" says Dillon, "People had to wear these Perspex 'Donald Duck' masks when they came to see me. But I had a little ukulele in there, so I got to write a lot of songs!"

Nobody's Sweetheart (2003) appeared at first to be a radical change in style for Dillon. With a backing vocal contribution from Heather Nova, sequenced electronic rhythms and violins, and a chorus on one track ("The Stain") that wouldn't sit badly on a Sheryl Crow LP, Nobody's Sweetheart is the most 'accessible' of Dillon's albums for One Little Indian. But although the weirder instrumentation and Magic Band-freakouts that occur on the first two albums are gone here, they find a compelling substitute in the use of pop's more subversive sideroads. "Let's Go For A Drive" pairs a pulsing "Riders on the Storm"-style bass line to whispering cymbals and overlays it with an Angelo Badalamenti-like organ sound to perfectly score this lament for a lost lover. "I wanna feel the wind in my hair with the top pulled down", Dillon sings softly and plaintively, "I wanna hear the waves on the beach make a crashing sound/I wanna live the past, live it all again/When we could feel our hearts beat/We could see the future then". The Jefferson Airplane-like "Can't Blame You Now" has Dillon reminding one of Grace Slick's finest moments, while on "Honeymoonee" a gentle, Beatles-esque backwards guitar track creates a note of optimism while Dillon contemplates the recklessness of desire in almost Keatsian fashion: "Hope springs eternal/Hope springs into the Inferno". More often, though, the album appears to be a collection of torch songs, centred around Dillon's expert keyboard playing and raw vocals, and sugared with ironic pop touches, as if Julee Cruise and Angelo Badalamenti had been up all night drinking bourbon and smoking fags with Jack and Meg White.

Dillon’s next album. “Pull the Strings” (2006), is produced by David Coulter, the associate musical director for “The Black Rider”, a musical fable by Tom Waits, William Burroughs and Robert Wilson, which played at the Barbican Centre in 2004. In that show Coulter’s band are called the Magic Bullets and that’s exactly what he brought sonically to Dillon’s new album. Inspired by the Salvador Dali statue “A Woman Aflame”, which when seen by Dillon seemed to contain all the pent-up emotions of suffering and surviving MRSA, the super bug that strips away the skin and leaves the victim both physically and emotionally ‘aflame’, the title refers to lyrics begging God for forgiveness, written during a phase where the singer became convinced that she was receiving a great punishment for a lifetime spent as a ‘rock‘n‘roll sinner‘.

Pulling the strings onstage with Dillon will be producer/multi-instrumentalist David Coulter on a variety of instruments including the saw, violin, drums and some bizarre stringed instruments from around the world, and Ray Majors on slide dobro, banjo, various electric guitar and percussion, and Dillon herself on harmonium, Fender Rhodes and some “good cheap organs - just like body parts!”. Filmmaker Rik Lander will be creating visual backdrops and lighting to increase the intensity of the performance, which is decidedly theatrical in style, influenced by Dillon’s own experiences, the photography of Cindy Sherman and David Coulter’s work on “The Black Rider”.

Advance copy of the album suggests a set switching between intimacy and raucousness, sensuality and brutality, intellect and emotion. Once again, one is left with the impression of Sandy Dillon as a songwriter with a variety of moods and ideas to convey, and a skill in conveying them that comes from an unusually adventurous approach to music.