When alternative dance-pop-cum-Balearic producer, musician and DJ Lou Hayter wants inspiration she knows where to look. Studying the best – from Rodney Jerkins to Prince by way of Moodymann and Wally Badarou – has enabled the former New Young Pony Club keyboardist to serve her apprenticeship and ensured she can make the records she always wanted to. Her new album, the fantastic ‘Unfamiliar Skin’, is the product of everything she has learned, as she tells Jim Butler: “I think you have to trust that everything works out in divine order…"

Like a lot of children born comparatively late after their older siblings Lou Hayter jokes that she shouldn’t be here. “I was an accident,” she smiles. “They were all ten years-plus older than me.”

Musically, however, there were considerable advantages to be gained from such an age gap. Her elder siblings constantly fed her a comprehensive diet of sounds. She recalls being obsessed with Level 42’s ‘Something About You’ and listening to The The’s ‘Uncertain Smile’ on her Walkman. 

“Weirdly, I can remember wanting to sample the start of ‘Uncertain Smile’ when I was really young,” she says. “All the stuff that I liked when I was sort of five and six, I’m still equally fascinated with now. I think that children can really understand music. I understood it from that age. My brother was playing me Erik Satie’s ‘Gymnopédies’ and ‘Gnossiennes’ and the ‘Betty Blue’ soundtrack. They encouraged me to play that on the piano.”

Chatting to the versatile Hayter – no doubt she’d be described in some quarters as a multi-hyphenate given her various roles as musician, singer, producer, DJ, musical director and style maven – and it soon becomes apparent that for her music and time are inseparable. Her narrative arc is not so much linear, rather an enticing and circuitous trip back and forth through the various musical landscapes of the last few decades. 

A native Londoner, she speaks excitedly about going to Metalheadz at The Blue Note as a teenager and attending Gilles Peterson’s That’s How It Is at Bar Rumba. “I really appreciate those things,” she recalls today. “All this stuff that people are looking back to now has become legendary and I’m really happy that I was there at that time soaking everything up. I bought every Masters At Work record I could get my hands on, every Moodymann, every Photek, every Metalheadz release… I know that informed what I’m doing now and I’m pleased that I was there at that time.”

By the time the 90s had sashayed into the 00s, Hayter had graduated to working within the culture she had embraced at hip east London labels Nuphonic and Trevor Jackson’s Output. “If you can call it work,” she laughs. “I don’t really know what I was doing!”

This was the era when the glitz of electroclash morphed into the earthier sounds of the international punk funk disco. It was a time of LCD Soundsystem, 2manydjs, Erol Alkan’s Trash, Felix Da Housecat and more. Tellingly, her favourite producer from that period was the vastly underrated Maurice Fulton; she gushes admiringly when mentioning Fulton’s work on his wife MU’s ‘Afro Finger and Gel’ album – the track ‘Let’s Get Sick’ in particular.

“I’m still completely obsessed with that record,” she says. “And then he put out the Syclops stuff. Trevor was doing The Rapture and LCD Soundsystem. We’d go to their first gigs and Tiga was putting out ‘Burning Down (London’s Burning)’ and we were going to raves, going to Sonar. I was DJing too. It was such a great time, it was so exciting, but I was really into what Maurice was doing which was slightly out of that I thought. That stuff he made was timeless for me.”

All of which, in a suitably roundabout fashion, is to say that the music Hayter makes is a captivating blend of her various musical passions: the sparse and intricate melodic classicism of Satie; the ecstatic Sturm and Drang of the dancefloor; the wildly colourful flavours of pop music (she’s an avowed fan of Prince, Madonna and co) and the majestic production of 70s outfits like Steely Dan and the Average White Band, both of whom she’s covered to stunning effect.

Her latest album, the dazzling ‘Unfamiliar Skin’ is easily one of the year’s landmark releases and contains aspects of all of the aforementioned, but takes her songwriting into fresh, yet familiar, climes. If her debut album, 2021’s ‘Private Sunshine’ was “sunshine-y and yacht rocky – an LA vibe”, this is a “bit less saccharine – more of a minor key thing”. And rather than a specific or emblematic city, ‘Unfamiliar Skin’ evokes – for Hayter at least – “outer space”.

“I was very into ‘What About Us’ by Brandy, which is [produced by] Rodney Jerkins,” she explains when asked about a sounding board for ideas. “There was this kind of space age moment in time in 00s R’n’B and I was really fixated on that. It might not translate into how you hear the record, but I felt like that particular moment in the early-00s when ‘What About Us’ came out was very now and I wanted to get into that.”

That crazy, sexy, cool period of end-of-the-century-into-the-00s R’n’B (think artists like Missy Elliot, Aailyah, TLC, Destiny’s Child – just not the ballads – and producers such as Jerkins, Timbaland and The Neptunes) was praised by none other than Andrew Weatherall and led fellow musical dissident Leila to dub the best of these otherworldly productions “mad, slow techno”. 

“It’s the really futuristic stuff I’m interested in,” she explains, before pointing to the album track ‘OK OK’ – all decelerated beats, eerie electronics and off-kilter strings – as an example of how that sound found its way into her music.

‘Unfamiliar Skin’ then is an album for after-hours adventures. The Mr Fingers-like proto-house shuffle of ‘3AM’ might be the most obvious example, but the neon-heavy vibe is apparent in the electro-not-electro ‘808 Beat’, while the Manga-inspired video for the slo-mo Balearic chug of ‘In My Heart’ features a cartoon Hayter riding around an endless night-time metropolis on her motorbike.

Of course, Hayter is no stranger to the vibrant antics of the night. A DJ since the age of 19 – she used her student loan to buy her first set of decks – today, she regularly spins at fashion parties for the likes of Chanel, Chloe, Paul Smith, Alexander McQueen and Miu Miu, having previously played at clubs such as Pikes, Homoelectric and fabric. Her catholic tastes, powers of curation and her innate ability to understand what cuts through – all honed behind the decks – have super-charged ‘Unfamiliar Skin’, although ask her how her DJing feeds into her music and she’s unsure how to answer.

“I don’t really know,” she replies. “I get asked that a lot. I suppose putting things together when I’m mixing inspires me with tunes.”

She’s more assured, however, when quizzed on the move into soundtracking the world of catwalks and compressed watermelon sushi. “I like the environment to be honest,” she beams. “This is something I can do in London; I’m not having to fly all over the place. I like working with a client and a brief and having an assignment and making sure that I do a great job.”

These nocturnal voyages also find expression in another of the album’s themes: love, passion, heartbreak, desire, unrequited romance, sex… These of course have long been the lingua franca of pop music and ‘Unfamiliar Skin’ is no different. The title was culled from a conversation Hayter had with a friend concerning why people had affairs (“What is it about the unfamiliar skin that makes people have affairs? What is this pull that the unfamiliar skin has?”) and she’s unapologetic about exploring another suite of songs dedicated to affairs of the heart.

“It’s probably the thing that I gravitate towards in songs,” she says. “Well, it definitely is. My engineer would say: ‘Oh, another one about love!’ My brother calls them bad boyfriend songs. There’s always something to write about. Or good boyfriend songs; ‘Cherry On Top’ (from ‘Private Sunshine’) was a nice happy love song. You can go either way.”

And while tales of doomed ardour (or happy infatuation) might sound autobiographical, Hayter is quick to point out oftentimes she’s detached from the subject matter; on other occasions the confessionals can be cathartic. “It’s all of those things, yeah,” she explains. “I might write a song about someone and it might sound like I’m completely broken-hearted, I’m not really, it’s a song. There’ve been lots of times where it’s a case of: ‘At least I got a song out of that.’

“Even the sleeve of ‘Cherry On Top’. I was on holiday and this boy asked me to send him a photo. So, I sent him that and I thought it was quite a nice photo. So, that became the sleeve. I got a good sleeve out of that. Other times, I’m just making it all up!”

Despite only releasing her first solo album in 2021, Hayter has been a permanent fixture in the leftfield electronic pop scene since those early days gallivanting around Shoreditch at the turn of the millennium. When former Nuphonic boss Sav Remzi was looking to expand a band he had signed to his new label, Tirk Recordings, he asked Hayter if she could help find him a drummer. Having succeeded she was then asked if she knew anyone that could play keys.

“I said I can,” she says of the fateful conversation that led her to join one of London’s archetypal mid-00s, new rave bands, New Young Pony Club. “I told Andy (Spence, co-founder alongside vocalist Tahita Bulmer) I had Grade 6 piano and he was like: ‘Oh, you’re overqualified!’ I went to a rehearsal and found myself playing at Cargo. I was terrified. I’d never been in a band and suddenly I’m in front of all these people onstage. I thought we’d do a couple of hipster gigs on Brick Lane to ten people and we’re doing festivals in Australia in front of 10,000 people.”

After two albums with New Young Pony Club (and following a Mercury nomination for their ace debut, ‘Fantastic Playroom’), Hayter left to concentrate on her own music. She released a noir-ish new wave single as The New Sins (alongside Nick ‘Boxsaga’ Phillips) in 2008 and then collaborated with Air’s J-B Dunckel on the acclaimed Tomorrow’s World project. “That was a big deal for me,” she says. “I followed Air from their first two EPs.”

She mentions that a second Tomorrow’s World album is finished and sitting on a hard-drive in Paris. “I imagine we will revisit it when we’re both ready. I’d love for it to come out.”

Although it’s been a meandering journey from New Young Pony Club to here, Hayter is thankful for the scenic path she’s taken. She talks about the last two decades resembling an apprenticeship in how to make a record. 

“I think you have to trust that everything works out in divine order,” she notes sanguinely. “If I had put stuff out back then I might have disappeared by now, whereas I have a whole new career as a solo artist, which is 15 years on from when I was in that band, so I see it as quite a blessing to be honest. I trust that everything worked out for the best.”

This drawn-out preparation, allied to her magpie tendencies, has involved studying the best musicians and producers out there. On a fundamentally practical level she explains that the way she’s learned to make records – she produced ‘Unfamiliar Skin’ – has been by studying the best.

“I very much aspire to American R’n’B production,” she states simply. “How they get records sounding that good. I always want everything to sound really good. I study Rodney Jerkins like a hawk. I’m fascinated by him; I think he’s unbelievable. I’m obsessed with The Neptunes and Timbaland. I’m obsessed with Quincy Jones and Prince. You can learn things. You can listen to a record and ask: ‘What are they doing?’ and deconstruct it. ‘Oh, they’ve bought a hi-hat in in the chorus, they’ve put a sub on the one here, they’ve dropped all the drums out here and pushed them back in again.’ Little tricks like that I’ve taken into this record. It doesn’t sound like Rodney Jerkins at all. But you can try!”

Another major influence on ‘Unfamiliar Skin’ are the records made at Chris Blackwell’s Compass Point Studios in the Bahamas in the early-80s when the likes of Grace Jones, Talking Heads, Tom Tom Club, Mick Jagger, Gwen Guthrie, Joe Cocker and more, all received the unique new wave disco sound of the Compass Point Allstars house band. Indeed, the opening track, ‘Scorpio’, is built around a Wally Badarou sample from the synth wizard’s ‘Fisherman (I-Theme)’.

“I’m fascinated by all of the Compass Point output,” she says. “I would love to make a record that sounded like it was made at Compass Point, instead I’m working in Brixton. Sly and Robbie, Chris Blackwell, Alex Sadkin, Wally Badarou… they’re the best of the best. Whatever they were capturing had this magic to it, that’s the only way I can describe it and when I make a record I always look for magic. If it doesn’t have that I don’t make it. I will only work on songs that I know have the magic to me.”

Lou Hayter then; she might be an accident, but her magical music is anything but. And for that we should all be thankful. 

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This article first appeared in issue six of Disco Pogo.

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