Biography
Iris Kellaway is twenty-two and from Gillingham, which is one of the Medway towns, which is a river with cranes on it and a fast train to London she could always see and rarely afford.
She writes folk-shaped pop songs on a dreadnought with a dead top string, records them in her bedroom into an interface she has had since she was seventeen, and buries things underneath the choruses โ a train, a telly in another room, a party conference on the radio, an argument she should not have been recording. Nothing is straightened onto a grid. The count-ins stay in. So does the chair.
The voice is close and quick and unmistakably from where it is from. She talks into a melody at the pace of an argument and then the chorus opens up and stays open, and quite often it stops halfway through a word, because that is where she ran out of the thought.
Her subject is having been watched since before she could agree to it โ a childhood documented by adults, then by herself, then by a machine that got better at it than either. Around that: heat that is not a metaphor, floods on a river she grew up next to, rent, deposits, a ladder with the bottom rungs sawn off.
And the thing underneath all of it, which is that every offer she has been made points backwards. A decade to get back to, a border to restore, a photograph of the country to be arranged back into โ and someone always has to be moved out of the frame for the photograph to come out right. She is not resigned about this and she is not asking for it to be knocked down. She would turn up to a construction site tomorrow. She cannot find one. There is a difference between believing there is no future and noticing that nobody is selling one, and almost everything she writes sits in that gap.
Which is awkward, given that she makes this argument in nylon strings and close harmony stacks borrowed wholesale from 1971. It has been put to her in every interview she has ever done. The answers have been, in order: a joke, a theory about form and content that did not survive contact with a follow-up question, and finally "I know. I'm working on it."
Then there is another country, four thousand miles away, that she has never visited and cannot stop watching. The American songs are not about America. They are about not being able to look away from it.
She is the last person who would claim to be above any of this. She is on her phone. She says so, on stage, in the middle of songs about being on her phone, and then notices that saying so is also content, and says that too. The recursion is where most of the good lines come from.
She plays sitting down. She will not do call-and-response. She ends sets abruptly and there is no encore, because she told the promoter in advance there wouldn't be one.
"Extremely online, entirely aware of it, and not shutting up."