ARIANE X - BETTER
by David Stubbs

‘I thought - you only have one life,’ says Ariane X, though she has packed a great deal into hers thus far - stand-up comedian, scriptwriter, campaigner, author, now pop musician, resuming a career she first took up in her teens.

‘When I first tried to become a pop star, there were no successful solo female Asian artists, and I got disheartened,’ she says. ‘There was no MIA, no Charli XCX, no Bat for Lashes, so it all felt impossible. I did vocal and piano sessions for Duran Duran, my favourite band, and got lots of regular paid work singing and playing piano in hotels and bars - but deep down, I assumed it was unrealistic to try and make it as a solo artist.’

In fact, it may well have been Ariane who was being unrealistic. Having a degree in music production, she approached Warners with her songs and received extremely encouraging feedback. However, she was hampered by a sense of low self-esteem, the result of an extremely abusive childhood, the grim details of which serve as a dark backcloth to her brilliant, sparkling debut album Better, a cycle of love songs dedicated to the light of her life, her daughter. Assuming Warners were simply ‘being nice’, she forsook her budding pop career.

Instead, Ariane invested her creative energies into writing jokes and scripts for shows such as My Family, Two Pints Of Lager and Countdown, as well as self-help books such as How to Live to 100 and The How of Happy. She attained national fame as she created and launched the Atheist Bus Campaign.

However, as lockdown descended, she decided it was high time to revisit her first love – pop music, unabashedly confident in the quality of her songs.

Better is pop indeed, with distant reminders of the halcyon, hazily seductive tones of Saint Etienne, or the exquisitely honed but darkly shaded electropop of Dubstar. But it’s not the sort of pop that’s manufactured merely to fill radio space. These are love songs, wrought like twisted party balloons, lush, undulating, delicious, colourful starbursts, rhythms like galloping unicorns.

However, all of this functions as a sort of anaesthetic for the deep, historical and familial pain expressed in these songs, which Ariane presents unflinchingly, without poetic obfuscation or cryptic evasion. Better is candycoated, blissful but also harrowing, no more so than on the very lovely, very dark ‘Well, Baby’. The album oscillates between delirious happiness and themes of abuse, depression, loneliness and domestic violence, albeit in terms comprehensible to a pre-teenager – hence their stark clarity.

‘I wrote most of the album in lockdown in 2020. It features 12 tracks about my daughter, who is 12, because it was a chance to broach things like my struggles with mental illness and suicidal ideation, and my traumatic childhood. I've always been open with her, but it's easier to play her songs about these things than to talk about them directly. Also, when I am gone, the songs will still be here, and she'll be able to listen to how much I love her.’

Opener ‘Secret Asian’ sets the tone, describing Ariane’s daughter, whose pale features, Ariane sings, mean she is unlikely to face the racism faced by brown people – ‘spit sprayed in your face/being told to go home to a faraway place.’ This is sumptuous, seductive pop but achieved by Ariane alone, produced with a mic, a keyboard, an interface and the software Logic Pro X (hence Ariane X, the ‘X’ exemplifying the duality of the album as a whole – a kiss, or a mark, a scar? Both?)

‘Still Love You’ is cut from the same velvet pop cloth but the register is markedly different, harsh, rapping, as Ariane stoically endures her daughter’s tantrums, flailing and kicking at her, but taking it in understanding of the fraught circumstances of her little girl’s upbringing, her parents separated when she was but months old; a health scare when Ariane found herself in A&E with a suspected heart attack (a false alarm) affirms the bond between them.

‘Kaleidoscope’ sees another shift in the cycle, bursting with a sense of ecstatic peace, in which, thanks to her daughter, ‘nothing aches and nothing hurts’, in contrast to the precipice of a void on which she once stood. But the mood, the sentiment shifts once more with ‘Demons’, which, it turns out, do not belong in the past tense; demons which can only be held at bay with medication. Scary, very real monsters. ‘Not Normal’ is similarly fraught; every day is a great battle there is no getting around.

But then, with a bipolar shift comes ‘Miracle’, in which Ariane demonstrates some of the more nuanced feeling she has towards the idea of religiosity since the days in which she was more militantly atheist. Sure, there is probably no God but there is something of the ‘sacred and divine’ about the way in which providence granted Ariane her daughter.

The rich, instrumental tropicalia of ‘Happy’, in which Ariane contemplates the multiple career futures open to her progeny is then juxtaposed with the anxiety of ‘I’ll Be There’ - that her daughter could end up friendless, loveless, her only assurance her mother’s love, one which she tells her, on the closer ‘Butterfly’ will endure eternally, unconditionally, ‘‘til the stars all fade to black’.

Ariane describes herself as ‘staggered’ by the positive response Better has received - radio interest as well as a record company deal, and a groundswell of enthusiasm among her formidable online fanbase are just for starters. These are not callow songs of innocence but songs of experience - but pop songs just the same.

‘I’m so incredibly excited to be releasing my debut album,’ says Ariane. ‘The feedback I’m receiving from fans who have heard the album at the secret link is absolutely amazing. I can’t wait to see what the world thinks.’