AP: What are those fixed ideas? Is there one question you keep trying to answer or a visual identity you always draw from?
SSD: When I first started, my university was right next to Harrow School and it became about looking at British institutions like Harrow or Eton and how the culture of learning is so different in those institutions to the ones I went to or the ones my friends went to. It is about dissecting the uniform of the British public school, which was the initial concept and is ever-evolving and ever-present. This season we added to it and looked at The Last Hurrah by Dafydd Jones, which is a photo series of Oxford graduates at their last celebratory party. There are images of Boris Johnson and a great one of Nigella Lawson. It’s rich kids behaving badly, tearing it up. All of these different things came together along with the final reference, which was this found diary of an Oxford grad from 1935 – he would start each entry with, “Today, in Elliot’s room…” It was about this guy he fell in love with in a shared dormitory space, the show itself became an abstract idea of this shared space between them.

AP: I love that. It’s so interesting, I actually just bought this 90s book by Adrienne Salinger called In My Room: Teenagers in their Bedrooms. She went and photographed these kids in their bedrooms and gave them the chance to have a short interview speaking about their lives and created this little time capsule. When you’re a teenager, everything you own and everything that you are is in that one room, there is something so tactile and beautiful about that. There is something so intimate and I love the idea of warping the space into something that feels surreal. Diaries, journals and that kind of writing has always moved me, it’s at the core of what I do.
SSD: I want to flip the question to you, I suppose me doing a show would probably translate into you writing a record. Writing a record is a larger consolidation of time than a show because of how frequently we do them but I was going to ask how you start, what was the point where you found what you were going to explore for My Soft Machine?

AP: With me, records almost happen accidentally. They usually start in the limbo after I’ve finished a project. There is a very specific freedom I feel when I’ve detached from what I’ve made and I’m looking towards the new. There is always this phase at the beginning, an absorption phase where I’m listening to and reading as much as possible. Brainstorming and mood boarding, collecting what I like and what I’m moved by at that moment. I almost trick myself, because when I set the intention I’m always like, “I’m going to create an album with this theme, on this timeline,” and sometimes I feel so suffocated by that. So I go to the studio and I’m like, “I’m just going to make some things, see what happens,” and approach it as me being in home studios with some of my best friends experimenting. With this last record, I centred on a theme of love and having more courage to move away from speaking about characters in this fly-on-the-wall sense and speaking from my perspective, because I use these characters’ names I never really owned my emotions or [was never] vulnerable in a direct way. The phrase itself, My Soft Machine is from the Joanna Hogg film, The Souvenir. My Soft Machine is the prism of my body, my brain, and the light filtering through that – it comes out in a very frank and honest way. That revealed itself to me at the end though, I had written these songs I loved and then I traced the threads through it. The name comes at the very end because I need to know exactly what I’m describing before I find the name.
SSD: Amazing. It’s interesting to hear you say it threads together at the end because it sounds like such a consistent body of work. It’s so impressive and exciting. I think that way of approaching work, in the sense of not forcing a timeline, is the way I might one day approach fashion. There is a strange timeline in this world.

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