Marika Hackman: ‘My fanbase is baby gays, straight guys and old dudes who want their vinyl signed’

When Marika Hackman was a “closeted teenage lesbian”, she was obsessed with The Shins. “When you’re in the closet, there’s a lot of gay yearning,” says the singer-songwriter, “and their music is really good for that.” But she had no idea that her favourite song by the male-fronted indie-rock band was intended as a lesbian love song. It was only 15 years later, when Hackman came to record “Phantom Limb” for her covers album – named, well, Covers, and out on Friday – that she looked into the lyrics. The story James Mercer had dreamt up matched her own to a T. “There was a deeper understanding all along!” says the 28-year-old. “It made it so nice to then sing those lyrics as a queer woman. I don’t want to call it a coincidence because I don’t think it is, but it was an amazing revelation.”  

Hackman’s own music was similarly opaque at first. Her 2015 debut album We Slept At Last, a macabre, medievalesque folk record, was “by no means in the closet”, she says now, but its sensuous body horror distracted from the female pronouns. “Retching through my skin, coughing up love that tastes like spring,” sang the Hampshire-born musician on “Let Me In”. On “Monday Afternoon”, she implored a lover to “breathe it in, the sickly sweet of my rotting skin”.

That album was “quite clandestine” on purpose, says Hackman, padding around the living room of her east London home over Zoom. She had already been wrongly dubbed a “model-turned-musician” thanks to a brief dalliance with Burberry and her friendship with Cara Delevingne, whom she met while at Bedales, the Hampshire public school to which she won a bursary. Having already been missold once, she didn’t want her sexuality to become “a weird, gross selling point”.

By the time her second album came around, she’d overcome that particular hang-up. Swapping the Shakespeare references for nods to The L Word, 2017’s I’m Not Your Man was raucous and swaggering, its lead single “Boyfriend” a f*** you to all the men who’d asked to join in when she kissed her girlfriend. “I held his girl in my hands,” she sang over grungey guitars. “She likes it ’cause they’re softer than a man’s.” Two years later came Any Human Friend, “which is like, peak queer”, says Hackman with a laugh. That record, released last year, tackled cunnilingus, masturbation, reckless infidelity, venereal disease and patriarchal definitions of virginity, and was her best reviewed yet.

The album was written in the wake of Hackman’s break-up with fellow musician Amber Bain (AKA The Japanese House). “There’s no big f*** yous or anything,” she says of both it and Bain’s album, Good At Falling. “It’s all coming from a caring place. It’d be really hard to hear a song from someone that you really cared about who was being really horrible.” If anything, Hackman made herself the anti-hero: “I think that I love her,” she sang on “Come Undone”, “But I’m f***ing another.”

“We’ve heard about being broken up with relentlessly, and we will continue to do so because it is devastating,” says Hackman, “but everyone f***s up and I just thought it’d be good to have a record that really showed the full spectrum of being a human in relationships, and that didn’t sugarcoat it, or make it a self-indulgent cry-along. Falling out of love with someone is incredibly painful. It’s not like you wake up and don’t love someone any more; it’s a horrible process of coming to terms with the fact that something that you thought was gonna last forever won’t, and that’s because of something that shifted within yourself. You have to then take the responsibility and hurt somebody that you really care about. That’s really s***. It’s heartbreaking to discover that you’re not in love.”

If the break-up proved a creatively fertile time, then the pandemic was anything but. Back in the childhood bedroom in which she recorded her debut EP almost a decade earlier, Hackman found herself in an intense period of writer’s block. “There’s so much underlying stress that’s tiring out the creative part of your brain,” she says. “When you sit down to write, nothing is coming out, because your brain is like, ‘I’ve already been using this.’”

So she decided to change tack and retreat into the arms of songs “that I really love”. It wasn't “a pissing contest”, she says – ”I’m not trying to mark my territory all over other people’s songs“ – but an attempt “to sidestep that big old blank page feeling, this endless thing in front of you that you have to pluck something out of. I didn’t want to flog a dead horse, I suppose. Doing covers is a good way of being creative… you learn a lot and it takes out that huge, stressful part.”

Covers, which spans Beyonce, Elliott Smith and Grimes, doesn’t feel like a consolation prize. By necessity a less rowdy affair than Hackman’s last album – she did it all herself, bar the mixing and mastering – it instead wanders the same musical terrain as We Slept At Last. Though Hackman’s gossamer vocals soften a song like Beyonce’s “All Night”, she avoids falling into the trap of so many covers and sanitising the originals in the name of acoustic purity (see Calum Scott’s take on “Dancing On My Own”). Her “All Night” is distorted, expansive and no less sensual than the original, its lyrics – “Kiss up and rub up and feel up on you” – very much in Hackman’s wheelhouse. Her spectral version of Grimes’ “Realiti”, with its spacey synths, vocoders and drum pads, is bursting with life, too. “When you strip the production back, a lot of her songs really do sound like old, eastern European folk songs,” says Hackman, “but I wasn’t going to strip that song back completely, because the production is a huge part of why that song slaps incredibly hard.”

Perhaps the most unassuming of the bunch is “Temporary Loan”, sung originally by the little-known American musician Edith Frost. Hackman kept that one almost exactly as it was – except for the gender pronouns. “If I’m going to be singing what is very obviously a love song,” she says, “it’s easier to emotionally channel something if those lyrics feel relevant to me. And it’s almost a duty as well. Guys who cover women’s songs change the pronouns because they don’t want to come across as if they’re gay. So it’s like, ‘Fine, I’m not gonna come across as if I’m straight!’”

It was fellow musician Laura Marling who introduced Hackman to that song. “I was touring with her ages ago,” she recalls, “and she played that song in the car and it was just one of those moments.” Hackman stayed friends with Marling; at End of the Road Festival in 2015, the pair performed an impromptu Foo Fighters cover in the woods to a smattering of people, Marling smiling conspiratorially at Hackman, her hands in her coat pockets, as she improvised a harmony.

I remind Hackman of something she said about Marling around that time: “Laura is now just viewed as a s***-hot singer-songwriter, not a girl singer-songwriter. She’s one of the only girls out there who’s viewed that way.” Have things improved since then? “I hope so,” she says. “It feels to me like an acceleration. If we’re looking at a petri-dish of bacteria, they’ve all gone f***ing hog-wild in the last five years.”

Then again, she adds, “we’re certainly not a f***ing utopia yet. You look at the proposed Reading line-up this year and that just shows you, doesn’t it? And I get called a songstress. Why do we need to gender a musician in the title? We’re not doing the hundred-metre hurdles. Things like that piss me off. But ultimately, I was getting a lot more pissed off 10 years ago than I am now. So, a positive change, but we’re not at the finish line.”

She is less ambivalent about the progress of queer representation. “My God, the improvement has been wild. It’s just a lot of queer people releasing great music and that’s so nice. I wish I could be seven to 17 again now, and have that around me. But I’m so happy that it’s there now. Having that feeling of non-sensationalised representation around, it just makes you feel like you’re not ‘other’.”

Has Hackman’s fanbase changed since she went “peak queer”, and started singing lyrics like: “We go down on one another/ You’re my favourite kind of lover/ With your kissing, f***ing, kissing, f***ing…”? Not particularly, she shrugs. “I have some baby gays, but I get a lot of straight guys my age, and old dudes who come and hang out at the front and want to get their vinyl signed.”

Back when gigs were allowed, people from all walks of life would stand shoulder to shoulder watching Hackman play. “It’s so nice, because you’ll have a queer couple snogging next to some old dude in a baseball cap who’s singing along,” she says with a smile. “Everyone there just respects the s*** out of each other.”

'Covers’ is out on Friday 13 November