Good Morning, Midnight is the 1939 Jean Rhys novel portraying an alienated woman moving through the present while being confronted with, but not necessarily recognising, her own past. In the book, Sasha Jensen wanted to be acknowledged but also unseen. Good Morning, Midnight the album is the first by Becky Becky, the new persona of Gemma L Williams, who previously recorded as Woodpecker Wooliams. She said goodbye to that guise at a show where she performed naked. The novel's alienation reverberates throughout the album.
On Good Morning, Midnight, she is joined by Peter Mason, formerly of Fence Collective. Where both Woodpecker Wooliams and Fence Collective were folk but boundary-stretching, Becky Becky is electropop – the pair could have been a standard-issue electropop duo. They aren’t.
The dominant voice in Becky Becky is that of Williams, not just because she sings. The album is an autobiography of her now-over relationship with Mason and the subsequent fall-out. The lyrics are suffused with anomie, uncomfortably raw and hopefully metaphorical or overstated. The pair admit the influence of the unvarnished Dogme 95 film style. Musically, the album has roots in Eighties electropop, the electroclash craze of 15 years ago and Sweden’s The Knife, but Good Morning, Midnight is not just about the chosen style.
If there is a parallel for Good Morning, Midnight, it’s not from the world of contemporary electropop. Instead, it’s in another recent album which also took female-written literature and refracted it through the lens of the artist’s own experience and the world in which they live. Last year, Julia Holter’s Loud City Song did exactly this with Colette’s Gigi. Although in no way musically similar to Holter’s album, with Good Morning, Midnight a similarly bold use of literature has inspired this absorbing, claustrophobic, intense and strange album. It is not available from mainstream outlets. Hunt it out.
Overleaf: watch an interview with Becky Becky
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