For Sydney-born, Melbourne-based singer, songwriter and visual artist
Bertie Blackman, the boundaries between her self and the songs she
writes are, she says, “mostly pretty blurred and intangible.”

Speaking about her recently released fourth album, Pope Innocent X,
Blackman admits that the album is not so much a collection of songs as
it is “a volume of small stories, moving pictures, pieces of me, told
in musical form.”

Coming three years after her ARIA-winning Secrets and Lies, the album
represents a marked change in direction for Blackman, both musically
and lyrically. It is, she reckons, “much braver, bolder and closer to
the bone than anything I have written before. I really reveal a lot of
myself in these songs.”

Written during six months spent in Chicago, where she holed up in a
small flat, surrounded herself with books and pounded out rhythms on
tabletops, Pope Innocent X was then slowly fleshed out in Melbourne,
where she worked closely with acclaimed composer and producer François
‘Franc’ Tètaz.

“When I came back from Chicago, I went to Franc and asked if he wanted
to work on a few songs with me. We didn’t set out to do the entire
project together initially because he wanted me to keep writing. I had
this collection of songs and he was like: ‘Well, three of them are
good,’ just insofar as what I had said to him, about wanting each song
to be a creation of a world,” Blackman says.

“Looking back, a lot of them were probably sounding the same, as
though they came from the same sort of world, so his comments did make
sense. He understood where I wanted to go and he wanted to, I guess,
push me to reach that place. I wanted each of them to really very much
be representative of a different little world, so there was worked to
be done on that because I didn’t want anything to be repeating
itself.”

Blackman says that each of the album’s songs constitutes “a separate,
living, breathing world or entity.” For her, the intense process of
working with and collaborating with Tètaz was fundamental to creating
the album she had dreamed of making.

“When I first started writing, I knew what I wanted to create, but I
wasn’t at all sure how I’d go about creating it. ‘Growl Howl’ was the
first song that I wrote, while in Chicago, and what is now a guitar
riff on there started out as a distorted accordion ruff. Franc was the
perfect person for me to work with because he conceives of things in
this really grand, epic, cinematic way,” she observes.

“I knew that I wanted to create these worlds and, initially, the album
wasn’t going to be a co-write, but it just ended up that we really got
stuck into these songs together and then we wrote new songs. It was
very much an all-encompassing project.”

The album’s enigmatic, religious title was directly inspired by
Blackman’s discovery of the British figurative artist Francis Bacon’s
1953 painting, ‘Study After Velazquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X.’

Though Blackman, the daughter of renowned Australian painter Charles
Blackman, grew up surrounded by visual art, she only happened across
Bacon’s painting when she’d almost completed work on her then still
untitled album.

“My father actually lived in the same building as Bacon for a time in
London, so that was kind of a cool connection to have, but, really,
it’s an amazing painting – really dark and disturbing and brilliant.
The title just really struck a chord with me, the combination of
words. A lot of people find it super disturbing and it is, it’s a
really violent painting, but it’s also compelling, and I was intrigued
by the name,” she reveals.

“I knew I wanted the album to have a title that wasn’t just a wordy,
lengthy collection of words, but more like a name, like you’d have for
a character, you know? The painting is amazing, but so is the title.
It’s so interesting – Pope Innocent! It’s so far from the truth – he
really wasn’t a very nice guy! But it really resonated with me. It’s
not about the Pope, it’s more about how, when you dig deeper, you’re
left with a title that’s kind of interesting and curious.”

Blackman, who also dabbles in the visual arts, ended up doing the
illustrations for the album’s cover and lyrics booklet, though it was
not originally her intention to do so.

It was a conversation with her manager that spurred her on and, she
laughs, “got me to sit down, in the studio, and start drawing and
playing around with things because, as he said, who can illustrate the
worlds in the songs better than I can, having created them?”

The album’s current single ‘Boy,’ boasts a video clip brilliantly
animated by Brisbane’s own Quan Yeomans, Regurgitator frontman and
himself a talented visual artist.

“I know! Who knew? I had no idea! One of my bandmates is really good
friends with him and I was hunting and hunting for animators, but I
only had six weeks and no one could do it, they all said they could do
it for delivery in November, but that didn’t work, it was too late.
So, he e-mailed Quan and that was how we ended up working together.
He’s an incredibly cool and interesting guy,” she says.

“It turns out that he’s really into fairy tales and he’s actually
working on an animated book of his own. He gave me all these great
reference books on, you know, Alaskan fairy tales from the 1600s. One
of my references for ‘Boy’ is Oscar Wilde’s ‘The Happy Prince’ and I
see a lot of myself in that story and in that song. Really, that’s a
lot of what the album explores – the tale of an outsider who just
wants to fit in and sometimes just can’t get it together. I guess it’s
me, really.”

Asked whether Pope Innocent X is an autobiographical album, Blackman’s
response is immediate: “Yes. Absolutely.”

“There’s definitely a sense of exposing myself and of putting things
to bed. Definitely. I mean, there was also a lot of discovery going on
writing this and I felt like I really grew up a lot writing this
record while still kind of regressing into childhood to create the
worlds. I was really self-conscious, really worried what people would
think, the label or management or whoever, and I had to work hard to
let go of that,” she reveals.

“I had this kind of converted barn space in Melbourne and Franc would
come every day and we’d just talk and work. One of the first things he
said was really one of the most important: ‘You’ve got to stop
thinking about what other people are going to think. You’ve got to
stop wanting to make music that’s going to please other people and
just be true to the stories that you’re making and that you’re
telling. That is your job. That is what you have to do.’”

Pope Innocent X is out now through Universal Music Australia.

– Heidi Maier.