For a few moments before Imogen Heap begins her concert at the recently concluded Bacardi NH7 Weekender in Pune, there is restlessness and excitement among the scores of people cheering for Heap. While her assistants come and set up the The Dewarists Stage with various kinds of musical instruments (which looked like equipment straight from a musician’s laboratory), the audience gets just a tiny sense of what a performance Heap has lined up for the evening. And then as she arrives on stage armed with just her voice, she takes everyone by surprise by the sheer dexterity in her ability to swiftly sway across the stage playing one instrument after another, leaving the audience spellbound.
Heap asserts that she doesn’t like to deal with things that she doesn’t want to deal with, and credits her team that allows her to have the creative time to be herself, and of course, to experiment more and more with her specially designed “music gloves”. “I have been delegating more in the last couple of years. I’ve taken on a studio technologist, who helps me set up the gloves and set up the studio so I don’t have to. It’s been great because I have so much more space to do other things and start other projects now. It’s something I hesitated to do for a long time because I had wanted to do everything myself. Sometimes though, that stops you from being yourself because you have to do the boring stuff. So it’s great to have found people to do that boring stuff,” says Heap.
Having been trained to play the piano, the cello and clarinet, Heap says with all modesty that she hasn’t mastered even one. “Perhaps the only instrument that I’ve mastered is my voice, but that too still needs work. There are still areas in my voice that I can’t really reach properly. I don’t practise; I’m terrible,” she admits sheepishly, but adds that it’s the creative muscle she works on. “I work on the creative muscle a lot and across many different media. But I’m not a virtuoso. I did learn a little bit about a lot of instruments, which probably gives the impression that I’m quite good. I feel comfortable with many different kinds of instruments — percussion or string instruments,” explains Heap.
There’s a certain distinctive identity that Heap has created for herself. She never thought twice about being a musician. “Ever since I was very small, it was always music for
me. For a while I would look out at the stars and think that it’d be great to be an astronaut, but in the end, it was always music. I didn’t want to be a pop musician. I wanted to write music for orchestras, and I didn’t see myself being a singer. I’d write songs for fun, but I’d write music seriously. What was my hobby became my work and I often have to remind myself that this is fun and that if it isn’t fun, then something’s wrong,” she says.
One of Heap’s interesting aspects is the inclusion of technology in music, but at the same not being a genre that uses technology too heavily. “Technology is inseparable from contemporary music. People who say they don’t use a computer when they’re making music are lying. It’s a means to a creative end,
not the creation itself. For me, technology has always been a friend and I’ve never been restricted, except while making the gloves, but never in a sense that it was getting the better of me. I always felt like we were working together
and it was a way to make music possible. In the
past, you would’ve had to rent out a studio for a
thousand pounds a day and you only had one shot
and consequently very restrictive because you couldn’t ever really
experiment much. But
now, you can experiment till the cows come home and really find yourself,” she says.
Being at ease with technology also highlights her strong presence online. “My online presence is quite important, as it is my personal connection to the rest of the world; it connects me with people I don’t know. I also love the spontaneity, as it allows me to share and collaborate instantly when I am feeling creative, unlike the old days when you had to wait for weeks for the press or the radio to share something,” she says.
Heap believes in taking each day as it comes,
and isn’t very good at planning (much to her boyfriend’s dismay!). “In some ways, my life is planned out for me a year or two in advance — you know the cycle of an album and then you have tour it afterwards, but I never would’ve guessed in a
million years that I’d be writing a song in China with the city. I never imagined that I would’ve been able to create a song with sounds of people from all over the world from the sound of a teapot to the sound someone punching their teeth to the sound of car horns and turning it into a piece of music. In some ways it feels silly to plan because the world moves so quickly. Of course, I do have goals like wanting to write more casual music. I want to learn how to integrate dance better and have more movement for me on stage and be free of my gear. That’s part of the reason behind designing these gloves. And then, I know that at some point I would like to have children,” she says.
“One of the things I enjoy the most is being in a studio late at night and everything is in a flow. I know exactly where everything is in the studio and if I want make something, I know how to get there, make a sound and go off on a tangent for many hours and come out with something that I think sounds really good. I can’t really do that on stage because it looks really boring, just tapping on to a computer. So if I could do this with the gloves, if I could have the same journey through making and changing a piece of music and improvising, it would be really exciting,” she says.