Isobel Anderson: Music as Medicine

Words by Ruth McLeod

Photos by Charlotte Steeples

In the depths of last winter, musician and sonic artist Isobel Anderson found herself alone at an Abba night in a caravan park in Romney Sands. She’d booked a week-long stay in the flat, featureless coastal landscape near Dungeness, to creatively explore the subject of existential grief for a new project, End Times. And it’s fair to say Abba hadn’t featured in her plans. But the brightly lit caravan park full of people dressed up, living their lives in contrast to the dark desolation of the surrounding environment, is the perfect microcosmic metaphor for Anderson’s focus.

“End Times is all about the very odd experience of living through the multiple existential collapses that are hovering in the air,” she says. “There’s Gaza, the climate crisis, the erosion of democracy and human rights. These things feel close and also far away, big systems collapsing in fast forward and slow motion at the same time. You feel powerless, and you also can't even stay feeling angry or upset because real life happens, you move on, you live. You’re kind of numbed to it.”

Isobel needed a way to step away from her day-to-day life. “I wanted space to feel this epic sense of grief that I feel I'm not allowed to feel, because the end hasn’t happened yet,” she says, “in this really poignant-but-stagnant landscape where it feels like it has.”

Anderson, who lives in Hastings, is a creative force. She’s self-released four albums which have won her famous fans and racked up more than 30m streams on Spotify. She’s also an academic, with a PhD in the male-dominated subject of sonic arts, and an educator who runs online courses in music production, alongside a podcast, Girls Twiddling Knobs, that are helping to address and redress the gender balance.

For her latest project, Anderson has returned to the caravan park several times, having fallen in love with this ‘cozy-but-sinister’ creative haven. Though dealing with the theme of endings, for Anderson this represents a significant artistic reawakening. It’s been eight long years since she’s been able to sing, play or produce music, after suffering with health issues so debilitating at times they have stopped her speaking, sitting down and even texting. But when you meet Isobel, who’s all warm smiles and strong opinions, it’s clear there’s very little that could fully cage her creativity.

Anderson’s own story is about finding that crucial chink of light in the dark, over and over again; turning endings into new beginnings.

“End Times is all about the very odd experience of living through the multiple existential collapses that are hovering in the air,” she says. “There’s Gaza, the climate crisis, the erosion of democracy and human rights. These things feel close and also far away, big systems collapsing in fast forward and slow motion at the same time. You feel powerless, and you also can't even stay feeling angry or upset because real life happens, you move on, you live. You’re kind of numbed to it.”

As a dyslexic kid growing up in Lewes, singing always made a unique kind of sense to Isobel. It came to her much more easily than the schoolwork she struggled to complete, and she had an exceptional voice, the kind that could stop people in their tracks or move them to tears.

“I remember I was 10 years old and was given a solo in the school choir. I got this immense reaction from the audience. I was struggling academically and a lot of life felt quite hard. In this one moment, it just worked, I loved it. Music became such a big part of my identity.” 

Everyone who heard Anderson sing predicted Adele-levels of fame for her. But, after completing a degree in music and spending three demoralising, cash-strapped years based in a bug-infested attic in Ealing, working all day and playing her thoughtful, folk-tinged songs on the London gig circuit at night, Anderson gave up on the idea of a music career. “I felt like there was this glass ceiling that, unless you knew the right people, you were just never going to punch through.”

Things changed when she serendipitously came across a scholarship to do an MA in sonic arts at Queens University’s state-of-the-art facility in Belfast. She took a punt, applied, got it and packed her bags. After a shaky start, and as one of only two women in a class of 17, she did so well she was offered a funded PhD place. “It was this turning point, as a dyslexic person,” she says. “I ended up really loving academic writing.”

She also began making music again. “Belfast was so different to London,” she says. “I had access to beautiful studios, and I had these songs in me, so I recorded them. When I put out my first album, I got a lovely reaction. There was just a great community there - you didn't have to knock on doors, they were wide open. Gradually, it coaxed me back into making music.”

“I felt like there was this glass ceiling that, unless you knew the right people, you were just never going to punch through.”

 Her second album was picked up by Jamie Cullum and played on national BBC radio in 2010. Her third was championed by DJ Lauren Laverne the year after. And her growing popularity on Spotify earned her her first royalty cheque just as her PhD funding came to an end.

But, as the rest of her life seemed to be falling into place, in 2012 Anderson’s health had declined sharply, and was about to reshape her world. First, at the end of her first year doing the PhD, a month before she was due to play one of Glastonbury’s main stages, Isobel developed severe tinnitus. “It's amazing how quickly it completely transforms your world,” she says. “I went from normal hearing to hearing a glaring siren day and night. I still performed at Glastonbury. But I really quickly became suicidal.”

After two years of waiting lists, trial and error and therapies including in-ear sound generators, which constantly pumped out white noise and gradually helped to reprogramme how her brain was responding to sound, Isobel reached a point where she no longer noticed it.

But an alarming pattern began to emerge. After a minor infection, Anderson then developed chronic pelvic pain, which she believes was caused by a similar bodily response to that which caused her tinnitus. “The pain just grew and grew,” she says. “Soon I couldn't sit for more than five minutes.” She put her PhD on hold, moved back to her parents’ house and endured two more years of painful experimentation with different drugs and treatments, gradually building up to being able to sit for 20 minutes at a time.

Then a swimming injury in her shoulder became chronic and stopped her being able to play guitar. Then, when she was back in Belfast typing her thesis, she got tendonitis in her wrists, and that became chronic. “Then I strained my voice and that became chronic. For six months I couldn't speak, text, type, or write. I was genuinely just sort of locked in. I felt incredibly low again.” 

Somehow, during this six-year period, Anderson still managed to record and release her third and fourth albums, the latter CHALK/FLINT, her most ambitious yet. “You have to keep living,” she says. “Music can be a release for all the frustration. If you have any kind of disability or chronic illness, it’s important to find a way to do at least some of the stuff that’s in your heart.” 

When she was no longer able make use of her significant knowledge for her own practice, she started to think about how to offer it up to others. In 2018 she came up with the idea of an online course, tailored to women, to counter some of the many issues they face in the male-dominated field of music production.

“I really care about women's experiences in music,” she says, “both from my experience of learning, but also being a woman - performing, writing, self-producing, self-releasing, being physically assaulted, undermined, not being taken seriously by an A&R person who called me ‘a piece of meat that hadn't been cooked yet’, men wondering why I wanted to do a PhD in sound, when I could just have a man in a studio produce me... I knew women often drop out of music tech courses because they're the only woman in the room. There needed to be a space where they could learn without the fear of judgment or mansplained to.”

With her voice partially recovered, Anderson launched a Facebook group called The Female DIY Musician, where she’d discuss issues such as imposter syndrome, releasing music or collaborating. She also relocated to Hastings to be closer to her family, a move she credits for the gradual improvement of her health.

When lockdown hit, she hit go on her first full online course, Home Recording Academy, and her award-winning podcast, Girls Twiddling Knobs, followed. With the podcast, Anderson wanted to bring conversations that often happen behind closed doors into the light, while highlighting women in the industry.

“It’s really illuminating meeting so many of these pros,” Isobel says. “For me, going through a long phase of not making music, it's felt important to stay connected to it. And I will do solo episodes of the podcast, where I get to nerd-out on a particular topic, like being assertive in recording studios.”

As well as teaching the 500-plus women who have taken-up her 10-week course to date, Anderson has now made 106 episodes of the free-to-access podcast, which have been downloaded more than 100,000 times.

“People have emailed me and said, ‘I recorded an album because of this podcast’. Or ‘When you talked to this guest, the penny dropped’, which is amazing,” Isobel says. “The impact it has made is so much bigger than it would have been if I'd taken a more conventional path like lecturing.”

In December, after five years of focussing on it full time, Anderson is bringing Girls Twiddling Knobs to an end, with all episodes being archived at the British Library to ensure its continued impact. With her health recovering, Anderson wants to see where her own creative practice might lead her next.

“It feels a bit like the end of Mary Poppins, where it's like, Girls Twiddling Knobs has done what it needed to do. That’s not to say the work is done, but I've played my part. I need to carve out my own space to be a flawed, messy, searching artist again.”

Anderson has many small projects bubbling away, but her main focus is on End Times. “It will be multifaceted, an experimental live performance, possibly an installation, and there will be a musical component as well, that will be released as an album. I'm starting singing lessons, learning to trust my voice again. It's me stepping back in, but very gently.” 

Every stage of Anderson’s journey to this point has required fight, resilience and reinvention, so she’s due a bit of gentle. But Isobel’s refusal to give up is a much-needed force in times so tumultuous they regularly send her to her New Romney caravan. Though End Times deals with themes of grief and collapse, Isobel intends for it to shine like a beacon.

“I don't think it's a coincidence that, with everything that's happening in the world, I've felt really called to come back to my voice,” she says. “Listening to someone sing is so simple, but it can be so powerful. It can be like a light in the darkness.”