Katy Steele’s foot, clad in a furry mint-green platform, jiggles in time with the music from her mobile phone. “It’s all about the vibes, man,” the singer quips, tapping her hand against her zebra-print jeans and harmonising with UK synth pop artist Ms Ray. “I should have asked for a speaker in my rider though, hey?” she adds with a burst of fizzy giggles.
While a stylist, make-up artist and hairstylist prepare her for an STM shoot, Steele diplomatically offers others the chance to select tunes. “Feel free to DJ anyone,” she says, before adding a cheeky warning: “just don’t put any s... on.”
After 20 years in the music business, Steele knows what she likes. Fake lashes are a constant request on most photo shoots, but Steele isn’t a fan. “I don’t want to look like Lady Gaga,” she jokingly tells make-up artist Hendra Widjaja, before requesting layers of mascara for a “really clumpy” look.
Embracing Simplicity with Undressed
More may be more when it comes to mascara, but Steele is embracing an entirely different ethos for her latest album, Undressed. Released this week, it features a collection of her most beloved songs from both her solo and Little Birdy back catalogue, along with four covers and one previously unreleased track, Honest With Me, all recorded in a stripped-back style.
Some tracks have lush layers of dreamy harmonies, while others are pared back to their bones with little more than vocals and pianos. The stark nature of the recordings showcases Steele’s killer pipes and magnifies the inherent emotion and vulnerability in the songs, particularly in the spectacularly undervalued track Rescue Boat from her 2016 solo debut Human.
The album came about after her publishing company, Sony Publishing, suggested releasing stripped-down versions of her songs. “So last year I just booked a day in the studio with Dan Carroll and we recorded a few songs that formed the basis of the album,” the WA-based singer says.
The song selection came down to which she felt could benefit from a different approach. “Some are songs I felt hadn’t had the right treatment in the first place, like Rescue Boat,” she says. “Sometimes songs can get bogged down by production, which detracts from the beauty and the simplicity.”
A Nostalgic 70s Flavour
There is a nostalgic 70s flavour to Undressed, and Steele admits it was born of wanting to create something less “touched”. “It’s funny, someone asked me the other day if the album is a reaction to the fact there’s so much going on in the world and wanting things to be a bit more simple, and I feel like in some ways it is,” she says. “Everything is so complicated and over the top now but there’s comfort in simplicity.”
Steele was barely out of her teens when Little Birdy formed before releasing their lauded debut album BigBigLove in 2004. She says it is inevitable that her voice has changed and matured over the years, and she relished putting a more mature vocal spin on early hits Beautiful To Me and Relapse.
“Sometimes I cringe listening to those earlier recordings because I was so young and my voice has changed a lot,” says the singer, who has had no formal voice training. “I’m proud of the songs but I was just out of school when I started the band and I’ve basically learnt my craft with an audience watching me.”
She likes to imagine the possibilities for change and adaption are endless for any song. “I see a song almost as its own organism, so when you do a different version, you can just keep expanding and expanding,” Steele says. “I think adding another dimension to songs that you have written in the past is kind of like this cool way of recycling your art.”
Spontaneous Recordings and Surprise Covers
While the majority of Undressed’s songs were recorded last year, Honest With Me and the Michael Jackson cover Ben were among a batch of songs she initially worked on while in Los Angeles more than a decade ago. “It was a really spontaneous recording,” Steele says of the solo session with John Konesky and John Spiker. “Most of the songs were unfinished but Honest With Me came from that session. In the second verse you’ll notice how the lyrics meander a little bit and don’t make a lot of sense, that’s because I was improvising. It was done in one take and I think there’s something really special about it.”
She admits Ben may be a surprise inclusion alongside more expected covers by Lou Reed and The Smiths, but she liked the vulnerability of the song. “It just really fit on the album because it’s so raw and I like that it is kind of left of field,” she says. “Both those songs from the LA session are pretty much one-takes and were used as is. The other ones I did in Fremantle with Dan Carroll have more layers and harmonies. I think it is a nice mix with the sparseness and a few that have a bit more colour.”
Because The Night, written by Patti Smith and Bruce Springsteen, was a more obvious inclusion. “It’s a great pop song and it’s just got real guts to it,” she says. “And I think it really suits a female vocal.”
Finding Her Groove
Steele feels like she found her groove working on Undressed. “This sort of thing is my vibe,” the mum of two primary-school-aged girls says. “And it’s been really fun and liberating. I don’t have a lot of time. Any parent with young kids knows how precious your time is, so I thought, I am just going to go for it. I am going to take a risk. I could have spent three years making this album but instead it took a couple of months and I really enjoyed it.”
The album release will be supported by a small national tour, presented in stripped-back format with just Steele and one other musician on stage. “The shows are going to be cool, really intimate,” she says. “It’s going to be a whole array of songs, from all over the catalogues, Little Birdy, solo and the Undressed stuff.”
She is already thinking about what comes next. “I see this album as volume one,” she says. “I’d love to collaborate with my brother (Empire Of The Sun’s Luke Steele) and my husband (guitarist turned producer Graham McLuskie) for volume two. I want it to be like a live album that is recorded in a lounge room with heaps of harmonies. Just a really nice warm record.”
Little Birdy Reunion and Future Plans
Little Birdy fans will also be happy to know the band’s recent live reunion after a 15-year hiatus may also result in new music. “We don’t want to be that nostalgic band, only playing the old stuff,” she says. “If we are going to keep playing then we want to do new music. It’s hard because we are in three different States but I am going to send the guys some demos — it will be interesting to see if we have still got it.”
Steele says she has gotten used to the juggle that comes with being an independent artist in the ever-evolving music industry. “I basically have about a hundred jobs,” she says. “When you are independent, you do everything. And it’s been really liberating but it’s also a lot of work and it’s a lot of risk, it’s like gambling — I do this and that but that pays for this. It’s a lot of juggling with a young family, too. But that’s the modern way now, not just in music.”
The press release accompanying Undressed calls Steele an artist who has endured, evolved but also managed to stay fiercely true to herself. “Put that on a T-shirt,” she laughs. “But I am proud of never giving up on myself. I could have given up, and I have wanted to, many times. And even now, I have my moments but then I start thinking about what I want to do next. I’m just happy to be releasing music, I really am. I feel like I’ve let go of heaps of baggage about the industry as well. It’s easy to get bogged down by stats and the algorithm and wondering if I even have any fans any more, but I have just let it all go. And I’m just making the music I want to make.”
As her name suggests, Steele has always been made of strong stuff. She was back touring three weeks after the birth of her first daughter, Iona, in 2018 and recently completed a show in Perth after breaking her ribs a few songs into the performance. “It’s amazing what the body is capable of,” she says.
On the day she recorded The Smiths’ cult favourite There Is A Light That Never Goes Out and Stay Wild, the stand-out track from Little Birdy’s last release Confetti, for Undressed, she arrived via the hospital. “I’d been in the ER that day with an eye infection,” she says. “I went straight from the hospital to the studio. My last two, three months have just been insane. Well, even more than usual,” she adds with another spray of fizzy giggles.
Katy Steele plays Rosemount Hotel on May 29. Undressed is out now.
