Bar Pandora Q&A

Here at glamglare, we have been in love with the bright, sophisticated synth-pop by UK musician Charlie Tophill, aka Bar Pandora since her song “Vice Vice Vice” was released in the summer of 2022. There is an intriguing story behind the project, so we are very grateful that Charlie answered a few questions about how she arrived at the sound of her new EP Recreate This  

How did you start writing and playing music? Were there specific artists who inspired you?

I come from a line of musical people on my dad’s side, so I think it was baked into my DNA. I had piano lessons aged 4, but I quit pretty soon after I started as I hated being forced to practise. But I played around on the piano all the time, without the pressure of lessons, and I remember being so excited the day I figured out that the chorus to ‘Dreaming’ by Blondie is just 3 notes – the first song I learned to play! 

I started writing as soon as I started playing. Weirdly, just a few weeks ago my best friend from primary school sent me photos of some lyric sheets she found for the band we were in when we were 7. We were called ‘The Rokets’ and at that age I was writing a lot of songs about stars, space and the moon – I guess all the things we would see traveling around in our ‘roket’… 

You have released music already before Bar Pandora. What triggered the start of a new project?

Bar Pandora came at the end of a long line of happenstances. I used to write and perform under my own name but I never felt creatively fulfilled doing it, so when the pandemic hit and all gigs were cancelled I was relieved that I didn’t have to do it any more. It was an eye opening moment for me. When a pandemic comes as a relief, you’ve got to be doing something wrong. So I quit music.

Then about a year after I quit, I accidentally came up with an idea for a song while I was out walking. I went home and wrote and recorded the whole thing in one evening and it felt so different to my previous stuff and so much more me – more than anything else I’d ever written. And the whole process was a revelation. I could do this stuff at home – not go to a studio to crank something out in an expensive few days – but do it myself, have time to play around and experiment, to percolate untried ideas. And the results were so much more exiting. It totally changed the way I write and I decided that was how I was going to work from then on. 

Being a new beginning, I wanted to work under a new name. So I killed off my solo artist and started working as Bar Pandora – a name I’d been sitting on for a couple of years but never had the occasion to use. I was so excited I even wrote a manifesto! It was basically: “Fuck It.” I mean, it was a lot wordier and feminist oriented than that, but that’s what came down to. If you wanna do something but it scares you, or it’s not what’s expected of you then Fuck it, just do it. And that became the foundation of Bar Pandora.

Bar Pandora refers to a literary café in Madrid, where you spend time with inspiring discussions. Do you have an anecdote to share about how this place connects with your music?

That’s right. That café is my happy place – I named the project after it because the mere memory of it makes me feel strong, and you need to be able to tap into some strength for a career in music! 

I was working as an au pair in Madrid, living in a family’s basement and having a terrible time, when I joined a feminist book club started by my friend Alex. We read loads of amazing books and it was like a red wine fuelled crash course in feminist thought. And we met in this literary café, Maria Pandora. It was such an amazing place – it had an antique feel with little lamps, paintings on the walls and shelves full of old books, and they gave you tapas of fizzy sweets with your wine. So we were all wine fuelled and hyped up on sugar, sharing ideas and talking about these books and sharing stories and it was just amazing. Seriously, that book club, that bar, changed my life. I was on the eve of leaving Madrid when I joined the book club, and because of it I stayed – got a new job, moved into a new flat and pretty much levelled up as a person. That’s how good it was. I think if I’d missed that first meeting I wouldn’t have had the strength to quit making the music I wasn’t enjoying, and start having fun the way I have fun making music now. 

For the two EPs, you worked together with producer David Jordan, aka Simply Dread. How did you meet and decide on creating the sound of Bar Pandora?

Dave is actually one of my best friends – we went to school together. We were both going through similar family difficulties and we used to skive off school together and formed a pretty strong friendship then. We tried to start a band in our teens but it was a massive fail – we had too much fun drinking together to ever get round to writing anything beyond the first strum of a guitar. 

It took us many years before we tried again. I’d written a song – ‘Austin’s Birthday’ (unreleased) – recorded it at home and I didn’t know what to do with it next. I was wary of sending it out to mix because I was so used to being disappointed with the results. So I sent the project to Dave and he sent a first mix back a few days later and it was like ‘WOW’. He had absolutely nailed it. I’d been so used to people ironing out all the weird from my songs, but he emphasised all the weird and added a bit more. He pulled out details I hadn’t realised were there.

Then he started sending me over some old offcuts of music that he’d never used – beats, bass parts, weird arps – and I picked them apart, looped them up and started writing with them. For the first EP that’s how we did it – we would send tracks back and forth until it was finished. The first song we wrote that way was ‘Dear Man’. Then ‘Look At Me’, then ‘Vice Vice Vice’ – it all just came together. After years of failing to work together, we discovered that the secret to our working together is to basically never work together. It’s all done remotely, and that works really well for us.

Your songs shine with an intricate production. Can you outline how a piece comes together from the idea to the finished track?

Thanks! The writing process varies, but most of the songs build up around snippets of recorded sound. There will be a beat, a riff, or a field recording that gets sampled and looped to form the basis of the song. It’s been live drums, train sounds, guitar riffs, snatches of a vocal line. I almost never start writing a song from scratch – I like to have a small piece of something to play with before the writing gets serious. 

Because I write and record at the same time, the production is a much more organic process than it would be if I wrote the song in full and then imposed the instrumentation on top of it. I do have one rule though: if I don’t like something, I’m not allowed to get rid of it straight away. Often the stuff that I am immediately freaked out by is because it’s out of my comfort zone. And generally speaking getting out of your comfort zone is always more interesting.

The vocals come late in the process – starting with a melody and some made up word-like sounds improvised along with the track. Then it’s just a case of finding what those words are. I think this is something a lot of writers find, but often the sound is as important as the meaning, so finding a meaning that fits the melody is a puzzle that has to be solved. 

When it’s all done I go to Yorkshire where Dave and I mix it together. Sometimes that’ll be the first time he’s heard the song, so that’s always interesting.

After the release of Recreate This, what is next for Bar Pandora and Charlie Tophill?

Playing live as much as I can, writing as I go. I’m especially excited about the live show I’ve got at the moment. There’s a new line up of the band with Matt Rheeston, who’s an incredible drummer, and the also incredible Indira Lakshmi on bass and synth. We played our first show together earlier this month and they are so much fun to play with! I feel very lucky to have them in my band and I’m going to get out there and play with them as much as I can! Get to new places, meet new people. That’s what it’s all about.

I’ve also started working with Boudica Festival, an organisation which platforms women and non-binary people working in music in the UK, so I’m going to be pouring a lot more energy into supporting others too. This year I’ve been so busy, but chomping at the bit to do more for other people who are under-represented in the industry, and so after the Christmas break I’m going to jump into that with both feet.

Thank you, Charlie! We hope for an opportunity to see your show in the future.