You might have heard Indiana’s single Solo Dancing last year. It made the top 20 and got played on BBC Radio 1. Moreover, it stood out by dint of being understated in an era when most mainstream pop stars seem to think subtlety is a village in Languedoc that’s had a lot of one-star reviews on TripAdvisor – I might have heard of it, but I’m certainly never going there. While the rest of the singles chart was either frantically grinning and doing jazz hands inches away from your face, or theatrically boo-hooing its way through ballads, Solo Dancing glowered in the shadows. It offered a tense, electronic pulse, topped off with a murmured vocal. The lyrics, depending on your interpretation, were either the negative image of Robyn’s Dancing on My Own – in which the titular activity was symbolic not of heartbreak, but empowerment and self-reliance – or were fit to join the the pantheon of songs about masturbation, which includes the Who’s Pictures of Lily, Cyndi Lauper’s She Bop and Kevin “Bloody” Wilson’s I Gave Up Wanking. A certain amount of grist was given to the latter theory’s mill by the video, which featured the singer literally flicking a bean, beating some meat and choking a chicken.
If that seemed intriguing, then so did the woman behind it. Amid the fresh-faced Brit School alumni and squeaky graduates from The X Factor, Indiana (AKA Lauren Henson) is a 27-year-old mother of two from Nottingham with a fondness for Gary Numan and Joanna Newsom.
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by Alexis Petridis via Electronic music | The Guardian
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