“Something I always think about is, what do you need to say, why do you need to say that now — and why do you need to say it? What is it you’re trying to express? They’re questions I maybe don’t start with, but at some point in every piece, I’ll give a good bit of thought to.”
Carmel Smickersgill
Carmel Smickersgill is a Manchester-based composer and performer. After studying at the Royal Northern College of Music with Gary Carpenter, she has had a varied freelance career in music: working in theatre, writing for concert halls and touring with bands. She released EPs We Get What We Get & We Don’t Get Upset and Unsolicited Advice in 2022 and 2025 with PRAH Recordings; she was a 2021 recipient of the Jerwood Live Art Award, a 2020 nominee for the Ivor Novello Rising Star Award and a 2019 recipient of the Rushworth Composition Prize with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra. Carmel’s music has regularly been played on BBC Radio 6 Music and Radio 3; she has performed on Elizabeth Alker’s Northern Drift Radio 3 show in June 2022, and supported Anna Meredith at the Barbican and on her November 2021 tour. Carmel is also one half of Bothy, a group looking to create sustainable working and rehearsal spaces for musicians in Manchester.
We caught up with Carmel over Zoom to discuss grassroots music spaces, accessibility, snarkiness, the Beach Boys, being yourself, and more…
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Zyggy/PRXLUDES: You have an incredibly varied compositional practice that spans across notated music for concert, opera, electronics, theatre, and performing in bands — tell me a bit about how you first got into music?
Carmel Smickersgill: I played guitar, and the flute — but really shit. -laughs- So I played in youth orchestras on flute, but I was really shaky if anyone could hear ever me… Whereas on guitar, I just wanted to shed solos and play in indie and jazz bands, which I did a lot of. I’m from Leeds, and there’s a lot of jazz in Leeds — there’s a lot of things to get involved in, which is great.
One of the things that made me go “oh, actually I like writing more than playing”… I used to play in this classic female, three voices, two guitars, folky-but-not-really-folky trio. I used to arrange quite hardcore metal and rock songs, but for us to do in a really three-part-harmonies kind of way. I’d really changed them — it wasn’t just straight covers. And then we went to a gig by a band that I really loved at the time called Pulled Apart By Horses, and they’d just released arguably their best album…
Oh my god — I actually love Pulled Apart By Horses. Was that their self-titled album?
Yeah — the one with ‘I Punched A Lion In the Throat’ and ‘High Five, Swan Dive, Nose Dive’… -laughs- They’re also a Leeds band, as well! After a gig in Leeds once, we were chatting to them in the merch bit, and I was like “I don’t know if you’ve seen, but we’ve done covers of your songs” — I was there with my mates who I was in this band with — and they were like “noooo way, you’re those girls! We love that song”… And I was like, this is way more satisfying than any gig I’ve ever played.
I understand that. There’s something special about making things, whether that’s compositions or arrangements, which feels like a totally different quality to just performing something. I guess like being part of a community.
I like making food for people more than eating food, you know? It’s like that personality trait.
How did playing in bands in Leeds when you were growing up inform your musical outlook nowadays?
I have a lot of strong thoughts about this. A lot of the venues that I would play are now dead. They were these perfect, sort of 200-cap spaces; but people would go to gigs because there was a really big a culture of being an audience, as much as being in bands. It was maybe after the rise of the “indie boys of the North” — not Oasis, fuck them — I’d say those post-Arctic Monkeys indie boys, and girls (but let’s face it, mostly boys). It wasn’t crazy to come across A+R people at gigs; I have mates that ended up on Columbia [Records], and big things, just from playing pub gigs. But that’s being in a time and place where people would watch those gigs.
If I could mention one venue, I’d mention the Cockpit — the Cockpit was amazing. It used to be underneath the railway arches in the train station, and it had three venues; you’d have three gigs happening at the same time, and they were perfect sized venues for having a massive array of different bands on.
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When you started studying at the Royal Northern College of Music, did that DIY attitude inform your approach to composition?
Actually, I think I came to Manchester and I was like “I want to leave this indie bullshit behind, I want to be a composer”… I’d done a fair amount of partying when I was 17, 18, and so I wasn’t as arsed for that. I want to go to music college and analyse scores and learn lots. Wild. -laughs-
I think I got very lucky. I was studying with Gary Carpenter, and I think that was a really good pairing of personalities; I think if I’d gone to another place with a different teacher, I’d have had a very different experience. I have the utmost respect and gratitude for Gary: whatever thought you’re on, [he would] question if it could go deeper — getting me to think through things to the bottom of it, rather than going “yeah, that’s alright”.
I learned to get over that thing of being yourself — not writing things that you think you should be writing. The best thing about studying composing is [the] time and space to give other things a go; to trial a bunch of different stuff, and figure out what you want to take and leave from those things. Rather than being “this is me and this is what I do”, it’s like “I don’t know who I am, I’m going to try a bunch of stuff and figure it out”.
I’d love to talk about your two EPs of electronic music — We Get What We Get & We Don’t Get Upset and Unsolicited Advice, both released on PRAH Recordings. How did both of these projects come about, and where did the material initially stem from?
So, none of this would exist without Anna Meredith. I remember I was being mentored by her, and I was umm’ing and ahh’ing about doing something — and she was a constant voice of “just do it!”. Sometimes, that’s the person you need; it was mainly with her encouragement that I started doing it.
All of that music is made up of the compositional ideas that I’ve had as you’re going about life, or on a different project, that got discarded for whatever reason — that I wanted to do something with. A couple of the tracks on the second EP [Unsolicited Advice] were tiny, tiny ideas for theatre shows that I didn’t think were worth dropping; so I took [them] and turned them into something that I thought was one form they could exist in. There’s a track in the second one — ‘Know You’re Loved’ — when it first existed, it was for a show about climate change and motherhood. And it was only screamed by women in a really visceral setting; no pitch in it, just the vague shape of the rhythm and the words. It was quite extreme, and intense. And now it’s just a pop tune! I like the life it’s had.
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Looking back at the start of the process for We Get What We Get, were there any particular reasons you wanted this material to first exist in this format — rather than in a concert setting, or live performance?
Because it’s free. It’s all just me, on my laptop; the voice is me, all the instruments are recorded by me. When I started We Get What We Get & We Don’t Get Upset, I was really unemployed; I had a chef job in covid, and I’d just lost the chef job. I was just bored, and I needed something to get up and do in the mornings that wasn’t just applying for jobs. I think that’s why the tunes were really upbeat. Maybe I try and write music that I want to hear at the time I’m writing it; so it’s all quite upbeat, but a bit tongue-in-cheek. Like, you’re unemployed, and you’re a bit sad, so you’re being a bit snarky about it.
Or those qualities just make you relatable. That relates to something you’ve said before — this idea of writing “silly music that comes from serious places”. What freedoms do you think that approach gives you?
I remember writing that phrase and being like “yes!” — that’s it on the head. Expressing a serious thing in a silly form gives you more nuance to play with, with what you’re actually expressing. Drawing on stuff that’s a bit everyday, and mundane, can give you further nuance — because you contextualise it in a different way. I like doing that because to me, it feels more like real-life than if I’m gonna write sad music about something sad.
I feel like the core version of that is something like the Beach Boys. You listen to a Beach Boys record, you listen to the text and it’s maybe a bit bleak — but musically, it’s really beautifully crafted. And they do some really weird stuff, as well. There’s one track I’m thinking of, I think it’s called ‘Lonely Sea’… it’s from Surfin’ USA. I feel what’s tried to happen there is that they’ve encaptured this surfer, high life thing — and actually, they’ve captured a lot of loneliness, and depression.
I guess it’s like a double framing, right? This exterior framing of the surf rock genre and mentality, and the interior framing of lived experience.
Depending on who you are, maybe that’s the way you want to be lonely. What feels more appropriate to you about being sad about being lonely.
For me, your track ‘Interval’ from We Get What We Get really encapsulates that. I find the superimposition of the text and the harmonies in that piece to be really poignant…
It didn’t start with the text. I often go back to Bach chorales, to let ideas germinate — or sometimes [I] go back to them and play through a few to sort my brain out. There’s something about them that’s so ordered and not-ordered at the same time. The harmony in ‘Interval’ now isn’t of that world — it’s a little bit more simple, a little bit more fractured. The text is a list of things that at the time seemed really important. I asked a few friends to read them out and send them as voicenotes.
What was really lovely about that track was that my mum and her best mate — who’s like my other mum — made a music video for it together. I think they had a real lol doing it. My mum makes films, and her mate’s a felt artist, so they did this stop-motion animation together. That was really lovely, because it’s nice to give something to someone that they then get a lot of joy out of. Working with your mates can never be underestimated.
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Tell me a bit more about your second EP, Unsolicited Advice — how did the ideas on that EP build upon what you’d established with We Get What We Get?
I think it’s a bit darker. I definitely got better at production between the two, so it’s a little bit fancier. It’s darker because, ironically, I was a lot happier; so the music gets sadder. Hopefully it doesn’t lose the sense of humour. There’s one track in it — it’s the one that gets played on the radio the least — ‘Suck Don’t Sip’… It’s the internal mechanism of someone in a club, and something bad’s just happened. It’s a musical representation of someone who’s having a quite shit time; they’ve gone out to the smoking area, and they’ve seen something that’s really petty — someone they like getting off with someone else — and they’ve sunk the rest of their tab and hit the club, like… This is not autobiographical, by the way. -laughs-
The lead line in that is very intense, and subtly uncanny — so I can definitely hear that.
That’s a sample from my mum again, who plays euphonium — very Yorkshire. Another fun thing about this track is that it started life as a pub quiz round. You know how sometimes there are ideas I don’t wanna let go? I’d done this round for a pub quiz at the Abbey Tap House in Manchester — which now no longer exists. The round was called snakes and gabbers, and what people had to do was form the longest conga snake of people that they could, and I’d written all these 20 second gabber tracks… So imagine it’s like musical chairs, but with gabber and you had to form a snake. -laughs-
That’s amazing. -laughs-
So the beat for that started out as one of the tracks for snakes and gabbers — which is obviously a pub quiz round where the name was thought of before the round. -laughs- There were loads of these little tracks from that round. There’s an off-beat snare that’s not a snare — it’s like a piece of wood, and it goes like “gah, gah, gah, gah” — and I was like “I actually quite like that, I’m going to do something with that”. And that’s where the track came from.
I dance very close to very expensive-sounding drums, and then swerve out the way… -laughs- I think it’s [about] being able to choose when to use a real sample, and when not; unless you’re a really great producer who can make anything sound exactly how you want it to — in which case, you could take any source material and turn it into anything, so why does the source material matter? There’s a reason why I use a particular thing. I get quite a lot of nice samples from my friend, who is a drum and bass producer called Note — so a lot of credit should be given to him. If you want good drums, drum and bass producers will have those…
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We’ve talked a lot about your electronic music — I’m curious as to whether you see a difference in your compositional process between the way you work with electronics, or samples, and the way you work with notation?
Not at the beginning — but yes at the end. I tend to start on paper with both. For notated, acoustic work, at some point — when you’re about a third in — you start thinking about the room, and the sound, the ensemble, the orchestration, in a way that’s less “raw”.
I guess there’s levels of dough, isn’t there? There’s the squishy, cold, lumpy bit, that’s probably the same for both; but then when you’re deciding what that dough is going to be — is it cake, is it bread, has it got raisins in it? That is then quite different. In everything that I do — EP stuff, theatre stuff, concert hall stuff — the lumpy dough stage is usually the same. But also, it’s never the same, because the main bit of the “lumpy dough process”… -laughs- Is, like, whatever I’m interested in at the time.
One piece of yours that’s really stood out to me is ‘Birthday Card for a Stranger’, which was commissioned by the Manchester Camerata a while back. Can you tell me a bit about how you approached writing that piece?
I work a lot with a theatre-maker, writer, lovely person called Sam Ward. I’m working on a show with him again this year — don’t know the name of it, don’t even know what it’s about — but it’ll be at Summerhall during Edinburgh Fringe, at 10:30am [every day]. Sam is one of my favourite, favourite collaborators; I trust that it will be a good time, so people should go and see it.
We’d just finished doing the second in this particular trilogy of shows, the third of which will happen [this] August. He’s really good at writing a text which feels very intimate, and makes a point very concisely. And so I said to him, after we finished working on the show, “can I sling you a bit of money and can you write someone a 50th birthday card?”
The commission was [for] 50 years of Manchester Camerata; a fifty-year celebration. He wrote this gorgeous text, that I then analysed. I sectioned it into how I felt was musical sections, which is a bit of a dream, because someone’s just given you your form. It’s this extramusical thing that I was draping the music around; I don’t think that it stands up as a concert hall piece without the text. The two things very much meet each other.
The text is projected above the orchestra throughout the piece — how did you go about structuring the text, musically?
I wanted to make something that felt like the text was being sung. There’s moments where it feels like underscore, and then moments where it feels like the syllables are matched; I think there’s really definite moments where it flips into this world of “reading — underscore”, and then it’s a melody, and then reading-underscore [again]. So you’re reading perfectly in time with the music — which would have happened had there not been a bit of latency on the projector we used in the gig! Someone else needs to perform it, please… -laughs- So it’s subconsciously guiding someone through it, without them realising they’re being guided.
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When you’re structuring a work, do you tend to think about audience experience — like, “I want the audience to feel this, or be taken on this journey”?
I think about it more like: you’re given a platform, right? And so what do you want to say with it? If you’re gonna take up that many peoples’ time, why? Something I always think about is, what do you need to say, why do you need to say that now — and why do you need to say it? What is it you’re trying to express? They’re questions I maybe don’t start with, but at some point in every piece, I’ll give a good bit of thought to. Maybe that’s why I like to do things that are quite relatable…
This really resonates with me — every single piece, I’ve now been asking myself: why this, why now, why me?
My answer to “why me” is usually why the fuck not?
Oh my god, I need your confidence. -laughs-
I asked myself this really seriously for a gig in November, where myself and an artist called RenzNiro wrote this show together — his music, reimagined with a chamber ensemble. It was a beautiful gig, but out of fifteen performers, I was the only white person onstage — which is how it should have been, because of the context of his music — so then I thought, why do I need to be there? Really boringly, the answer to that was [that] I’d been involved in the arranging process, and the fee they’d have to give someone to come in fresh was more money than we could afford. So it was “why me? Because I’m cheap”. I think if money wasn’t an option, we would have gotten a global majority MD in for that gig… Maybe when we tour it — if some fabulously wealthy person wants to give us all their cash. -laughs-
I guess sometimes, the answers really are that practical. Or making use of the resources that you have.
Doing the art that you wanna do within the confines that you’ve got to work with. The idea that someone needs a symphony orchestra and a load of big speakers to do their art, it’s like “whoa, your art sounds really expensive”. If the thing they’re trying to do needs that, fair play — but I don’t feel limited by trying to work within what’s available to me.
I’d love to talk with you about your recent opera, Inevitable, that was commissioned by Buxton Opera last year — where did the concept for yourself and librettist Josh Overton initially stem from?
The story came from a piece of art that went viral on Instagram at the time when I was thinking about this. It was this mechanical hand — Sun Yuan and Peng Yu’s Can’t Help Myself. You know, when they made it, it was about AI use in border control and how that’s an implicitly violent thing. And some rando saw it at the Biennale and made this fictional narrative for it, and it struck a chime with loads of people; they’re watching this thing try to save itself and it can’t.
And so I was like: cool, that’s how I want people to feel at the end of this opera. I want them to be sat there, just going like “noooooooo…” — watching something play out they knew they couldn’t help. What made the piece of art kick off on Instagram so much is [that] I think it’s something that resonates with people; the moment of helplessness of a lot of situations, the helplessness of individuals.
[With] the opera, we all know as the audience that there’s a crank — a hand crank — and a big clock. If you don’t crank the hand crank, the world ends, and the clock is the thing that counts down to this happening. We watch this character on stage be like, “ooh, cool crank, cool clock, wonder what these do?” — they’re having a loll, frolicking about, and we’re all watching the world end. You know the idea of a Ring Cycle world end, where it’s actually a huge deal and it’s massive and grandiose? This is the opposite; it’s like a “thank you bye.” — full stop.
Rather than a dramatic explosion, the world ends with a meme…
Yes, that’s it! Maybe if we do it again, we could incorporate that. I’ll credit you.
One trend I’m noticing permeate your practice is this kind of snarky, almost sarcastic personality — it’s fantastic. Is this kind of snarkiness something you consciously channel in your work?
Not intentionally. I did a piece two years ago, it had a voiceover — it was loosely about nonviolent protest, and how people get involved in something; and how those power dynamics shift. So the audience and orchestra all do things together, or don’t — [or] some people do some stuff, some people don’t. I worked with a playwright on that, as well. I wrote one version of it and sent it to the playwright I was working with, Nathan Ellis, and was like “I think I could go further” — and he’s like “whoa, whoa, whoa, no… I think you’re being mean to the audience!”. Like, calling them out on problems they’ve not created.
So I think I don’t mean to be snarky or sarcastic. I’m not that as a person. I’m very honest and straightforward. But I think sometimes it does end up coming out, because that’s how I feel better represents the specific feeling [I’m] trying to convey.
I get it — like, it’s one sensibility among a whole bunch of other sensibilities.
Maybe “snarky” or “sarcastic” is to limit what you’re actually doing. Everything’s a bit layered — everything has a surface version, and there’s the other things going on underneath. There’s different levels for something to be appreciated on. Whenever I’m writing, I always want to make sure it could be appreciated on all of the levels. Someone could come in and have a nice time listening to the music (as long as their nice time is the music they’re hearing); and someone can come in and do a deep-dive on the philosophical thought in it. And there’s somewhere in the middle, where it’s like “yeeeeeah, I see what you did there…”
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At the start of our conversation, we talked about a lot of these grassroots venues in Leeds having been shut down. You now co-run Bothy — an organisation in Manchester dedicated to finding spaces for musicians and creatives…
Yeah! It’s [run by] me and a cellist — Daniel Springate. Something I think about a lot is how space gets used in cities; how particularly in the UK, space is really highly capitalised, in contrast to places where there’s maybe more protection of artistic spaces, subsidies, and general respect. We don’t have so much of that here. I think a lot about wasted space.
Bothies are the cabins in Scotland that are free to use for anyone. So we started Bothy with the idea that it’s making spaces that are free to use for classical or art music-making people. We’ve worked with different places to facilitate free rehearsal space [and] performance space. We helped Phoenix Rousiamanis put on an opera at Niamos in Manchester; we’ve done a load with a great cellist called Lili Holland Fricke, and we’ve worked with Jeanette Szeto and Valette Ensemble — the stuff that they’re doing is really cool.
We’ve seen so many venues in this country close down, and it can be so difficult for artists to find supportive grassroots spaces. It’s incredible work you’re doing.
Every time something practical — like space or transport or something boring and essential — becomes less accessible, it redefines who can or can’t participate in the thing. Here obviously the thing is making, playing or performing music. I see that if you’re someone who wants to do those things and you see a lot of the space where it’s being done in getting bought up, gentrified or sold for commercial purposes you have to do something to show the value of that space beyond something financial. That’s what we’re trying to do. But put simply, people who need practical help to put on a gig or rehearse message us and we try our best to help them.
At the moment, we offer free rehearsal space to classical musicians between 2-6 on a weekday. If you have any Manchester readers who need that kind of thing, get in touch via Instagram or email!
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Learn more about Carmel Smickersgill and her practice at:
- https://www.carmelsmickersgill.co.uk/
- https://soundcloud.com/smickersgirl
- https://www.instagram.com/carmelsmickersgill/?hl=en
Learn more about Bothy and get in touch:
References/Links:
- Pulled Apart By Horses – ‘I Punched a Lion in the Throat’ (2010)
- Pulled Apart By Horses – ‘High Five, Swan Dive, Nose Dive’ (2010)
- ‘The Cockpit in Leeds closes after 20 years of music’ (2014), BBC News
- Hannah Pezzack, ‘Sweets to the Sweet: Carmel Smickersgill’s We Get What We Get and We Don’t Get Upset’ (2022), The Quietus
- The Beach Boys – ‘Lonely Sea’ (1963)
- Manchester Camerata, Five Zero Season (2022)
- Sun Yuan and Peng Yu, Can’t Help Myself (2016)
