1. She just sort of ‘gets’ the whole pop star thing
Some pop stars get it, others
don’t. Madonna and Robbie ‘get it’. Olly Murs and Pixie Lott do not ‘get it’. Pop
stars who ‘get it’ tend to realise quite early on that the bits which aren’t
‘the tunes’ are actually very very important too, so set about cultivating an
image and that. Pop stars who don’t ‘get it’ go through a similar stage of
development, but tend to outsource it to people who’ve never actually met them
and who make most of their sartorial and artistic choices by doing a blind
trolley-dash around All Saints and Topshop. Then they make bad videos and
boring album artwork because they’ve managed to become a team captain on an
ITV2 comedy panel show and don’t really care anymore. A*M*E is firmly in the
former camp.
2. Play
the Game Boy and Need You 100% are both very ace
The first is a vaguely 8-bit-ish
affair with an oddly lurching but propulsive groove and is very very good
indeed. It sounded very very good when I heard it in a three-quarters-empty
student union on a wet Sunday night, which is a mark of just how very very good
it is. That Need You 100% was number one for three weeks straight makes writing
a defence of its merits relatively academic, but it’s still worthwhile to point
out just how weird a hit single it is. There’s so much space within the
relatively sparse production for that bassline to bounce around, and there’s a
handclap breakdown (!!!). Handclap breakdowns were temporarily ruined by every skinny-jeaned
indie band formed between 2005 and 2008 with the intention of exciting sunstroke-afflicted
13-year-olds at Reading and Leeds, so A*M*E and Duke Dumont’s redemption of the
trope is very welcome indeed.
3. She’s
absolutely tiny
Having briefly met her when she
played at Newcastle SU as a support act for Lonsdale Boys Club (Long, Stale
Bores Club more like L.O.L.) I can exclusively confirm that A*M*E is between 5
feet and 5 feet 2 inches tall. That’s shorter than the average postbox (5’ 4”). More to the point, this means that while being not quite as great
as, for example, Foxes right now, A*M*E is a full 18 inches shorter than the
artist formerly known as Louisa Rose Allen. This means that while Foxes scores
a highly respectable 3.2 Pop Units/inch³, A*M*E bests her with a stratospheric 4.78 Pop Units/inch³.
Can’t argue with maths.
4. Her
zine, The A*M*E
The only reason I actually went
to see A*M*E was because of the strength of The
A*M*E, a 30-odd-page publication which includes such luminating features as
an advice page with Ken Kofi, wherein the ex-secretary general of the UN/special
friend of Barbie dispenses his worldly advice (to a girl whose boyfriend is
ribbing her for being fat: “Are his jokes good? I love fat jokes”; to a girl
with acne: “We suggest cleaning yourself more”). There’s also a weird 90s
nostalgia page which praises the decade which “had pop legends like Debbi [sic]
Harry” (Blondie were on hiatus from 1982 to 1997 but never mind). Music in the
90s “had structure… versus [sic], a mid eight”, which certainly helps to
explain why since Y2K hit the charts have been filled with amorphous
20-minute-long drone rock and acid jazz freakouts. “It was good honest music”,
says A*M*E, banging her shoe on the desk and crying hot, angry tears over the
time when she found out that while Shakira’s hips may not have lied, her shins and
collarbones were fucking turncoat bastards.
The A*M*E is almost entirely pictures, but then so is Harper’s Bazaar and people still buy that. Must be a London thing.
5. “You
got my heart running faster than Usain, boy”
Is that line from new single
Heartless good? Is it bad? I have literally no idea. The way A*M*E says it not
once but TWICE suggests to me that she thinks it is, but then I’ve been had by
pop stars before (Pixie Lott; VV Brown; Shakira's kneecaps).
