15 minutes with Suki Waterhouse ahead of her Melbourne shows

“It’s kind of surprising to me that anyone listens to my music in Australia, so it feels like the complete unknown.”

What comes to mind when you hear the name Suki Waterhouse? An It Girl of the 2010s? The best part of Daisy Jones & the Six? An entrepreneur of apps and accessories? The fiancé of a certain heart-throb vampire? Scratch a line through all of that – the legacy left by Suki Waterhouse will be her music.

This winter, the British cool girl is bringing her show to Australian audiences for the first time ever. As part of Rising, Suki is taking on Melbourne’s Athenaeum Theatre on June 6 and PICA on June 7 to perform her latest album, Memoir of a Sparklemuffin. “It’s kind of surprising to me that anyone listens to my music in Australia,” she says. “So, it feels like the complete unknown.”

Discover more artists and music we love at FJ’s Music section.

Suki’s humility is somewhat out of proportion to her stardom. But as the self-described “model, actress, whatever” points out, she’s been writing songs since she was a teenager. It hasn’t been until the last few years that she’s been solidified as one to watch in the indie-pop scene.

“I feel like for the past decade, I’ve been silently building up to have this life as a musician, always in the studio, always writing,” Suki says.

“There was a very small amount of people who were listening to [my music]. But it was still always there and happening. I couldn’t really ever have thought that I would be actually going on stage and performing the songs, and being able to make albums, or anything like that.”

Music has always been a means of reflection for Suki. Since she was 17, she’s considered the craft a “refuge”, a place where she could “make these memory stamps and hold this mirror up to myself”. Even her most recent releases, ‘On This Love’ and ‘Dream Woman’, draw on stories and anecdotes from different corners of her life, surfacing throughout the tracks as a kind of scrapbook of existence.

“I think I use music as these markers of time, like proof that certain things had happened to me or I’d felt certain ways,” she says. “I had this real desire to put these memory sticks into songs. If I could put the feeling into a song, then I would always remember that it really happened.”

“I get to be the crazy boss”

As a performer who’s spent much of her life in the entertainment industry as a vessel for someone else’s stories, it’s clear that music is Suki’s way of picking up the pen and writing her own. “That’s the great thing about music,” she says. “I get to be the crazy boss.”

“It’s the first time I’ve ever been able to have control over anything in a way where I’m actually creating this from scratch. I own every decision that goes along with it, which is really liberating.”

One of those decisions was holding off on releasing both ‘On This Love’ and ‘Dream Woman’, along with Memoir of a Sparklemuffin. “I can be quite manic in what I decide to do with songs,” Suki says in the most nonchalant way, making me wonder how this ocean breeze of a human could ever be manic. “If it doesn’t feel totally energetically right, then I’ll just blow the whole thing up right before it’s gonna come out.”

A family affair

It’s understandable that Suki wanted to spend a little longer on tracks that weren’t ready for the album release, considering that “in the whirlwind of making the record… I was pregnant. I had to hand it in like a week before I had my daughter.

“I still had these songs that I really needed to have out in the world,” Suki continues. “And I didn’t want to just lose them, because then they’ll go into the void and never get put out. And I feel really strongly about ‘Dream Woman’ and ‘On This Love’.”

Suki says that when it came to turning ‘Dream Woman’ into a music video with her sisters – shot by Madeleine and directed by Imogen – she was “in the mood for not having a crew”.

“[We were] literally just going around with a handheld camera and running into stores in New York… We really had absolutely no plan. It was just like, let’s run over the bridge in the freezing cold,” she says. “It felt like a return to how I used to go around New York City when I was 18 and, like, film myself outside of a boy that I had a crush on’s apartment, crying or something.

“You know what I mean?” she adds, laughing. “I would always make little dramatic films of myself, or I’d always have a camera and be self-timing stuff. That’s kind of the joy of working with [my sisters].”

Sparklemuffins and Suki Waterhouse

This type of childlike enthusiasm is as potent in Suki’s music as it is in her live show, Memoir of a Sparklemuffin. It’s a magical dose of escapism into the mind of Suki Waterhouse. Her performances include glamorous outfits, an ethereal “forest-themed wasteland” stage design, a “dangerous amount [of] shrubbery” and, of course, a sparklemuffin or two.

Named after a small, colourful jumping spider that is native to southern Queensland, the sparklemuffin earned its nickname because of its outrageously bright appearance and the males’ tendency to dance as a way of wooing the ladies. Oh, and the female spiders also eat the guys if they think their dancing isn’t up to scratch.

Suki identified with the sparkly creature, and thus a memoir was born. Will she try to see the Australian arachnid when she visits? “I have to, don’t I?” she laughs.

This article was originally published in Beat. 

You can get tickets to see Suki Waterhouse perform at Rising on June 6 here and June 7 here.