Anna Phoebe talks to us about her new release 'ICONS' out on Friday 5 March

Anna Phoebe is internationally renowned as a violinist, composer, producer and broadcaster, whose work across a wide range of genres is known to be dynamic, versatile and hugely collaborative.

She's one half of the string duo AVAWAVES whose music we've played extensively on Scala Radio.

Lockdown gave Anna the chance to consider some of the music and artists she had listened to whilst growing up. This period of reflection gave rise to her eagerly-anticipated ICONS EP., tracks from which Penny Smith will play on her Thursday afternoon show from 4pm.

Recorded under lockdown conditions at her own Wallace Studio in Kent the tracks on ICONS are all arranged, played, mixed and produced by Anna Phoebe, with Klara Schumann on cello.

The tracks on the EP pay homage to ‘Baby, Can I Hold You’ - Tracy Chapman (1988), 'Avalon' - Roxy Music (1989), 'Jubilee Street' - Nick Cave (2013), 'Manchild' - Neneh Cherry (1989), 'Insomnia' - Faithless (1995), and 'Blackstar' - David Bowie (2016).

We spoke to Anna yesterday about her lockdown experience, her astrology sign, and her love of ceramics.

What can you see out of your nearest window?

Loads and loads of plants. It's just very, very green outside.

You are a gardener then?

You know what? I think I might be. I love Gardener's World. So yes! LAUGHS

I was having a chat with someone who's really into astrology recently. They told me they reckoned that I'm a real air and water sign. And that because of that I should be doing things day to day which connect me more to the earth to like balance things out for me. I suppose that the gardening is part of that. But then thinking about it, I do love ceramics too. I LOVE the feeling of clay. I love the feeling of dirt in my in my nails. So maybe I like to see the gardening and ceramics as a kind of balancing out of my otherwise quite scatty approach to life.

So, if you're into ceramics, then you must surely be watching the Great Pottery Throwdown on Channel 4?

Do you know what I watched that? I watched that the weekends with my kids. That's our kind of our little family viewing time. So I'm getting them into it as well.

What I love about clay is that it's got its own rules. It's a living thing. The idea that something has its own rules, and you can't just you can't just dominate it, you have to work with it.

For the last few years since we moved down to Kensington, I've been going to an Adult Education Centre and doing a ceramics course. I was missing working with clay quite a lot because I was touring. I would just I would just turn up to these sessions and work with this piece of clay. And in a short while it becomes something even though I'm quite haphazard.

I think that whatever your approach to creativity or the creative process, you can can go to something else - another medium - and learn a whole new way of doing something. What was so interesting to me was thinking was actually that my approach to clay is very similar to music is that you just kind of get an idea and you just go with it.

And then there's too much and then you whittle it down until you're left with and what my friend Salena Godden, the writer calls 'the jus'. So it's like the essence of something. And then that's it. That's what you're left with. I think my approach to clay is, funnily enough, the same as music.

That leads us on very nicely. Your new EP which we're playing on Scala Radio. We've listened to all of it. A favourite of the digital team's (we're showing our age) is the Neneh Cherry track.

I trying to take five days off from the studio after work on some AVAWAVES material. I'd got a solo album coming out and I kind of promised myself to take five days off. But then when you take time off kind of ideas come to you because you've got sort of space.

I guess the ideas for the ICONS EP was as a result of a nostalgia trip - looking back at songs and artists who shaped me as I was growing up. I wanted to just sit in a studio with these tracks, to play around with ideas because I've had several things swirling around in my head like the_Insomnia_track or the_Faithless_track.

I actually had really bad sleeping habits during this last year. I think many people did, and I noticed that the riffs of some of these tracks I was listening to just wouldn't go away. I'd lie awake like at 3am morphing each idea into one another. Some would take me back to Scottish beach parties as a teenager.

So this project was about remembering childhood or other times in your life, but look at those memories through the lens of where I am now. So for example, the Neneh Cherry track: we used to watch Top of the Pops every Thursday together as a family. I remember seeing her on Top of the Pops and being sort of a little bit in love with her. And the video she did for that too was really memorable. I think it went on to win awards. I just thought she was so super cool. I would have been eight years old. But I just remember kind of falling in love with her in the video. And in that video, she's holding the baby and then her kids are in the background too. And now I'm the kind of a mum who's a bit haphazard, with kids and dogs and trying to like balance everything. So maybe, I'm now thinking, maybe Neneh was this kind of feminist icon for me, juggling family life, music, and self-expression.

It is lovely to hear you speak with so much warmth about what some might have previously regarded as throwaway music.

My brother works in pop, he's actually a pop songwriter. I grew up listening to a lot of varied music. His interests are varied too - jazz and a lot of classical. My parents took me to classical concert when I was five years old, but then they also listened to the Pogues. So I've got kind of soundtracks for different bits of my life. My dad, whenever he did the cleaning on the weekend, he'd play the Pogues really loud with the windows open. So I associate music with kind of different bits of my childhood. I originally lived in Germany. it wasn't until 1988 maybe that I moved to the UK. So I spent the first few years living in the UK without speaking any English, listening to music but ignoring the lyrics. I listen to the emotion of a song, rather than the lyrics. For me the lyrics are secondary.

Where to purchase Anna Phoebe's new EP ICONS

You can pre-save ICONS via Orchard.

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