‘Next year I need to book out two weeks and make sure I’m in Glasgow for the whole festival,” laughs Su Shaw as we speak ahead of the shows she will play under new moniker, SHHE. Previously working as Panda Su, SHHE is alter-ego of the Scottish-Portuguese artist and producer. Her self-titled album, released last year, is an intensely personal reflection on identity once it has been completely renounced.
“I think for me it was actually taking a break out that got me creating again,” says Shaw.
“With Panda Su it came to a natural end. I did different things in that time with the years I had a break and returned to it when it felt right. I had always struggled a bit with communicating and finding the sound that I wanted to make, and it made sense to go away and learn that.”
Shaw upped sticks to Dundee, where SHHE was born.
“It felt like a new life persona,” she says. “It’s not a massive city, but for me Dundee was a real change. It felt like a new start.”
It was a new start that attracted new attention: her first new track, Eyes Shut, a collaboration with photographer and dancer Harry Clark, had its music video premiered on Dazed and Confused.
“Eyes Shut was a really personal track for me and the video worked so beautifully” adds Shaw. “I wanted to share it with an audience and Dazed was perfect. The response was incredible.”
Indeed, it was a response that eventually led to SHHE being signed to label One Little Indian, home of Bjork. The results were fruitful, but creating SHHE entailed a larger mode of isolated self-discovery after eliminating completely the already recognisable and familiar.
“I needed to go through that exercise of recording the album alone,” she explains. “Up to that point, I had been a real perfectionist. But if you’re always striving for perfection, you’ll never finish anything. I needed to put myself through that.
“I moved house when I finished the album, which although it was chaotic, was nice to look back and reflect. I recorded late at night, and it made me feel relaxed, away from the pressures of people knowing that you’re making an album. It was peaceful, therapeutic, even.”
Before her move to Dundee, Shaw grew up in Fife forests with her time pock-marked by trips to Lisbon, where her mother is from, and Iceland. She even had a stint organising Scottish mountain treks for a charity based in St Andrews, where she attended Madras secondary school.
“It was hard to find people that remain in St Andrews for a long period of time, and find people making music there too.
“For me it’s always about where I can be part of the creative community, where I can make music, and it was always that for me. If you go to East Neuk and Anstruther and Pittenweem, it seemed there was loads going on there. I used to play at Homegame festival and it was amazing, but you needed to investigate to find the music in St Andrews. It was on the edges.”
Luckily, Shaw will be making it a lot easier to hear the musical creations of SHHE from all areas in the country with her raft of Scottish dates: she supported Kathryn Joseph in Aberdeen in 2019, but will be returning to play her own solo show there tonight at The Tunnels, after dates in Glasgow, Edinburgh and Dundee.
“When I released the album initially, I didn’t play any dates in Scotland and it was the hope that I’d get out there for shows. I suppose these shows are a delayed album launch,” she laughs.
“It’s the first time I’ve played Glasgow and Dundee as SHHE – living there I’ve been looking forward to performing there. It’s also been my first time playing Celtic Connections – I think the audience that the shows get are incredible, as it’s so diverse.”
It’s a lot of firsts, but they are merely “new” firsts. For now, SHHE is fully formed and primed to show us who she is. It may not be the same person in years to come, but judging how well her first reincarnation has gone, her second (if there is one) will be even better.
SHHE will play at The Tunnels in Aberdeen tonight.
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