Deep Dive: Erica Nockalls – In Every Dream Home a Heartache (feat. Jean-Charles Versari)

When I first heard In Every Dream Home A Heartache by Erica Nockalls, its inventiveness and originality meant it took me a while to realise it was a cover of the legendary 70s track. We asked the English vocalist and violinist to take us on a Deep Dive of the song, which also features Jean-Charles Versari on vocals.

Genesis of the song

We were in Jean-Charles Versari’s studio late one rainy night in Paris, working on a mix of one of my latest singles, and I took a comfort break. We’d been lightly drinking as we collaborated, something I’m rather partial to doing, as working with Jean-Charles into the small hours is one of my favourite activities – it’s my idea of a perfect night out – creating, and having fun whilst you’re at it. The loo at the studio, there’s a hand dryer. Nothing unusual in that fact, but in my personally preferred loo, the acoustics are fabulous.

The hand dryer gave me a curious couple of drone tones as a harmonic bed, and for some reason unbeknown to me, it had conjured up the memory of my love for this song, In Every Dream Home A Heartache by Roxy Music. Sitting atop the porcelain goddess, I started singing it, with this beautiful, stark, small tiled natural room reverb, that in my semi-sober state felt was really rather flattering to my vocal musings… although I appreciate this image is anything but flattering. I purposefully marched (wobbled) back to Jean-Charles and declared my passion for the idea to cover said track.

Fast-forward to being back at the house that night, I stayed up and demoed it, because I’m greedy like that when I have an idea – everything all at once, and obsessive. I persuaded Jean-Charles to lay down a scratch vocal as a duet at around 5am… which I remember he was slightly reluctant to do, mainly, I feel, because the desired vocal I wanted to coax from him was quite far removed from his more familiar territory as noise-rock frontman in his exceptional band, Versari.

It quickly became vividly apparent once our voices married tonally, that this notion had legs, and drunk me was indeed right, and that my idea was indeed brilliant (hoffs nails). You see, as well, there’s a freedom that comes with reworking someone else’s music, and was one I’d personally not known about before this point. I found it to be absolutely liberating to do what you like with any of the ingredients you’ve been given, a bit like an invention test on Masterchef, and I do love to cook.

The only rule is, for me, to successfully cover someone else’s song is – there has to be a point. This in itself is a point I feel many people blindly (either knowingly or not) miss. Change the key, change the tempo, maybe just use the lyrics, TWIST the lyrics, but for fecksake, CHANGE something. Otherwise, it’s like turning up to a party with cheap cider, and drinking the hosts champagne.

Oh, and my other only rule is, you can’t cover Bowie. No one can, or should. It simply doesn’t need doing, and you’ll just embarrass yourself.

The lyrics

They’re amazing. And I can say that because I didn’t write them. Nice one, Mr Ferry.

I’d known this song since a child, and was surprised at how much I remembered. As soon as we started singing together, the path I needed to clearly venture down was to twist the lyrics in the song, so my part of the duet was altered to give a voice to the doll Ferry had sung about. I enjoyed having an emotional meltdown in the end section too. A touch maniacal in places, but there’s nothing new there.

As well as twisting the lyrics, I also altered the key and lovingly changed and beat-mapped the tempos, all with a view to making it sound as derelict and stark as I thought the song treatment deserved.

Making the video

One main aspect, videoed on a phone, shot from our Paris apartment window, one warm, summer evening, looking out over a grand boulevard. I thought the lit (and unlit) windows of all the opposing homes, and lives, would be the perfect, relevant backdrop. We are mostly profile, face to face, naked, appearing out of time, out of place, out of each other’s line of sight, and yet right in front of each other, like lost ghosts longing for love – tantalisingly within reach, but never grasped.

I’ve always thought that the thing with videos is ‘concept over budget’. You can have thousands to spend, and all the gear in the world, but ultimately, without a good idea, your video is gonna be shit.

Where does it fit within your overall sound?

I reckon this stark, more minimalist approach to be something that will appear in my new work, which I’m happy to report is starting to brew as a background task in the depths of my mind currently. I’d like the dark, underlying current of tension to be embraced for new material that I’ve begun to harness here. It’s a level of both sorrow and anger twinning together that I don’t feel I’ve fully investigated yet. Usually, I’m one to pile in the kitchen sink to my own material, production-wise, but as I’ve been working on this, and producing other peoples music, I’m totally loving the less is more vibe.

What’s up next in the wake of the single’s release?

Jean-Charles and I are fresh off tour supporting Echo and the Bunnymen in the UK. We performed as a duo, which was a new experience for me playing my own music, and I thoroughly loved it, although I had to frequently have a word with myself to keep my nerves in check, especially playing venues like the Liverpool Arena and the Albert Hall. Banging out your most intimate internal brain processings to an audience who had the potential to utterly despise both you and what we were doing, was, well, breathtaking quite frankly. They didn’t hate us though, nobody threw anything, and we actually went down rather well.

On the back of that, 2024 will see us play more shows under my name, performing as duo, and I have every desire to write more of my own music whilst collaborating with Jean-Charles. He’s a gifted musician and producer, and I’m interested to see where this road together will take us. He has a unique and aggressively passionate style of playing guitar too, and comes up with things I would never even consider.

Follow me for new news on my music… and art. As a visual artist, I have every intention of releasing a new artwork throughout 2024 in tandem with my music.

In Every Dream Home A Hearthache, its b-side Build Me a Ship and more music from Erica Nockalls can be downloaded on Bandcamp and streamed on Apple Music, YouTube, and Spotify. For news on upcoming projects and live dates, check out Nockalls on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram.

Coffin photo by Jean-Charles Versari