When Porridge Radio formed in 2014 - a decade ago - being in a band was the very last thing that London-born Dana Margolin expected to do. Studying anthropology at the University of Sussex, Dana began performing her songs on her own at local open mic nights, before assembling a full band - taking in Georgie Stott on keyboards and backing vocals, Sam Yardley on drums and keyboards, and former bassist Maddie Ryall (who departed in 2023, replaced by Dan Hutchins). Their debut album - Rice, Pasta and Other Fillers (2016) was followed by Every Bad (2020), which was shortlisted for the Mercury Prize and acclaimed by The Guardian as “uncompromisingly brilliant.” Later, Waterslide, Diving Board, Ladder to the Sky (2022) became their first UK Top 40 Album Chart success.
After 2022 - by some distance the band’s busiest year of live shows to date - had finally calmed, the suddenly quiet beginning of 2023 was a decisive moment for Dana. “I got home having been so sad and so tired for so long, and running from that sadness using work and exhaustion to the point of distraction, and then suddenly I wasn’t on tour all the time,” she remembers, “I was just sitting in my room.” This became a period of reflection for the songwriter who had not stopped for the best part of a decade, and had knotty questions about identity, creativity and family to unpack. “I come from a family of workaholics,” smiles Dana, “it’s that, and it’s art, it’s not just work. It’s my whole life.” Dana wanted to work out a way forward - how do you retain creativity, without harming yourself in the process?
When Joni Mitchell was once asked about writer’s block, she argued in favour of a creative “crop rotation” to keep going. That means, when you fall out of love with one thing, work on another and your creativity will find a way to heal itself. Dana Margolin began creating in new and different ways to bring herself back from the emotional experience of what was obviously a bad case of burnout.
As well as the painting that has been a crucial part of her creative life throughout her career (Dana has painted or directed the artwork for every Porridge Radio album), she composed the soundtrack for a BBC Radio 4 show with her bandmate Sam Yardley. She completed a solo UK tour playing new songs on her own just like in the old open mic days. She started a Substack, writing assuredly at length on anything from books that she has read, art shows she has attended or the general need to bear witness to the world around you. And, importantly, she began thinking more about poetry. Sure, Dana had always written poetry, but had filed it away as something different from her Porridge Radio craft. “There were things I was doing in songwriting,” says Dana, “that I felt I could become better at.”
You can hear some of this in tracks like Anybody - the startlingly frank opening track about “all the millions of ways I pushed myself out of shape to try to be a nice and sweet girl in order to be loveable” - and the storming and cathartic God Of Everything Else, the most explicitly break-up song on the album where Dana writes about spending “a year wishing I was somebody else.”
At the same time, a short-lived but intense relationship ended across 2023. “By the time I had recovered from the burnout,” says Dana, “we broke up.” The relationship and subsequent heartbreak fed into the genesis of the songs that would make up Clouds.
“A lot of this album is about a more frenetic and desperate kind of love,” says Dana, “it is about completely losing my sense of self in one relationship, and the deep residue of insecurity and pain that lingered and clouded a new relationship.” Older songs that were written as love songs - like In A Dream I’m A Painting - took on new meanings as Margolin viewed the songs with a new distance. “There was a lot of love and confusion, all interspersed with exhaustion and pain.”
The Clouds sessions took place in Frome as Winter melted into early Spring at the beginning of 2024. “There were a few breakdowns,” grins Dana, in a fair assessment of recording such intimate and personal songs, “after some takes I would just collapse on the floor, so upset.”An environment was fostered where Dana could express herself and be nurtured, and the band worked more closely than ever on sculpting the album. “We would have these big communal meals every night,” she says, “it felt very close knit and caring and warm and special.”
“Our little house looked over a big hill,” remembers Dana, “there was a river running through it, it was big and bright and beautiful.” The studio itself was bright - full of beaming natural light from the large windows, a blessing for musicians used to the sealed tomb world of most recording studios, and for once the band were all able to record in the same room as the producer. Recording live necessitated the whole band becoming intimately involved in the creation of the album, it was all hands on deck. “We were a live band anyway, we’ve always been known as a band who do something very particular and very emotionally intense live, and Dom (Monks) knew how to get that feeling across.”
Monks brought a widescreen expanse and pin-drop intimacy familiar to listeners of his work with Big Thief to the sessions. Dana says that Monks became someone she “trusted more than anyone else who has ever come into the project from outside.”
Following that, the band were invited to debut the material at a special performance at Paris’ prestigious Centre Pompidou. “Visually, that was very much a collaboration with Ella and Ellie,” says Dana of the show she put together with her filmmaker sister Ella Margolin and set designer Ellie Wintour, “I had this idea of the album being a puppet show, but they took it to a new level.” The songwriter had seen the puppet work of the American mid-century sculptor Alexander Calder at New York’s Whitney museum, “I had watched his short film where he creates a circus out of puppets. It’s so funny and it’s so ludicrous and also very serious and beautiful and poetic.” That contrast began to feel very herself, very Porridge Radio. “There are joyful ways to portray something that’s also deeply sad and vulnerable.”
Today, Dana reflects on Clouds In The Sky They Will Always Be There For Me with the enthusiasm of a real creative breakthrough. “It feels like the first time we’ve made something,” she explains, “it captured something about our friendship as a band and the way that we have learnt to play together. I love the songs, I love playing them, they haven’t gotten old to me and it feels like it’s a very singular thing.” A pause. “It’s taught me so much. Following your gut to the nth point, trusting your friends and their loyalty, trusting yourself to be able to fight with people properly and still come back together. How I want to live is how I want to make records, because making records is my life because my work is my play is my job is my life. It all ties together in this thing, and there are ways to do this that might not kill me.”
