Lou Rhodes on Lamb, lockdown, and her new book for children
By: Sheryl Garratt
Tags: Self Publishing, Writing, Books, Crwativity, Music

If you’re looking for an easy, affordable gift for a small child, the digital version of the charming picture book The Phlunk is beautiful, and works seamlessly on an iPad. With gorgeous illustrations by Tori Elliott and read by its author, Lou Rhodes, it’s about a cute, cat-like alien with huge ears that enable it to hear everything children are doing on Earth.

Lou and I have know each other for a long time now. When we first met, I was editor of The Face, and she worked for the magazine as a photographer. When she asked me to write the first press bio for her band Lamb, a collaboration with producer Andy Barlow, I was a little anxious: what if they were awful?

I needn’t have worried.

They were magnificent, offsetting Lou’s calm stage presence and ethereal voice with frenetic electronic beats and lush strings. Lamb’s eponymous debut album, released in 1996, is still a huge favourite in our house along with their other seven studio albums, and Lou’s excellent, more folk-influenced 2006 solo album Beloved One. (Which was nominated for the Mercury Music Prize.)

But I wasn’t alone in my doubts, in those early days. Factory Records boss Tony Wilson thought Lamb was a mistake. “He famously told me to not give up the day job when we started,” says Rhodes with a laugh. “He said, ‘You’re a good photographer, Louise!’ I said, ‘Well, thanks. But I think we’re onto something here as well.’ But he was just like, nah.”

Trusting the process

“You’ve just got to trust,” she says, talking about the leap of faith we all take, when making something new. “It’s not really a cerebral process, when you’re creating. It’s that gut feeling of — something’s happening here. And if you had to explain it to anybody, in its formative stages, you wouldn’t go beyond that.

“If you cross-examine what you’re doing, you might as well stop there. Because it comes from somewhere else. It comes from your core and you just follow the process. That’s what we sometimes lose touch with, because we live in a kind of left-brain reality of, ‘Are you going to make a living out of this?’”

The Phlunk grew out of one of those leaps.

“He kind of appeared when my two boys were small,” she explains. “I wrote a poem about this alien creature who can hear everything that children say and do. When kids are small, they’re just always like, ‘Mommy, look, look, look.’ They always want you to see and hear what they’re doing.

“And from when mine were two and six, I was a single mum, and also working, writing, touring. So the idea behind The Phlunk was that he’s always there listening, even if they feel like you’re somewhere else. Although obviously, I wasn’t somewhere else all the time! I hope they would attest to that.”

The poem sat in a drawer until 2011, when Rhodes decided to make it into a book. She approached the illustration department at Falmouth School of Art and Design, and asked if they’d run a competition amongst the students, to draw the character. Tori Elliott won, bringing it to life in a way that Rhodes says was “better than I’d even imagined”.