Tuesday 6 May 2025, 7.30pm
To mark the release of film-maker and singer/songwriter Sally Potter‘s new album ANATOMY, coproduced with Marta Salogni and released by Bella Union, Café Oto is proud to host the only UK concert featuring Fred Frith (guitars), Liam Dunachie (piano), Aimée Farrell-Courtney (bodhrán), Ben Reed (bass) and Misha Mullov-Abbado (double bass).
Sally Potter has been exploring themes of human connectedness, morality, and mortality in a career that has spanned four decades, encompassing works as varied as the speculative historical epic “Orlando” and the acerbically witty comedy-drama “The Party”. In addition to her film work, Sally is a musician and singer-songwriter, a parallel vocation that began with improvised performances and concerts in the 1970s and 1980s and continued through composing music for the soundtracks of her critically lauded films. Her second album, ANATOMY is an entirely new affair for the multi-disciplinary artist—an eclectic and boldly visionary collection of songs that seek to tackle our species’ symbiotic relationship with the Earth, all while reflecting on the emotional threads that intertwine us all as people who share this planet.
Sally Potter on ANATOMY:
“ANATOMY is a sequence of songs that chart the passionate love, destructive human behaviours, spiritual longings, physical dependencies and rampant exploitation that make up our turbulent love affair with the planet we inhabit.
Whilst most of us feel deeply attached to those we are closest to, whether family, friends or lovers, there is often a disconnect with the land – especially if we live in cities – and with places and people far away. The causal chain, the consequences of our actions, seems remote.
ANATOMY makes the links between the individual human body, our collective body (our species), and the body of the Earth, with songs of solace and protest, creating a space in which to contemplate and feel the unthinkable.
You are my Earth, beloved
My everything…
Without you I would not be here
Without you, we all disappear…”
Praise for Potter’s debut album PINK BIKINI:
"Sally Potter’s debut album is a gorgeous excavation of what it meant - and means - to be a girl growing up in a world that wants to tame her passion, defiance and curiosity. Potter both remembers her experiences and observes them, moving between subject and object with the clever experimentalism that fans of her films will recognise. The guitar playing by her long-term collaborator Fred Frith is exquisite, and the result is an intimate, poignant listen with a lovely, slightly melancholic feel." – MIRANDA SAWYER - BBC RADIO 6
"Potter's singing is... in a Marianne Faithful style, with hints of Weimar... she's a beguiling storyteller." – MOJO
"Emotionally raw... full of bittersweet narrative vignettes drawn from Potter's turbulent teens." – UNCUT
"Sally Potter's first solo album, Pink Bikini, is as vivid, enticing and emotionally potent as you’d expect from an artist with her keen eye and ear and restless creativity." – MARK CARO – CAROPOP
Sally Potter left school at 16 to become a filmmaker, joining the London Filmmakers Cooperative before studying dance and choreography at The Place. She then formed ‘Limited Dance Company’ with Jacky Lansley.
In 1978 Sally toured Europe in FIG, an all-female improvising band formed by Lindsay Cooper and Maggie Nicols. She wrote the lyrics for music composed by Cooper for the ‘Film Music Orchestra’, whose members included Phil Minton, Irene Schweizer and Hugh Hopper, and ‘Oh Moscow’, a song cycle about the Cold War, performed on both sides of the Berlin wall.
Following the critical success of her short film “Thriller”, Sally has written and directed nine feature films, working with actors including Tilda Swinton, Julie Christie, Cate Blanchett, Johnny Depp, Riz Ahmed, Judi Dench, Cillian Murphy, Javier Bardem and Elle Fanning, and winning over 40 international awards.
Sally co-wrote the score for “Orlando” with David Motion (released by Varese Sarabande), curated and collaborated on tracks for “Yes” (released by Deutsche Grammaphon), “The Tango Lesson” (released by Sony Classical) and composed the score for “The Roads Not Taken” (released by Milan / Sony Masterworks).
In 2023 she released PINK BIKINI, her first album as a singer/songwriter continuing her collaborations with Fred Frith, Matthew Barley, Viktoria Mullova and Misha Mullov-Abbado among others.
ANATOMY, her second album as singer/songwriter, is co-produced and mixed by Marta Salogni and released by Bella Union.
LISTEN HERE TO A SELECTION OF SALLY POTTER’S MUSIC FOR FILM
