Losing My Edge: we asked Hannah Diamond what her favourite song is, really
Each month we ask an artists to share what's actually their favourite song. You probably won't be too surprised by PC Music star Hannah Diamond's
Each month we ask an artists to share what's actually their favourite song. You probably won't be too surprised by PC Music star Hannah Diamond's
SS: Hi Hannah, you’ve picked a Whigfield track that isn’t ‘Saturday Night’.
HD: No. It’s ‘Think of You’.
SS: Is this Whigfield’s best single, then?
HD: It’s an absolute smash.
SS: Even better than ‘Sexy Eyes’?
HD: ‘Sexy Guys’?
SS: Eyes. ‘Sexy Eyes’. It’s essentially ‘Saturday Night’ with Whigfield singing about sexy eyes instead. It is not good.
HD: Well, ‘Think of You’ is an incredible song. It reminds me of a really fun era when I was doing my internship at Super Super magazine, which is where I met everyone from PC [Music]. We used to have this mix that Will Wright, the editor, had made for the office for when we did all-nighters to go to print. And this was one of his favourite tracks on that mix.
SS: I didn’t know you worked at Super Super. What was your role there?
HD: When I started I was the editor’s intern. I was incredibly shy and couldn’t even speak to anyone for some reason, and there was this defining moment when we had this shoot that got handed in that needed a retouch overhaul, basically, and I was like, ‘oh, I can do that.’ And they were like, ‘this girl who’s never spoken has suddenly said that she can do all this retouching and Photoshop’. So I started doing all of art direction, graphics, everything to do with the image side of things. It’s where I met GFOTY [Girlfriend Of The Year, Polly-Louisa Salmon], and through Polly I met A.G. [Cook] and Danny [L Harle] and everyone she went to school with. So this song reminds me of an era where I met my people.
SS: It’s a shame it doesn’t have a choreographed dance though, isn’t it?
HD: I actually feel like we’re in the choreographed dance era of songs again, because of TikTok. We’ve gone through this long period where it was really uncool to have dances connected to tracks – like ‘Cha Cha Slide’ and ‘The Ketchup Song’. It was considered so naff. But it’s progressed to something more advanced with TikTok. What’s going on there is pretty technical and everyone is killing it. We were doing fake maraca shaking.
SS: Are you on TikTok?
HD: I am but I’m figuring out how I want to be on there. Because being a public person doesn’t come naturally to me, actually.
SS: Do you think you could film yourself doing a TikTok dance in a public place? Because I struggle to take a photo in public.
HD: I do too! I get embarrassed getting my phone out to take photos of things in public, which is hilarious because I’m a photographer as part of my job. But I think it’s because I overly think about the intrusiveness of the camera in a public space. But when I see other people doing it, I think, ‘wow, slay! I aspire to be like you.’
SS: If you weren’t listening to ‘Think of You’ when it came out, when you would have been 4, what were you listening to then?
HD: My granddad had a very big tape and CD collection, and my favourite song when I was that age was ‘Baby Love’ by The Supremes. That was my fucking jam! And then I also borrowed a Donna Summer album from my granddad that Ioved.
SS: Have you always had a love for positive, celebratory pop music then, or did you ever go through a noise phase, or something “less Hannah Diamond”?
HD: I’ve listened to everything. I get bored and I historically spent a lot of time alone in my bedroom making art, and that gives you a lot of listening hours. I’ve always loved pop music, but I also had my indie era, where I was listening to Bloc Party all the time, or listening to Hadouken!. Enter Shikari. Then metal. When I was 11 I got really into trance because I was given a Gatecrasher CD by my uncle for Christmas…
SS: That you’d expressed no interest in?
HD: No. He just thought it was pretty fun. It opened a whole new world to me. There’s a musical archive in my brain.