Katy Steele strips things back revealing a more vulnerable side to her hits in Undressed

Katy Steele’s foot, clad in a furry mint-green platform, jiggles in time with the music emanating from her mobile phone. “It’s all about the vibes, man,” the singer quips as she taps her hand against her zebra-print jeans and harmonises with UK synth pop artist Ms Ray. “I should have asked for a speaker in my rider though, hey?” she adds as a burst of fizzy giggles erupts from her diminutive frame. While a stylist, make-up artist and hairstylist flutter around preparing the singer for her STM shoot, Steele diplomatically offers others the chance to select some tunes. “Feel free to DJ anyone,” she says, before adding a cheeky warning: “just don’t put any s... on.” After 20 years in the music business, Steele is a woman who knows what she likes and what she doesn’t. Fake lashes may be a constant request on most photo shoots but Steele isn’t a fan. “I don’t want to look like Lady Gaga,” she jokingly tells make-up artist Hendra Widjaja, before requesting he apply layer upon layer of mascara so her lashes look “really clumpy”. More may be more when it comes to mascara but Steele is embracing an entirely different ethos for her latest album, Undressed. Released this week, it features a collection of some of the musician’s most beloved songs from both her solo and Little Birdy back catalogue along with four covers and one previously unreleased song, Honest With Me, all recorded in stripped-back style. Some tracks have lush layers of dreamy harmonies, while others are pared back to their bones with little more than vocals and pianos. The stark nature of the recordings showcases Steele’s killer pipes while also magnifying the inherent emotion and vulnerability in the songs, nowhere more so than in the spectacularly undervalued track Rescue Boat from her 2016 solo debut Human, a clear stand-out on Undressed. The album came about after her publishing company, Sony Publishing, suggested it would be good to release some stripped-down versions of her songs. “So last year I just booked a day in the studio with Dan Carroll and we recorded a few songs that formed the basis of the album,” the WA-based singer says. The song selection came down to which she felt could benefit from a different approach. “Some are songs I felt hadn’t had the right treatment in the first place, like Rescue Boat,” she says. “Sometimes songs can get bogged down by production, which detracts from the beauty and the simplicity.” There is a nostalgic 70s flavour to Undressed and Steele admits it was born of wanting to create something less “touched”. “It’s funny, someone asked me the other day if the album is a reaction to the fact there’s so much going on in the world and wanting things to be a bit more simple, and I feel like in some ways it is,” she says. “Everything is so complicated and over the top now but there’s comfort in simplicity.” Steele was barely out of her teens when Little Birdy formed before releasing their lauded debut album BigBigLove in 2004. She says it is inevitable that her voice has changed and matured over the years, and she relished putting a more mature vocal spin on early hits Beautiful To Me and Relapse. “Sometimes I cringe listening to those earlier recordings because I was so young and my voice has changed a lot,” says the singer, who has had no formal voice training. “I’m proud of the songs but I was just out of school when I started the band and I’ve basically learnt my craft with an audience watching me.” She likes to imagine the possibilities for change and adaption are endless for any song. “I see a song almost as its own organism, so when you do a different version, you can just keep expanding and expanding,” Steele says. “I think adding another dimension to songs that you have written in the past is kind of like this cool way of recycling your art. “And I like that idea of not wasting anything. I remember Paul Kelly said something about that and it has stuck with me. My computer is filled with hundreds of memos and songs that have never been used but you know one day, I might go back to them. Sometimes writing a song is like putting together a puzzle.” While the majority of Undressed’s songs were recorded last year, Honest With Me and the Michael Jackson cover Ben were among a batch of songs she initially worked on while in Los Angeles more than a decade ago. “It was a really spontaneous recording,” Steele says of the solo session with John Konesky and John Spiker, both in-demand musicians and producers who have toured with Jack Black’s band, Tenacious D. “Most of the songs were unfinished but Honest With Me came from that session. “In the second verse you’ll notice how the lyrics meander a little bit and don’t make a lot of sense, that’s because I was improvising. It was just me finding my way through the arrangement. It was done in one take and I think there’s something really special about it. “Sometimes things are not perfectly finished and I really believe that that doesn’t matter.” While she admits Ben, which was written by Don Black and Walter Scharf, and topped the Australian charts for eight weeks in 1972, may be a surprise inclusion alongside more expected covers by the likes of Lou Reed and The Smiths, she liked the vulnerability of the song. “It just really fit on the album because it’s so raw and I like that it is kind of left of field,” she says. “Both those songs from the LA session are pretty much one-takes and were used as is. The other ones I did in Fremantle with Dan Carroll have more layers and harmonies. I think it is a nice mix with the sparseness and a few that have a bit more colour.” Because The Night, which was written by Patti Smith and Bruce Springsteen and initially recorded by Smith — although Springsteen often plays the song live and included his own version on the 2010 album The Promise — was a more obvious inclusion. “It’s a great pop song and it’s just got real guts to it,” she says. “And I think it really suits a female vocal.” Steele feels like she found her groove working on Undressed. “This sort of thing is my vibe,” the mum of two primary-school-aged girls says. “And it’s been really fun and liberating. “I don’t have a lot of time. Any parent with young kids knows how precious your time is, so I thought, I am just going to go for it. I am going to take a risk. I could have spent three years making this album but instead it took a couple of months and I really enjoyed it.” The album release will be supported by a small national tour, which will be presented in stripped-back format with just Steele and one other musician on stage. “The shows are going to be cool, really intimate,” she says. “It’s going to be a whole array of songs, from all over the catalogues, Little Birdy, solo and the Undressed stuff.” And she is already thinking about what comes next. “I see this album as volume one,” she says. “I’d love to collaborate with my brother (Empire Of The Sun’s Luke Steele) and my husband (guitarist turned producer Graham McLuskie) for volume two. “I want it to be like a live album that is recorded in a lounge room with heaps of harmonies. Just a really nice warm record. “Well, that’s my plan but it is all up in the air.” Little Birdy fans will also be happy to know the band’s recent live reunion after a 15-year hiatus may also result in new music. “We don’t want to be that nostalgic band, only playing the old stuff,” she says. “If we are going to keep playing then we want to do new music. It’s hard because we are in three different States but I am going to send the guys some demos — it will be interesting to see if we have still got it.” Steele says she has gotten used to the juggle that comes with being an independent artist in the ever-evolving music industry. “I basically have about a hundred jobs,” she says. “When you are independent, you do everything. And it’s been really liberating but it’s also a lot of work and it’s a lot of risk, it’s like gambling — I do this and that but that pays for this. It’s a lot of juggling with a young family, too. “But that’s the modern way now, not just in music.” The press release accompanying Undressed calls Steele an artist who has endured, evolved but also managed to stay fiercely true to herself. “Put that on a T-shirt,” she laughs. “But I am proud of never giving up on myself. I could have given up, and I have wanted to, many times. And even now, I have my moments but then I start thinking about what I want to do next. “I’m just happy to be releasing music, I really am. I feel like I’ve let go of heaps of baggage about the industry as well. It’s easy to get bogged down by stats and the algorithm and wondering if I even have any fans any more, but I have just let it all go. And I’m just making the music I want to make.” As her name suggests, Steele has always been made of strong stuff. She was back touring three weeks after the birth of her first daughter, Iona, in 2018 and recently completed a show in Perth after breaking her ribs a few songs into the performance. “It’s amazing what the body is capable of,” she says. On the day she recorded The Smiths’ cult favourite There Is A Light That Never Goes Out and Stay Wild, the stand-out track from Little Birdy’s last release, Confetti, for Undressed, she arrived via the hospital. “I’d been in the ER that day with an eye infection,” she says. “I went straight from the hospital to the studio. My last two, three months have just been insane. “Well, even more than usual,” she adds with another spray of fizzy giggles. Katy Steele plays Rosemount Hotel on May 29. Undressed is out now.