As musical origin stories go, it’s one of the strongest in recent years and a gut punch to anyone whose biggest achievement these last months was banana bread.
The 16-year old North Londoner found inspiration for the lush and involving “Won’t You Be Happy” from The Pretenders and Blur. “I was nearly asleep at about 2am, and had the ‘Bahdabahhhh’ melody stuck in my head,” she tells me. “I’d just been reading Chrissie Hynde’s autobiography, so I originally thought, ‘Oh shit, that’s a nice Pretenders melody’ – and then I realised it was my Pretenders melody!”
A love of Blur’s debut record Leisure led to the Stephen Street connection. “The simple shoegaze psychedelic feel-good stuff was what was getting me through [lockdown],” she explains, “so I made that the aim: to just have something you would wanna dance to, like Leisure.”
Spurred on to contact the Blur producer, she emailed him anonymously. Street got back in touch the very same day and asked her to send over the stems of the song. “I love him because he always does everything he can in production to prevent the listener from becoming bored,” Wilder explains. “There’s always something coming in or dropping out, guitar lines running over the top, or backing vocals and harmonies, and that’s always something especially in this song, that I try to do.”
