An Ode To A Popstar

A past-her-prime popstar sings her song in font of a curtain while dragging the skeleton of a hoop skirt around herself.

When performer, Becca Blue came up with her unfortunate stage name, she probably had no idea that within a short space of time there would be someone in the world spotlight with almost the exact same stage name as her, but who would become ultimately more famous, for doing much more risqué things on a stage – with over 1000 men. Still, as Becca Blue, Rebecca Molloy wants to entertain us her way, with her stage persona, singing her songs, and showing us her pop video, so here we are.

Dreamt up as a persona for an artistic exhibition, Becca Blue’s shtick was to perform karaoke for folk individually, within the space of a walk-in cupboard. In the same vein as all those frightfully entitled, bourgeois, privately educated but with no direction, twonkish, one-man/one woman shows that we find at the Edinburgh Fringe, hosted in a skip, or the back seat of a car, or a chemical toilet, this ‘artistic’ exhibition seems to fall right in with those. So, following the success of the cupboard karaoke, Becca Blue decided to become a popstar in her own right, and here we have her debut single from her debut EP, An Ode To A Popstar.

In the three-minute video accompanying the song, we see Becca Blue performing some simple arm movements in an amateurish physical theatre type manner. She twists her hands and arms around each other and squats and stands up again in a repeated fashion, then grabs hold of an oversized frame for a hoop skirt, covered in what looks like tin-foil, and drags it around herself in front of the bare curtain. At times she has a microphone, and glitter on her eyes, looking somewhat like a pop character as she sings her garbled words to us. None of these actions are well captured.

There’s an attempt at style from the cinematographer, with high saturation and low contrast, and the tacking on of super-8 framing at points, but for the most part all we’ve got is someone prancing about in their skimpies in front of a curtain. The song itself is wistful and moany, with Blue’s whiny notes stretched out across the melody to no end. There’s no emotion or effect from the lyrics as the song plays, however, as there’s not a lot of clarity in the singing as to what’s actually being said, and it’s very difficult to tune in to Blue’s voice to get any sort of meaning. Sadly, the video seems to give nothing away in that regard either.

There’s not a lot of effort, or action, or drama, or narrative, in the presentation of An Ode To A Popstar, and so it is hard to take any sort of enjoyment from it. Even with limited budget, and limited expertise, there must have been some better expression of the song than wandering around half-naked in front of a bare curtain making shapes with your hands, but sadly, that’s all we get. Now imagine if you’d paid twenty quid for a ticket at the door!