On 1st October, Betty Blight releases a single that she describes as “very dear to her heart.” Here she tells us a little of the birth of this song.
Listen to it on Spotify, or buy it on Bandcamp and receive prints of her original artwork.
In 2017, two days before my 35th birthday, I woke up in Buenos Aires having water thrown in my face. Not the politest awakening, but it was forgiven when my eyes focused in on the paramedic in my kitchen. I had low blood pressure.
The second time I fell over I was on my way to the living room. It was a few days later and I awoke laughing on the floor as everything tingled and felt odd. The third time they had to close the charity shop I was sifting through in Chichester; the fourth and fifth were in my parent’s kitchen.
Each time I went somewhere parallel and threatened not to return. It wasn’t low blood pressure, but my heart’s electricity going haywire, short-circuiting, stopping the life flowing in me. I had a complete heart block, and technology implanted in my chest in a Portsmouth hospital kept me on this earth. Overnight I became a cyborg, my heartbeat would forever be told what to do by a pacemaker. I returned to my home in Argentina where things pretended to get better.
In Villa Pehuenia, Patagonia we walked 18 kilometres on January 1st 2019. A year before, I’d celebrated the incoming new year on my hospital bed, toasting smuggled-in 7Up with the bubbles stirred out. This brand new year brought my first long walk after a year in repose. I’d been proud to make it to the corner shop.
Now we skinny-dipped in a freezing, secluded lake in the Andes, and huddled around meat grilling on the fire. I recorded some songs in the forest, and sat in a field of spearmint, giant daisies and wild strawberries. We climbed red moonscapes, crossed dinosaur valleys and sat atop a crater as the sun pelted us with its rays.
It spat me out fresh as the baby I’d heard being born in a corridor during that month back in hospital after my return to Buenos Aires. My liver had turned me yellow, my heart was swollen and misshapen, beating new rhythms at will. “God,” I said, “there’s still stuff I want to do,” and the people screeched and gurgled in the adjoining corridor. A woman wailed as her baby screamed out its first breath. And so life flowed through those rooms, not leaving me aside.
I didn’t realise I was dying, just that I was on the edge of something totally unknown to me, and that I was completely alone. And yet not. All that was needed was a voice within me to ask to come back, and I could. Like Dorothy, I could also return to my roots and start a whole new journey.
Here I am, Betty Blight, back in England after 14 years in Buenos Aires, with a childish message for us all. A new song of old. Some hope and light and the promise of sunrise. And here is “Little One”, restorative and conjuring. This song lowers fevers, soothes anxiety, regulates heart beats and brings us back to earth.
Little One is released by Castle Cooperative Records, October 2021. Words and music by Elizabeth Julia Worley (Betty Blight); recorded, mixed and mastered by James Stonehewer in The Old Town Studio, Hastings in 2019. Double bass performed by Milton Alonso and recorded in Constitución, Buenos Aires by Nico Cohen. Betty sings and plays guitar. Percussion performed by Yair Katz and Joe Nicklin. Original artwork by Betty Blight.
Castle Cooperative Records 