It's just a few notes everyone knows. But if you strip them from their acid rave outfit and turn them into a piano riff, Alice DJ's hit single starts to breathe in a new space, a space of longing, of loneliness and desperation. "It was an accident really," says Jenny Plant, British singer songwriter who replanted "Better Off Alone" into a new soil with just her voice and a humble piano bed,"we were in the studio and wanted to do a video. I sat down on the piano, my friend filmed it and that's basically it. The audio you hear now is the live recording from that day. We debated whether to make another 'proper' recording, but this moment was special and I think you can hear that in this version."
Classically trained on piano, harp and violin, Jenny Plant found her place in music in two worlds over the recent years: for one, she's a singer songwriter influenced by fellow piano-driven artists like birdy, Adele or Carole King, currently working on her debut album. And then she arrayed into the world of film and game soundtracks. "I got asked to sing on a big video game, which was a career highlight for me. I did a bit of writing for another game, I sung on a few soundtracks, I'm singing on a few Disney soundtracks that are coming soon!"
It's only fitting that her version of "Better Off Alone" got picked for BBC's new horror drama Red Rose, by show creator Michael Clarkson himself. The song sets the mood in the beginning of episode 3. "Getting an upbeat track like that, it takes on a completely different meaning when you slow it down. That's the beauty. The lyrics are so emotional! The riff here - playing it slowly makes you realise how pretty it is, but you don't think about it when you listen to the original 90s banger," says Jenny. The music supervisors of the series agreed. Red Rose will be available on Netflix late September.
To stop viewers from shazaming into the void, made records will release "Better Off Alone" on September 16th as part of our new singles club, made arcade, which will see a new unique single released every few weeks from a different unsigned artist.