Dougall is an English singer, songwriter, and pianist, with a musical career spanning twenty years. Emerging onto the Brighton indie scene in the mid-2000s, The Pipettes, with Rose (aka Rosay) being a founding member, grew a cult following for their unique, retro girl-group aesthetics. Her solo work has seen development to a rich unique sound, and pairs her voice with prolific piano or synth rhythm. To date, her most recent published work is an album of joint-effort alongside Graham Coxon for The WAEVE.

The Pipettes' debut album, We Are The Pipettes garnered relative success, and featured songs depicting young love, adolescence and post-feminism. The seven-piece (three female lead singers and four male backing musicians named The Cassettes) were an upbeat reinvention of the early 1960s, with Motown and disco influences. This followed through to their live performances, with retro polka-dot dresses and choreographed dances.

Dubbed the ‘Mod Pipette’ by a 2006 Pitchfork Review, Rosay, the youngest member, provided a much-needed hard edge to the band. Her soulful voice balanced surrounding sweet voices, and sang lead on singles ‘Judy’ and ‘Dirty Mind’.

Leaving The Pipettes in 2008, Rose Elinor Dougall embarked on a solo musician career, releasing a handful of singles and an album before venturing into collaborations with Mark Ronson. Dougall joined Ronson’s live band, the Business International and lent her voice to four songs featured on 2010’s Record Collection, in which she was praised for “her impact on the otherwise routine electro-pop number ‘Hey Boy’ [that] suggests that Ronson may well have found another muse in the mould of old cohorts Amy Winehouse and Lily Allen.” in an All-Noise review.

After a few single and EP releases, 2017 saw ‘Stellular’, a full-length solo album, released to her own Vermillion Records. This saw a momentary let go of folk and psychedelia influences; instead, focussing on danceable synth-pop and an element of the space-age, and provides an impression similar to that of jangly bands such as The Smiths and Cocteau Twins, that had been apparent in Dougall’s work for nearly a decade.

Contrasting ‘Stellular’, Dougall’s 2019 album ‘A New Illusion’ took a left turn in her discography. Largely a piano, voice and strings record, the tracks have more space to breathe, therefore carrying a slight rhythmic ambience. The Irish Times states “Dougall skilfully deconstructs the promises people make and the dysfunctions they normalise.” The track ‘Christina in Red’ best exhibits the blending themes of bitter and dysfunctional love with her fresh reinvention and interpretation of jangling psych-folk.

A chance meeting between Rose and Blur guitarist Graham Coxon in December 2020 sparked the beginnings of The WAEVE, a project that grew into a “life-changing collaboration”. Breaking out of COVID-19 lockdown, they shared their current musical inspirations over email, and met for a “socially distanced walk on Hampstead Heath over Christmas”. Despite their initial plans of making just a few songs that either musicians could include on further albums, Dougall and Coxon found themselves with a much larger project, and decisively made a new band for their album. WAEVE, stylistically in capitals but also written Waeve, is pronounced Wave, taking after the old English spelling for sea: S-A-E. Both could connect with the imagery and narrative the English coastline could offer, and felt that it reflected the sonic landscape their music embodied.

Dougall and Coxon combine King Crimson’s jazz abrasivity, Van der Graaf Generator’s mellow sentimentalism and Sandy Denny’s expressive vocal storytelling with their own established styles, for a hybrid genre consisting of Krautrock, folk, punk and progressive rock elements. Quick to demolish comments about gender-stereotyped “older bloke and younger woman” duets, Coxon humoured that “It was like I was Nancy Sinatra and Rose was Lee Hazlewood.”

“The coming together of two musicians, who through working together have formed a new, singular, sonic identity. Themes of oblivion and surrender are juxtaposed with suggestions of hopefulness and light. Against a brutal global backdrop of impending apocalypse and despair, Graham Coxon and Rose Elinor Dougall strove to free themselves through the defiant, blind optimism of making music.” – The WAEVE in their own words on Instagram.

A second The WAEVE album is currently in production.