‘It's kind of mind-bending,†says 69-year old Steven Hall. For the last three years, the Scottish musician has been living with his lawyer husband a few hours south of Chicago, driving an Uber for some additional income. Now, suddenly, he is being lauded by critics for his double LP My Skyscraper, released last month under the name Nirosta Steel. Compiling material recorded between 1984 and 2025, it charts a sonic landscape through disco, folk and synth-pop with detours into Chinese opera and ecclesiastical a cappella. Pitchfork called it “an archival triumph and one of the year's most thrilling new releasesâ€.
It all came about when a label head, impressed with Nirosta Steel's 2014 album Cool Fire, asked Hall if he had any more music. “He didn't know what he was in for,†says Hall. The couple of dozen unreleased songs he shared spanned four decades of eclectic musicianship, and revealed a globe-trotting life and career that intersects with experimental icons such as Arthur Russell and Allen Ginsberg. Now My Skyscraper seems poised to admit Hall into that rarified pantheon of historically salvaged artists whose time has belatedly arrived.
“I feel like Rip Van Winkle! Like I suddenly walked out of a cave and I'm blinking my eyes and there's all this bright light shining on me,†says Hall. “Two weeks ago the label was maybe $2,000 in debt because we were going to do 200 copies. Now we have 1,000 orders and are looking to press 2,000.â€
Born in the Glasgow suburb of Milngavie to a middle-class optician father and a “tough as nails†mother from a family of 18, Hall grew up performing in the church choir and local theatre company. His parents sent him to a teacher to rid him of his accent, accounting for a rather unplaceable accent (“some people think I'm Swedishâ€), but they were much more lax as his sexuality developed, and the young Hall freely dated boys and girls throughout school. “There was never even the idea of coming out,†he says, “because I came from a very liberal background where my parents' attitude was, ‘Whatever you want to do, it's OK.'â€
After his father died, Hall's mother posted a personal ad in the International Herald Tribune and consulted with her three children (Hall has a twin sister and a brother) as to which suitor she should pursue. A man in Delaware won out and the family relocated to the US, which had long dazzled Hall thanks to his fascination with American musicals (“especially the real fantasy, Judy Garland-Mickey Rooney, ‘let's put on a show' classicsâ€) and the Chrysler Building, which was built from a stainless alloy called … Nirosta steel.
Poets – including Ginsberg – would visit his high school in Delaware, and Hall would join them on their return trips to New York City, which is how he found himself at the so-called Poets' Building in the middle of the East Village's then bustling arts scene. “I thought it was normal,†says Hall, “because it was the only thing I knew. ‘Oh, Bob Dylan's coming over, his limousine is parked downstairs. Richard Hell from Television has a show tonight.' I thought I could be doing the same thing.â€
He briefly followed Ginsberg to Naropa University, where he studied dance and poetry under Douglas Dunn and William S Burroughs. But it was while visiting Ginsberg in the Poets' Building that Hall met Arthur Russell, and the two developed a deep friendship and collaboration while playing backup for Ginsberg's poetry sets. Russell, he says, was one of the few people who “just couldn't help creating all the time, and it was hardly a conscious thing. His genius was totally organic and came from his Buddhist awakening. People credit Ginsberg with bringing Buddhism to the west, but Arthur was, in some ways, teaching Allen.â€
Hall and Russell collaborated on several projects, including the disco outfit Loose Joints with the DJ Steve D'Acquisto. One of only two songs they wrote together, the sweltering Go for the Night, appears on My Skyscraper, with production by members of Arthur's Landing, a sort-of tribute band assembled by members of their circle after Russell's death from Aids in 1992. Their other co-write, a lo-fi elegy titled Lost in Thought, was meant to feature on the album but was bumped in favour of the 22-minute diptych Fresh Feeling and Special Weakness – two of only three recordings of Russell, a gifted multi-instrumentalist, playing drums.
Those last-minute additions survived somewhat miraculously, given Hall “had just had them transferred last year, after having them on two-track [tapes] for all those years. I was lucky they were still usable because they were never played, I think, since they were recorded.†More than that, the tracks were improvised one-takes: “Once we got going, the idea was we don't stop, and we don't go back and do it again. Everything I did, Arthur was right on top of it. That shows not only how talented he was, but also how close we were, because we could have that kind of interaction and it worked.â€
Beyond their collaborations, the two would find inspiration on joint journeys to now legendary nightclubs such as Danceteria and The Saint. One of their favourite pastimes, Hall says, was getting high and looking at guys in their diverse East Village, with a preference for its Ukrainian runners and Puerto Ricans “who didn't like to wear underwear when they wore sweatpantsâ€. With a naughty chuckle, he relates that, when a well-endowed man approached, “we would nudge each other and say, ‘entering binocular mode.'â€
Hall admits his relationship with Russell sometimes suffered from their clash of competitiveness, and what he viewed as his friend's jealous streak. In the book Travels Over Feeling, Hall reveals that he was seconds from signing to Russell's Sleeping Bag Records label when Russell grabbed the pen from his hand, claiming he would become too famous and move on. “Arthur had a saying, ‘Sometimes paranoia is justified,'†Hall explains. “At that time, he thought some of the people at Sire Records, some of the sleazy people he was hanging out with and playing demos for, had taken some of his ideas, which is entirely possible.†Hall says Russell believed the Rolling Stones' song Miss You, for example, was based on one of his drum tracks – though “there was not really any evidence of that, but that was the kind of thingâ€.
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In his 20s, Hall began spending substantial amounts of time in East Asia, initially staying with a wealthy boyfriend in Hong Kong. He began scoring performances and hosting movement workshops for Zuni Icosahedron, an experimental theatre company there, and later “made a really good living†recording location sound for film and television ads in Taiwan. Naturally, he picked up inspiration each step of the way. My Skyscraper track Lost in Music concludes with audio from a Cantonese funeral procession, and Boss Trix (Benny's Song) is inspired by a Taiwanese lover with impressive bedroom skills.
“I've been collecting all these songs for ever, basically, and it's not just collecting,†he says. “A song that was written 30 years ago, or something I did with Arthur 40 years ago, I keep doing them in different ways so I don't get bored, or it's different versions of songs I've done with other people in other languages.â€
With the album's success, and with momentous live engagements on the horizon including his first performance at New York's former Pyramid Club (now Nightclub 101) since he played there with Russell, Hall hopes to reignite his writing with new collaborators, and says he'd like to do a covers album that includes his take on Sade's No Ordinary Love, originally intended for My Skyscraper.
“It's like surfing on a wave and just seeing where it goes,†he says. “There was no plan or budget for promotion, it was just the music we wanted to put out.â€
As for finding renewed success at such a late stage in his career, Hall remains unfazed. “I really admire older musicians, like Madonna, who's two years younger than me, or Mick Jagger, who's a lot older,†he says. “Certain musicians just keep finding ways to approach it. There's an authenticity in terms of the process, because everyone was just doing it because they wanted to. And that's what my music is like, too.â€
