Emmy The Great Interview

I’m thinking that interviews aren’t meant to go like this. Emma Lee-Moss is sitting opposite me telling me about living with Charlie from Noah and The Whale, and coming home from a holiday to find Laura Marling in her house, and nicknaming Marling ‘Anne Frank’ because she was always in Emmy’s attic.

I ask her about Charlie as though I’ve known her for years, when in reality her PR only just introduced us, and I’m suddenly aware of just how unusual it is to speak to an artist that isn’t answering-by-rote. To the contrary, Emmy is completely unguarded when she leans forward and says, “We never touched or kissed or anything, but he lived at my house, and we slept in the same room because we were so inseparable. We were intensely good friends for six months, and then one day I came back and Laura Marling was in Charlie’s room. And then Charlie violently moved out, I don’t know what happened.”

What happened is that Emmy went on to shun everyone’s predictions that 2008 was her year, veering past major-label record deals and turning her back on the hype – and the new folk ‘scene’ in the process. It’s now 2009 and her album is only just about to be released. It’s called ‘First Love’, a title almost on a par with her own in levels of unbearable tweeness. Emmy’s been trying to tell everyone that the title ‘First Love’ has some kind of literary origin, but it seems unlikely, and the fact that the media lap up her stories is clearly a game to this deadpan, half-chinese, middle-class English girl with her smiling eyes. There’s a Catch-22 irony about a humble person self-titled ‘great’, and it smacks of good humour.

Personal difficulties aside, Emmy seems to struggle with the very idea of any ‘scene’. “Most of this new folk thing, I can see all the contradictions,” she says. “There are so many complications when the press decide that something is a scene, it’s just so much hassle. I just want them to all get in a group and say that they’re a scene and then for someone to take a picture.” She sounds at once brave and slightly indignant, but the message is clear: Emmy The Great intends to do things her own way, whether anyone else approves or not.

‘First Love’ rattles with that homemade feel; it sounds like faded wallpaper and peeling lacquer and the lingering warmth of recent sunshine. I assume this is intentional, but Emmy doesn’t seem so sure. “I’m aware of the record's flaws,” she says. “We made a lot of mistakes. I didn’t want it to sound hi-fi, so it sounds fucking awful, I wanted to use bad equipment. We maybe didn’t spend enough money on the actual recording.” A couple of days later she will hunt me down on facebook to give me a link to the remastered version with its much improved attention to balance and sonic consistency, and I’ll be left thinking, again, how rare it is in the music industry to find someone quite so unaffected.

Today, Emmy is half way through telling me about the time she got sold for ket at Reading Festival when her PR tells me to wrap up the interview, and it seems suddenly formal juxtaposed with all the chatting we’ve been doing. The NME, perhaps confused by someone so reluctant to leap onto bandwagons, described Emmy as the girl that boys want to take care of and girls love to hate. In truth, Emmy The Great is much like her music: disarmingly honest, steeped in good-humour and genuinely charming – qualities that confuse most people in this business. Here’s hoping she stays that way.

Live Review: Cherbourg @ Borderline 5/2/09

Scenes are funny things. It’s near-on impossible to pin down the moment that a meeting of like-minds under the right conditions becomes a movement of cultural significance. And while NME like to hedge their bets by labelling every artist that emits so much as a squeak with a gibberish genre tag, the likelihood is that by the time we on the receiving end catch on to a musical trend, it’s already all but finished for those who instigated it.

That’s what Phil of new-folk’s latest offering, Cherbourg, means when he tells me the scene is over as we talk over cigarettes outside Borderline at the band’s EP release. He doesn’t mean London new-folk is dead – far from it with albums from Mumford & Sons, Noah and The Whale and of course, Cherbourg, scheduled for release this year. He means that now London new-folk is established, labelled, and accepted by even the most genre shy, those within it will inevitably start to grow out of its artistic constraints. What usually happens at this stage is that major labels sign lesser-talented imitation acts, rather like commercial vultures picking at the popularity of original movement.

Cherbourg are perhaps the last genuine new folk act, and to some extent even they surface in the shadow of their predecessors, Mumford & Sons. Frontman Andrew Davie sings with the same throaty folky drawl as Marcus Mumford, and the four members slip into similar four part harmonies throughout their set. They distinguish themselves by always erring on the unapologetically dark side of the lyric-stick, the line ‘it’s just another nightmare and you forgot to close your eyes’ but one example. Also, Phil swaps his fiddle for an electric guitar every now and then for some quite indulgent solos that he could probably pull off if they weren’t accompanied by closed eyes and a ‘meaningful’ expression.

Taking themselves too seriously might be Cherbourg’s greatest danger as they navigate the ‘scene’ this next year. They’re new-folk’s darlings boys – there’s a show of support from Noah and The Whale’s Tom and Jay Jay Pistolet mixed in with a very lovey-lovey crowd at Borderline tonight – but they haven’t quite made it yet. While songs about heartbreak proliferate, Cherbourg’s lyrics tend towards the formulaic and they’ve definitely been peeking at Mumford and Sons’ rhyming dictionary (at one point even rhyming ‘ear’ with ‘ear’). But as a tight musical outfit with mates in the right places, there’s no reason why 2009 shouldn’t work out excellently for them and their fiddler-friends in new-folk.

Fee Fie Foe Fum @ Cargo, 16/12/08, featuring Laura Marling, Mumford & Sons, Johnny Flynn and the Sussex Wit, Jay Jay Pistolet and more.

This year’s been a good one for homegrown folk music. A whole host of bands and solo artists have emerged, acoustic guitars in tow, to create a veritable sonic movement. New-folk distinguishes itself with an emphasis on earthy, acoustic musicality and stylistic integrity – a breath of fresh air in a digitally manufactured and commercially driven industry.

Fee Fie Foe Fum is new-folk’s Christmas party. It feels just like it, too, as the artists stand among the audience between sets, supporting one another and celebrating their individual successes and collective critical acclaim. We arrive to catch the end of Cherbourg, but cannot help being distracted by Laura Marling and Marcus Mumford, just a few feet away, in a romantic clinch. Most of the acts on the bill tonight have been touring together, across the globe, in one combination or another throughout the year, and there is an observable sense of community that makes the rest of us feel like the lucky gatecrashers.

Lucky is the word, though. Jay Jay Pistolet looks quite solitary as he takes to the stage after Cherbourg. He is softly sung, the vocal distorted by a mic effect that resounds in Cargo’s warehouse rafters as though emanating from a gramophone. There is an faux-sadness to his performance that is impossibly endearing, and a respectful hush falls upon the onlookers for each quiet, melancholy love song. What he lacks in versatility is more than compensated for in charisma, as he wishes us all a pleasant evening and, doe-eyed, departs the stage.

Mumford & Sons are next as the midnight hour approaches and the mood in the audience loosens up. The talented four-piece are waistcoat-clad and stand in a line, each absorbed by the task at hand as they dance, subconsciously. Their set is infectiously jubilant – there are soon people jigging in the audience, bottles held aloft. Mumford & Sons come off best in passages of magnificent male harmony (‘The Banjolin Song’) that sees all four of them singing like a dog-eared, growling Fleet Foxes, but without the same drifting tonality. If anyone steals the show it is Marcus and friends – and seeing as they don’t have an album out yet, that’s good going.

A little later, Laura Marling comments on how honoured she is to be playing on such an amazing line-up. “You are the line up!” someone shouts back from the floor, and is duly ticked off by Marling. She does look singularly beautiful in a dress and make-up tonight though – as though the boyish, dressed-down girl that we’ve all grown to love finally learned to take pride in her pretty face. She plays a meagre four songs – one new – and creeps off, before being encored back to the stage by the crowd. A rendition of ‘My Manic And I’ turns into a bit of a sing-along, which is utterly bizarre for a fatalistic little number without anything even approaching a chorus. But everyone loves it, and so we sing all of the well-worn words, encouraged by delighted smiles from the Joni Mitchell of new-folk.

“No one should ever have to follow Laura Marling,” Johnny Flynn grumbles as he takes to the stage. Although he is absolutely right, he still manages it as well as anyone possibly could. Flynn makes an angelic, if visibly nervous frontman, showing off extensive talent on any number of instruments while his band provide musical and moral support, ribbing him for his anxious chatter. Though it is the evening’s most unsure performance, with a lyrical slip-up mid-set, it still encompasses all of the best of qualities of new folk – earnest musicality, inclusivity, and humility. There’s not a single person without a smile on their face by the time Flynn and his band play the closing chords.

Forget idiotic day-glo lycra and faddy electro – if tonight’s anything to go by, 2009 will belong to new-folk.

Some Tracks I Liked In 2008

There may well be more to come, but it's getting to that list time of year again. And there's nothing I like better than a good list, so I'm getting mine in early. Jamie dabbles in that sort of thing, too...

The Dodos – Ashley (Visiter)

There was something about the biting cold of early spring that I found within the music of The Dodos. I was heading towards my finals at uni and each day entailed an uphill hike to the library for hours of silent reading, and something about the cross rhythms in Ashley seemed a part of the heavy momentum of that time. Coupled with which, the exponential improvement in this band’s live shows over the course of the year make them worthy of an end of year accolade, if nothing else.

Laura Marling – Blackberry Stone (Cross Your Fingers EP)

Alas, I Cannot Swim blew the large majority of the music press, including myself, away, even earning Miss Marling a Mercury nomination. (“I’ve no idea what all this is about,” she later confessed to me at the awards ceremony.) But it is in ‘Blackberry Stone’, originally the B-side to single ‘Cross Your Fingers’, that Marling’s astounding vocal range and the mesmerising ache in her lyrics really comes to the fore.

Frightened Rabbit – Backwards Walk (The Midnight Organ Fight)

The Midnight Organ Fight seems one of those albums that people can form an almost unspeakably personal relationship with – even bloggers who usually muster prolific jive on any given subject. Scott Hutchison’s broken Scottish brogue and the band’s epic approach to instrumentation express a kind of red-blooded hurt that is severed before it really takes off in Backwards Walk, a musical manifestation of the frustrated lyrics. The Daytrotter session of this track is a must.



MGMT – Kids (Oracular Spectacular)

Maybe one day, I will be able to listen to this song again. Right now it’s still more irritating than Katy Perry. It became the inescapable summer anthem of 2008, and it was rammed down my throat almost hourly at every festival I went to. But it’s for that reason it makes the top five, too, because one day I’ll hear it and remember chasing mediocre pop stars around Glastonbury and climbing midnight trees in Benicassim and drinking whisky with boys in bands at Roskilde.






Fleet Foxes – Tiger Mountain Peasant Song (Fleet Foxes)

It was actually stumbling upon a First Aid Kit cover of this that I fell in love with it, leading me to properly listen to Fleet Foxes’ much lauded debut album. Baroque pop? The saviours of American music? Sounds overblown, but in a strange way Fleet Foxes deserve it for reinventing Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young for a new generation, for sounding so unlike everything else that was released this year, and for the best Jesus facial hair this side of the bible. Amen.





And the shortlist: The Acorn – Oh Napoleon (Glory Hope Mountain) / British Sea Power – Canvey Island (Do You Like Rock Music) / Deerhunter – Saved By Old Times (Microcastle) / The Kills – Cheep and Cheerful (Midnight Boom) / The Last Shadow Puppets – Meeting Place (The Age Of The Understatement) / Mystery Jets – Flakes (Twenty-One) / Raconteurs – Many Shades Of Black (Consolers Of The Lonely) / Tokyo Police Club – In A Cave (Elephant Shell) / TV On The Radio – Halfway Home (Dear Science)

Mumford & Sons 'Love Your Ground EP' released 3/11/08

There are only four songs on the Love Your Ground EP, evidence, perhaps of the painstaking meticulousness of Mumford & Sons, who must, surely, have a multitude of publishable tracks to chose from by now.

Each of them is lyrically lachrymose, from the quiet, introverted fury of ‘Little Lion Man’ with its refrain, “I really fucked it up this time,” to the grasping hope of ‘Feel The Tide’, that sings “you and I now, we can be alright.” And yet the words are upended and juxtaposed with banjos and mandolins and ukuleles and those sorts of folk-like, twiddling, inevitably cheery instruments that make the songs themselves seem bright as well as melancholy.

The songwriting here still sounds a little premature and not yet fully formed, and Marcus Mumford is not yet beyond writing lyrics that teeter between trite and touching. There are glimpses of poetry in ‘Hold On To What You Believe’ with the words “we’re young/open flowers in the fields of this war-torn world,” but the chorus is still irritatingly preachy. Similarly the music is heavily circular, risking mudanity, and yet is illuminated by inspired moments, such as in the surprising intrigue of a time-signature change in the same track.

Mumford and Sons have been better known as Laura Marling’s backing band for a good while now, and it is through this musical join-the-dots than they are inextricably interwoven into the fabric of new-folk, inhabiting genre shelf-space alongside Noah and The Whale, Mystery Jets, Marling and Emmy The Great. Their EP reaches for the more artistically sincere side of the new-folk stick, and yet falls just short this time, veering too often towards the predictable and twee. Yet there are moments here that speak of a kind of cold, rattling, expansive folk that needs only to be stretched and refined over time to produce something truly definitive. This will be the task at hand for the band as they put together their debut long player.

Mercury Music Prize 2008: Exclusive Interviews

Colin Greenwood: “It would be embarrassing if Radiohead won the Mercury Prize”
In exclusive interview at the awards show...

Radiohead's Colin Greenwood told Gigwise in an exclusive interview last night that the band would be “embarrassed” to win the Mercury Prize.

“The music’s great, the line-up’s really strong and diverse, so just to be included is pretty special,” Colin said at the awards show. “But Radiohead are not new, so we're being involved in something we don’t feel we should be.”
Radiohead recently returned from a huge tour of the US and Canada, from which bassist Greenwood seemed a little groggy. “This is my big night out,” he said. “but I've got a head cold! I think I caught it from my kids.”

“I already miss touring.” Colin admitted. He said of their time away: “It was wonderful. We played a cricket match with the crew and everyone in Vancouver. And Thom and Johnny played a cover of a Neil Young song, ‘After The Gold Rush’, in LA two weeks ago, in front of Americans and they didn’t lynch us!”

Radiohead embark on a tour of Japan in the October.



Laura Marling Calls Mercury Prize “Weird”
In Gigwise exclusive at the awards show...

Elusive folk songstress Laura Marling confessed to Gigwise in a very special interview last night that she though the Mercury Prize was “weird”.

“I’ve no idea what this is all about,” Marling said from a balcony overlooking the ceremony, below, just moments before her performance.

“With your own gigs, you’re playing to people who’ve come to see you and want to listen to your songs and have a nice evening, where as this, it’s great, but it is a huge commercial deal. It’s not got as much soul as a gig, but it’s great…” she said, unconvincingly, before adding quietly, “it’s weird.”

When asked if she minded being nominated for the prize she replied: “Music isn’t all about music anymore. The only thing that keeps me going is the community of it, and this hasn’t got anything to do with that, but it’s part of it.”

Marling, alongside Adele and Estelle, was one of three solo female artists to be nominated for the prize, which was awarded to Elbow at last night's ceremony.

Gig Review: Laura Marling at the Star of Bethnal Green 3/9/08

Read the original here


“I've been here for two hours,” a smiling redhead confesses at the door of the Star of Bethnal Green. Inside, the tiny pub is brimming with the well-coiffed and music-savy. The doorman is arguing with the Scruffy Bird promoter, trying to get him to stop letting people in as the venue reached capacity some time ago. There is a queue of pretty indie kids that winds its way down the street for half a mile. Which is why the redhead is smiling: she's made it to the front; she might just get in.

The reason for such commotion? One diminutive eighteen-year old by the name of Laura Marling. With her pale elfin featues and boyish white-blonde crop, Marling has a voice that defies contemporary comparison and a strength of principle and direction that has revived the underground folk scene's anti-commercial, music-concentric resolve.

Just over a year ago, in a performance on Jools Holland, Laura was a rabbit in headlights: her blue eyes never left the ground, her fingers trembled through delicate bedroom compositions. The ethereal creature before us this evening, make-up-less as ever and shrouded in a large, nondescript shirt, has evolved from that early terror, garnering a steady, steely confidence over the course of two years of hard graft and steady gigging. Marling weaves her way through the crowd to take to the stage, she smiles, she chats amiably with her hushed and waiting audience, and finally, she sings.

She is without her Mumford and Sons backing band tonight, and with the absence of musical support her songs - the earlier love-forlorn acoustic tracks and the more recent, fiddle-featuring folk-tales - are stripped of complications, sounding all the better for it, especially is such an intimate environment. 'Ghosts' and 'My Manic And I' are interspersed with a b-side, 'Blackberry Stone'. The latter, one of Marling's finest songs and rarely heard save from live, smoulders with a rhythmic and melodic ire that echos in the dim confines of the pub. The earlier part of the set is interrupted slightly by the sound technician fiddling with the levels, but in many ways this just adds to the personal feel of the gig, as tiny smiles and giggles slip through Marling's usual cold, fixated stage persona.

We are treated to some new material, two new songs to be precise. “It's terribly self indulgent to play new songs,” Marling apologises, before adding lightly, “so I will.” The first, 'Rambling Man', showcases a melodic line and vocal agility of uniqueness that strikes of Joni Mitchell. There are but glimpses of facile lyrics at moments in the new, unpolished tracks that remind how young Marling still is. The audience is awe-struck and respectfully still, until the 'Crawled Out Of The Sea' interlude, where an irrepresible sing-a-long begins accidentally, endorsed by a glimmer of a smile from onstage. "I wish more people would do that," Marling murmurs afterwards. "No one does that anymore: this is what music is all about." And as her voice winds its way through to the melodic reaches of her handstitched, humble folk songs, we can't help but agree.