Another voice: Anna out on her own
But amid the annual parade of Lady GaGa wannabes, pouty electronica artists and skinny indie bands, one performer stands moodily apart. The spiritual love-child of Nick Cave, Scott Walker and Siouxsie Sioux, young Londoner Anna Calvi cuts an eerie dash that feels jarringly out of kilter with the prevailing mood.
“Fitting in was never something that appealed to me,” she says, running a hand through her vast tousled mane. “I don’t keep up with current trends. I live in my own little world. The whole point of making an album was doing something that felt ‘true’ for want of a better word.”
Soft-spoken and petite in person, on record, Calvi transforms into a pop Valkyrie. Singing in a blood-curdling croon, whilst coaxing Sergio Leone-esque chord sequences from her guitar, her music is at once deeply fantastical and faintly disturbing. In places, it has the feel of Edgar Allan Poe set to music. It comes as no surprise to learn years of heartache went into her self-titled first LP — or that it was written in a spooky suburban attic and partly recorded in a dingy basement.
“I spent five years on it,” she says. “At the start I didn’t have a record deal. I was left to my own devices really. I won’t pretend there weren’t moments when it wasn’t very difficult. Over all, I must say I found the experience to be extremely rewarding. I’m very glad I did it.”
One of the reasons Calvi is in the news is that she has been long-listed for the prestigious, and highly influential, BBC Sound Of poll. Voted for by prominent figures in British music, Sound Of serves as a sort of quick reference guide to tomorrow’s big new thing. Last year, Ellie Goulding came first; previous picks have included Duffy, Adele and The Ting Tings. And while it’s hard to imagine Calvi burning up the charts in quite the same fashion, there is no doubt she has already attracted a constituency of influential admirers.
“Brian Eno has been very supportive of me,” she says of the semi-legendary pop boffin and in-house U2 producer. “A friend of his saw me in London and recommended that he check me out. We got in contact and he was extremely encouraging. One of the things he said was that I should stick to my guns and not let anyone influence my sound. He felt I had already found my voice and that if I was working with a producer it should be somebody who was sympathetic to what I was trying to achieve.”
Calvi grew up in a middle class enclave of the London suburb of Putney. Both her parents are hypnotherapists and huge music fans. Her father is Italian and family summers were spent in Florence and Rome. It was a comfortable upbringing, though not without its traumas. She was born with both her hips dislocated and spent the first three years of her life in hospital. Obviously she can remember little of that time. Nonetheless, she feels it shaped her as an artist.
“There were a lot of operations and it was quite a difficult time. Because I had to spend all my time indoors it changed me as a person. It forced me to be more creative. Children internalise a lot of their world already, of course. I’m not saying I was unique. For me, though, it was definitely exaggerated.”
Precocious and talented, she formed her first ‘band’ at age 11, composing songs in the style of David Bowie’s Spiders from Mars. “I was obsessed with music,” she recalls. “I actually had a sort of make-shift studio that I put together and I’d arrange instruments and everything. I ended up going to college and learning how to do it properly. It’s something I’ve been fascinated with from a very young age.”
Listening to her music, it is tempting to think of Calvi as someone locked in a constant struggle with deep, dark emotions. On songs such as Desire you can almost hear her struggling with the baser elements of her nature, trying, and ultimately failing, to keep them in check. She sounds at once joyous, conflicted and rather scary. It is hard to reconcile the vengeful character she presents on record with the softly spoken, slightly girlish figure she cuts in the real world.
“I’m like everyone else really,” she laughs. “I enjoy going to the cinema with my mates at the weekend. I don’t sit around brooding all the time. People often make the mistake of thinking you inhabit your songs in some literal way. The music and the artist aren’t the same people. I don’t think I could go around being that person all of the time.”
As well as catching the eye of the BBC Sound Of judges, Calvi has garnered a growing celebrity fan-club. There is Eno, obviously, and also Domino Records boss Laurence Bell who signed her after hearing a few rough demos (with Arctic Monkeys and Franz Ferdinand among his roster of discoveries, he is one of those rare modern-era label bosses with a genuine instinct for the next big thing). The famous admirer she’s especially chuffed with having on board, however, is Nick Cave who took Calvi on tour last November.
“I was nervous about meeting him, if I’m being honest,” she says. “You don’t always want to meet your idol, in case they are a letdown. He couldn’t be sweeter. It was an honour and a joy.”
She’s back in Ireland later this month for a sell-out show at Dublin’s intimate Workman Club. However, if you can’t make the concert, fret not: before Christmas Calvi filmed a set at Other Voices in Dingle, to be broadcast a few weeks from now.
“It was an amazing experience,” she says. “I’d never been to that part of the world before. It is lovely. My one regret is that I couldn’t stay longer — we had to fly in and out very quickly. I loved being there.”
* Anna Calvi is out now. You can see her on Other Voices, RTÉ 2, February 16.
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