Artist Interview by: Helen Pearse
Venue: Roast, Borough Market (London)
May 2008 - Liane Carroll was the UK's best kept, jazz secret. Not any longer. In a
week that saw her win ‘Jazz Musician of the Year’ at the Parliamentary Jazz
Awards, I met the multi-award winning artist and discovered that
lunching with Liane is very much like hearing her play live. One moment you’re
laughing along with her, sharing her joy, the next moment you're fighting back
tears as she breaks your heart with the sadness of her stories.
Liane and I meet in London’s foodie hotspot, Borough Market. We were
surrounded by stalls laden down with pungent French cheeses, glistening Spanish
chorizo, mountains of artisan bread and coffee beans plucked from remote corners
of the globe. The smell was heaven.
As we sat and admired the view from our first floor restaurant table, Liane
brought me up to date with her week thus far. As well as picking up the
‘Musician of the Year Award’ at the Parliamentary Jazz Awards, held in the House
of Commons on Tuesday night, she had also seen her husband of eighteen years,
bassist Roger Carey, play with his band, ‘Engine, Clutch and Gearbox’ twice – ‘a
treat for me, because I hardly ever get to hear them,’ - and had been present at
the birth of her daughter Abi’s second child, granddaughter number two for a
very proud Liane. All this and it’s only Thursday…
Events in Liane’s professional life have been gaining momentum since the
release of the critically acclaimed Billy No Mates in 2003
on the independent ‘Splash Point’ record label, although she was a regular
fixture at Ronnie Scott’s throughout the nineties. It was after this that the
awards started arriving like London Transport buses – a bit of a wait and then
five arrived all at once. “It’s been brilliant,” Liane says, “I’d been asked to
sing at the BBC Jazz Awards in 2005. Suddenly, I’m being given two awards. I
think I was the first person to win two in one go. It was lovely. I hadn’t
been expecting it at all. I got ‘Jazz Vocalist of the Year’ and the ‘Best of
Jazz’ award. The following year I won ‘Best Vocalist’ at the British Jazz Awards
and then in 2007, I picked up ‘Best British Female Singer’ at the first ever
‘Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Awards’. It was fantastic. I ended up getting really drunk
and jamming with Jeff Beck!"
"The Parliamentary Jazz Awards were the same," says Liane. "Three years
ago I played for them and last year I presented an award. This year I won one!”
It was a brilliant night by all accounts. Jazz legend Jack de Johnette was
playing, and Ken Clarke was there too, a former Chancellor of the Exchequer
and massive jazz fan. Liane’s great friend Ian Shaw was also on hand to give out
the gong for jazz journalist of the year. All in all, quite a night.
Success hasn’t always come so easy for Liane. “I’m really glad it’s happened
this way, that I went the road I went, learning stamina and hearing songs by
chance along the way. I love hearing songs like that, in a little jazz club
somewhere. In the early days, I played a place where a girl mistook the piano
for the bar and sat on it while I was playing--then tried to balance her drink
on the top. Another time, I was about sixteen, I got booked to play the organ
for a couple of hours on a Sunday lunchtime in a Hastings nightclub. I thought
it’d be a family show, when I suddenly found myself playing ‘Blue Spanish
Nights’ for a stripper. I just had to keep looking at the organ stops…I was so
embarrassed and not nearly as worldly wise as I liked to think I was…”
Then there had been a struggle with alcohol. Liane explains, “I feel very
settled now within myself, just recently really, and family has done that in a
way. Drinking was on its’ way to being a problem. I had such wild times at gigs
whilst I was on it. Wild times, full of wild abandon and I thought that all that
would go….infact, I’m having more fun. It’s actually better without the booze,
and I’m so glad that’s happened. I need to feel the hurt of the sad songs. I
thought that passion would disappear if I stopped drinking, but it didn’t. It
enhanced it. Having grandchildren has really helped too. It’s made me grow up.
I’m writing a lot of songs for them now. A lot of these songs are coming about
from that kind of joy,” she smiles irrepressibly, “so I’m a really cheap date
now, and Smirnoff’s must be heading into receivership!” Liane pauses briefly to
sip on an exotic pink and orange non-alcoholic cocktail.
Liane’s relationship with Splash Point Records has been a real strength for
her too in terms of her career path. “I’ve been with Splash Point from the word
go. They’re perfect for me--an outfit run by musicians, for musicians and a
lovely, independent label. Over the years, I’ve had offers from bigger labels,
but I’m not ready for that yet, for a ‘big name’ contract. I’m really happy with
this organic company, and if that means that I don’t get my face on big posters
on the underground and sell millions of CD’s, that’s fine. My ambitions don’t
run to that type of thing. My ambition is to learn more songs, listen to more
songs and write some more…”
Liane’s life has been full of music from the word go. She was taught piano by
concert pianist, Phyllis Catling, from the age of three. “She was a real, old
dragon," says Liane, "She used to keep a pair of scissors handy to
snip bits off your hair if you made a mistake – so I used to turn up with my
hair in a beret! I did all my grades on piano, but it was jazz that I loved. My
parents were both semi-professional singers and the gramophone was always on
with Sammy Davis, Sibelius, Stan Kenton, Aretha, Nina Simone. Their sounds made
me feel different in my body, this kind of ‘fizzing up’ feeling. Jazz was the
sound track of my life. I feel that momentum now with the music. One lifetime’s
just not enough. I’ll have a lovely evening sitting writing stuff, feeling
really inspired--and then the gremlins arrive in the middle of the night and
when I wake in the morning, I’m not so sure about what I’ve written. But, I just
have this feeling that I have so much work to do.”
Music has seen Liane through the dark times too. She takes a deep breath,
“The way it was, was like this…my nan and granddad, they had a little hotel
on the seafront at Hastings called Sunshine House. It’s where I was made. Then
my mum got ill, and my nan and granddad being the parents they were to my mum,
sold up and bought a transport cafe to be near us in Carshalton. Sadly, my dad
was violent. He beat the shit out of my mum. Terrible! I can still remember it.
They split up when I was six, and that’s how my mum, my half sister and me all
ended up living over the café with my nan and granddad. No one was shy in our
family. Good manners and discipline were important, but you were always
encouraged to express yourself and to never be afraid to do that. I’d go
downstairs at age four or five and sing ‘Hello, Dolly’ to the truck
drivers."
Liane continues, "My nan had the most amazing record collection. She had all
the musicals and she took me to the cinema to see them--West Side Story, The
Sound of Music, The King and I, all of that amazing stuff. They make me cry
still. We had this little corrugated lean-to that my nan called the
‘conservatory.’ It was about 1972 or ‘73 and that crepe paper was all the rage.
My nan was a little whippet of a lady and my granddad the most gentle man I’ve
ever known. He looked like Stan Laurel. She turn the conservatory into a
Hawaiian beach with grass skirts, pineapples, a fancy jug full of orange juice
that she’d call a ‘posh cocktail’ – she had such an imagination. Sound and
vision for her was a visceral experience. She was always, always singing.
That’s how I remember her, being wrapped in a big towel and sitting on her knee
and her singing to me. And then I came downstairs on my sixth birthday and
there was a piano for me in the lean-to. It looked like something out of The
Munsters, with candelabras on it and everything, but it was my lifeline and they
couldn’t get me off it!”
By a cruel twist of fate, Liane went on to marry a violent husband. “I got
married very young to an entrepreneur who promoted music. We went up North and
by the time I was twenty one, I’d had Abi [Liane's daughter], but he was
really violent. He really, really hurt me a lot--badly, unbelieveable! I gave up
playing completely after Abi was born. I just gave up. To have had that love
that I’d experienced as a child taken away, made me feel utterly worthless. I
was made to feel so worthless. I got out when Abi was quite young – about eight
months old. I was so frightened for her too. We escaped and went back to
live in Hastings. But, I’m so grateful that I had the chance to have Abi. I have
found it very hard to write about it musically, but I’m getting there…”
Right on cue, our puddings arrive. We have a moment over rhubard crumble and
possibly, the most lemony posset ever made. We’re sharing baby photos, talking
about our children, and Liane’s joy at being a grandparent. She mentions
her nan and the track from Slow Down, her 2007 album that is
dedicated to her, "If I Loved You" by Rodgers and Hammerstein. I ’ve heard
Liane sing it live twice and a hundred times on my much-played CD, and she tells
me that it is all about her grandmother’s love for her. For once I forget my
professional self. "It’s all in there, Liane," I tell her, "‘it’s just all in
there." And this is her gift, that in telling her story through her songs,
she makes them all of our stories.
The final surprise of the afternoon was the arrival of her long time friend,
fellow artist and collaborator, the wonderful Ian Shaw. Ian plays piano on ‘If I
Loved You’ for Slow Down, and duetted with Liane on Carole King’s "You
Got A Friend" for the 2005 ‘Standard Issue’ album. In no time at all, we’re
swapping stories about favourite seventies TV re-runs of Will and Grace, and a
very special recipe for chocolate mousse - all over glasses of fresh mint
tea. Lunch finally over, and I headed off towards home, glancing
back over my shoulder to see Liane and Ian arm in arm in the market behind me.
They were brimming over with laughter and looking every inch as if they’re about
to launch into a "My Fair Lady" song and dance routine in the middle of the
flower stalls. Liane’s nan would have loved it.
For more information: http://www.lianecarroll.com
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