| NERINA PALLOT | |||
Passion
and silence. Every word, every line, a m e a s u r e. It’s
the science of the soul...
Someone once wrote the words” go, little book, go”. I want to re-phrase it and say “go, little song, go.” See, to me, songs have lives of their own, (the good ones at any rate): they spin their webs and catch moments, memories, emotions, and people too. Some songs are small and shy like a nervous child that suddenly breaks into a smile when you least expect, and some bully you into submission or knock you out straight up. Some you don’t hear from for ages, and then you meet them again one day and you are pleased to see they have grown up ok and aren’t stealing from grandmothers or selling you insurance. Or asking you to vote for them. I am only telling you all this because it’s the only way I can tell you about me. I guess you want to know about where I grew up and how terrible my childhood was and yes, my parents never understood me and no, the world doesn’t either, and why there’s nobody else like me and just how great I am. But I ain’t gonna, because it’s a somewhat pointless exercise and nothing I can tell you will make you love me any more or less. But I can sing every song off Stevie Wonder’s Talking Book and recite lyrics verbatim from Joni’s Blue. I love Steely Dan so much that I even spent hours learning the guitar solo from Reeling in the Years.....very slowly though. I have family. They’re good, not too weird, and scattered over many continents. The same goes for my friends. I got to live in India for a bit as a kid, and there was no FM radio there back then. But there was Michael Jackson, and the first record I can remember really wanting to own was Thriller, and I saved up for it and salivated over the gatefold sleeve and honestly thought it was ok to have a monkey for a best friend. One day, a piano arrived in our home and I took up residence at, on, and literally in it. I only ventured out to roller skate to Ravel’s Bolero and to buy my first guitar with my pocket money when I was 11. I desperately wanted my mother to be a pushy stage mother, but she was acutely aware of what happened to Tiffany, and would rather I learnt Bobbie Gentry songs. So, if the only encouragement I was going to get at home involved my mother’s country record collection and her burgeoning Ravi Shankar library (it reminded her of home, it reminded everybody else of the local Indian restaurant), I was going to have to find rock and roll somewhere else. It arrived when I was 12 years old, her name was Elvira, her folks were like, totally bohemian, and after a few years she worked her magic on me and I found my mojo. Well, kind of. I became obsessed with Bon Jovi and the Stone Roses. But while I strummed along to Living on a Prayer (which I still maintain is a perfect pop song), I also decided to give my parent’s record collection one last chance, and it was a good job too. It yielded a couple of gems: Simon and Garfunkel’s Greatest Hits and Carole King’s Tapestry. I thought Paul Simon should win a Nobel prize for the lines “still a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest” (The Boxer). And I liked Carole King because a lot of her songs were in easy keys and she had a kind of funny voice too which made me feel better about my own. I didn’t really know what it meant to sing “there’ll be good times again for me and you”, because I was a kid, but I kind of know now and I love her all the more because of it. Cut to the chase, I ditch the glasses, the braces, the knee high socks and I emerge, butterfly like, and fly off from my little island in the English channel...... And land, courtesy of a scholarship, in a forbidding English boarding school. Wide eyed, socially inept and by now playing violin and singing opera too. After the pressure cooker of being a musical wunderkind, I move to London and enroll in art college. Everybody was stoned, which was fun for a while, but I could only listen to The Doors so much and after 5 all night readings of On the Road I was ready to go back to music school. Here, I continued studying classical piano and singing, although eventually putting my violin back in its case after deciding cello players had way more fun and I wanted some of that. I found that while I loved writing songs at the piano, those old country records I reluctantly grew up listening to had crept in somewhere and I could only get that feeling if I wrote on guitar. On my travels I spied a Hofner bass, and decided if I had that I would almost certainly want to play every day. That was one long summer spent indoors listening to the White Album over and over and slowly picking out McCartney’s unbelievable playing on Sexy Sadie. (It’s ok, it mostly rains in the great British summer, so I wasn’t so unhappy to be inside.....) And then one day I woke up and I was in the real world, with a proper job (ok, not that proper, it was at a record company) working for Mr King. He warned me against dabbling with the devil that is the major label, (he even threatened to break someone’s legs on my behalf), but I carried on regardless and made a record with a very ridiculous title and some even more questionable photographic evidence. This experience taught me many things, but especially that it is never a good idea to make a video in which you fly. Which is where Sophia comes in. I wrote it around the time I went back to university in London, where I have been learning to love learning, and how to find the words to sing about what we talk about when we talk about love. I must also mention my publishers Jeremy Lascelles and Kenny MacPherson at Chrysalis, who funded my adventures in music, employed the likes of Wendy Melvoin, Eric Rosse and Howard Willing to produce it, and kicked me up the backside when needed. They have also trudged out to various godforsaken venues to see me opening for the likes of The Symptoms (god forsaken), Jason Mraz (demi-god forsaken), Semisonic (forsaken), and Sheryl Crow (oh, not forsaken at all, god definitely liked that dressing room).They even hooked me up with the Canadian band Delerium, which gave me my first UK Club Chart #1 in January 2004 with ‘Truly’. Anyway, if all goes well, their jobs are safe, and I can finally get the vintage Les Paul I know will go so perfectly with my beautiful lady Barbra Bosendorfer. They’ll make a lovely couple. So, go, little songs, go........ Phill
Savidge 0208 3480373/07887 584 242 |
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