Gillian Glover interview
Inspiration can be a nuisance some times. Like the uninvited visitor who pops up all of a sudden, this creative arousal of the mind has the disturbing tendency to showcase its dazzle entirely out of the blue. Yet singer/songwriter Gillian Glover was more than quick-witted when this bewildering intruder crossed paths with her. “I was walking through Soho in a rush to get somewhere, and I had this tune going through my head, and as I didn’t have my little dictaphone, I called myself on my answering machine and I sung this tune and the first two lines of the song. Then I hung up, kept walking and then another two lines came, so I scribbled them somewhere, kept walking and then another two lines came, so, literally, “Go” was written all through Soho and different doorways,” Gillian says about the penultimate song of her debut album entitled “Red Handed.”Although eerie “Go” is doubtlessly one of the songs that Gillian is most proud of, it is not the only highlight of her 11-track album. From the groovy “Serpentine” and “Made You Look” to the darker “Red Shoes” and the moving “Singing You To Sleep,” “Red Handed” is an album that steps into several territories, with each song having a story to tell and an emotion to stir, driven by Gillian’s powerful and diverse vocal style. “I’m slightly dubious about people who only listen to one kind of music, because you experience a range of emotions every day, not alone in a lifetime, so the ideas for the songs come from everywhere! I mean, literally, it might be something I overhear somebody saying on a bus or any visual and auditory experience. It’s only natural that the album would end up being very emotional and with a varied music style,” explains Gillian, daughter of Deep Purple’s bass player Roger Glover, about the album that is best heard “with a nice glass of red wine.”
In “Red Handed” Gillian’s voice merges wonderfully with the fine playing of first-rate musicians, such as drummer Woody Woodmansey, (David Bowie, Art Garfunkel, Paul McCartney) and pianist Rod Melvin ( Ian Dury, Brian Eno, Kilburn & The High Roads) among others. “They were totally wonderful and behaved like professional musicians. At the beginning I was a bit intimidated, I thought ‘what am I doing, I’m so out of my depth,’ but they immediately put me at ease. And it was a great learning experience to work with them and I’m looking forward to doing it again.”
Although “Red Handed” is her first solo endeavour, Gillian is not a new-comer in music. She’s been singing and playing live with London-based Beat:Root for about six years now, and before that she was having a weekly gig, or “a party” as she says, with her first band ever in Dahab, Egypt. “The first time I sung live was scary!” she says with a smile, “I was really sick the first time, but the show must go on! I still got up there and sung, and then it just became a regular, it was great, lots of fun that lasted about a year. With Beat:Root we gig more regularly probably than my solo project, it’s more funky and you dance to it more. There’s nothing more rewarding than people having a wicked time and dancing with you! With Beat:Root it’s very much a democracy, we all pretty much write the parts that we play or that we sing and we work very well as a team together.”
Yet, she was introduced to a wider audience in 2002, when she did her first studio recording at her father’s solo album “Snapshot,” in a song that Roger Glover had written in the 70s, but never recorded it – maybe because it had to be sung by a unique voice. “I was very nervous in the studio environment, because everyone is looking at you and is concentrating on you and what you sing is going to be recorded and can’t be changed forever. To be honest, we did one take and my voice was wavering, so we went downstairs to a bar and had a quick drink to calm my nerves a little bit and then went back and sung it again.” The result was a shining performance of “The Bargain Basement,” a song that is still a part of her live set list.
One would expect that growing up in such an environment, music would be Gillian’s first and only choice. Nevertheless, things had taken a different turn at the beginning. After studying painting in New York, she went to Egypt where “I painted murals and advertising billboards in order to get my divemaster, so rather than money exchange I gave them paintings and became a divemaster.” The unavoidable affair with music came a bit later, and immediately grew into a relationship of love. “I kind of came to music late, because I probably thought that I had big shoes to fill. It wasn’t a conscious decision not to follow music, but once I ended up doing some music with a friend of mine, just in his basement for a laugh or to pass the day, I understood that this is much better than painting. With music I get to make stuff with somebody else and I realised that two heads are better than one, rather than making this thing on your own you come up with something totally different that you couldn’t do if you were solo,” says Gillian. It was those recordings that Gillian did at her friend’s basement that Roger Glover heard and asked her to sing at his album.
Roger Glover returned the favour to his daughter by helping her very discreetly, only towards the end of the recording of “Red Handed.” “He would never step on my toes and try get involved where I wouldn’t want him. I don’t want to push him away but I don’t want to rely on that help either. It is great working with him, he’s really complimentary and everything is very rewarding and easy. But this whole project was completed as far as I see and only at the very end my father said ‘I think it’s about 90 per cent there - would you let me help you and getting a string quartet and stuff like that,’ but he’d let me do it on my own and that’s how I would like it. In a way, if you rely on that kind of help too much, you end up shooting yourself in the foot, because of how people perceive you and expect that to be how your music or part of your music is. It shouldn’t be like that and I don’t want it like that,” says Gillian decisively.
When talking about her father, Gillian subtly assumes a more defensive stance, mostly because the comparisons drawn are usually both prejudiced and unjust. Yet, the path she chose to follow leaves no room for doubts.
Without the backing of a major record label, Gillian acknowledges the difficulties but refuses to retreat or compromise. “If you don’t have the support of a big record label, it’s very difficult to do anything, just to get people to hear the album, just to get it in shops. I’m aware that it’s a long, big struggle, but at the same time it can be a blessing in disguise, because it is very independent and there are no compromises. I think it’s gonna have to be one of those projects that will make its way through time, from mouth to mouth,” she says. “Music in its best form is really about being cutting edge, a combination of self expression and reaction to things happening around the people that are writing most of the music. I think that is kind of lost a little bit now, it certainly is still there, I just want to see more and it makes me more determined to write more music and hopefully, good music.”
For the time being, the promotion of “Red Handed” is relying mostly on the buzz that is created after her live performances, where a group of excellent musicians, including electric violinist Sim Jones, are accompanying her on stage. In a typical Gillian Glover gig the approach is similar to “Red Handed;” various alterations in style and moods delivered with quality and passion. “The stage is a magical place,” she says. “I always feel nervous before a gig, but a few songs into it I’m fine and I get to enjoy it. For a gig to be successful it is essential to know that we’ve all played a good gig together, to have communication between everybody who’s playing, you have to have that connection. I love watching world music musicians when they play, most of the times they have a real rapport with one another, looking each other in their eyes, they nod, and 'how that was a nice solo you just did there,' real respect for one another. I love watching that as a person off stage and I think it’s important to have that kind of connection with the people that you’re playing music with, because if you don’t have that, it won’t be good music and it won’t be received the same way by the people in the audience.” Her next two London gigs are in December, followed by a few more dates in little venues, solely around the UK.
“I would love to play anywhere, at all those places that I travel to. I like to travel quite simply, small towns, lots of us running around barefoot, being happy, just on the beach. I would love to play in that kind of an environment, to sort of have a regular gig. I see bands there that have a regular gig, they play every week in just a small community, and that would be fantastic, but right now I can’t see myself moving away from London.”
There are already plans for a follow-up to “Red Handed,” where Gillian admits that she’d like to explore new sounds and musical areas. “I would really like to have some more percussive kind of quality to this album. I have a nice little collection going of African percussion instruments and I spent some time last summer at a couple of festivals that were all workshops based around drumming and singing and dancing, very small, very kind of hippie. Currently I am writing, I’m starting to think more and more about it, I am constantly carrying around my notebook, getting down in paper the ideas that float in my head, and I think we’re going to start soon. We book a studio every couple of weeks and just start jamming. We’ll see what we can come up with and hopefully early next year start recording.”
In between performing live as a solo artist, playing with Beat:Root and writing new songs she found the time to co-write and sing on Roger Glover’s next long-awaited solo album, expected to be released some time in 2008. On top of that, she continues painting and making jewelry, which is her main business, having incorporated music to that as well, as she uses guitar and bass strings for her jewelry. “I think it’s all connected together somehow. I need to do something visual and creative too, whether it’s jewelry or painting. I would like to think that any good piece of art, whether it’s a painting or a piece of music or a photograph, can put the viewer or the listener into another place for a minute. I love it when a piece of music makes me cry or gives me goosebumps, then it’s done its job, and that’s been a wonderful feedback with “Go” for example, a lot of people felt that emotion come through which I’m very pleased, even though I’ve made them cry!”
For more information on Gillian Glover, check: http://www.myspace.com/gillianglovermusic
posted by Teo Kermeliotis @ 10:36 AM
