Anna Calvi smiles sweetly. She does that a lot. She doesn’t seem like a person who makes monsters. Or, indeed, a kind of music that rages like wild emotions adrift in stormy seas, performed, on stage, with a fierce, laconic poise. There is definitely some split personality going on here. ‘When I play live I’m a different person,’ Anna smiles, sweetly. ‘I feel powerful and fearless. All the things I wish I felt in everyday life.’ Her self-titled debut album is about lust and love, devils, and a new take on David Lynchian dramatic surrealism… uh, actually, stop right there. Another thing about this disarmingly sweet blonde girl is that she’s better at defining what she does than anyone else. ‘It’s a record about the internal forces in life which are out of your control and can take you over, and how you survive them. It explores intimacy, passion and loneliness. There is an element of darkness to the record but there is also a sense of hope… This album is the culmination of my whole life up until now.’
And there are good reasons why that life is suffused with a darkness. The story begins with a baby girl, born in London, and struggling to survive. Anna Calvi spent most of her first three years of life in hospital. The way she dealt with it was to create her own world. ‘I was always a dreamer. The early things stick with you.’ Growing up with her music obsessed Italian father, Anna was exposed to an eclectic array of sounds which ranged from Captain Beefheart to The Stones, to Maria Callas, combined with an early understanding of classical music developed through childhood violin lessons. She would come to identify the work of 20th century composers, Messiaen, Ravel, and Debussy as an influence, attracted in her words to “the impressionistic element of the music”, the feel of which she would try to recreate on guitar, an instrument she was compelled to learn on discovering Django Reinhardt and Jimi Hendrix at the age of 13. She would immerse herself in other influences such as opera, West African music, the blues of Robert Johnson and Bukka White and in particular flamenco- the passion flamenco dancers exude in their stance and style having had a massive impact on Anna’s fierce, upfront stage persona, and the outfits she and her band choose to perform in, the visual element of Anna’s art being of huge importance to her. It’s this thoughtful focus on the visual side of things that leads Anna to clearly identify how the work of film directors Wong Kar Wei and Gus Van Sant has also influenced her music, “people that make beautiful films where the cinematography tells the story”.
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At 17 Anna had reached a crossroads. After considering art school, she made a last minute decision to take a degree in music. And, once that was done, she finally made the decision to sing. Anna found her musical twin when she met Mally Harpaz in 2006. Joining forces first as a drummer Anna then asked Mally to learn the harmonium instead. ‘She’d never played one before but she’s the kind of musician who can just pick stuff up.’ The next, and last, recruit to the Clavi less-is-more aesthetic was drummer Daniel Maiden-Wood. The three-piece was complete. ‘I love the rawness of the three of us. And I love space in music.’ The trio emerged from their nocturnal bunker every once in a while to play some shows. Young Brit-folk star Johnny Flynn asked Anna to support him on tour, and, at a Manchester gig, former Coral guitarist Bill Rider-Jones happened to be there, and be smitten. He immediately called Laurence Bell, founder of esteemed British indie label Domino, and urged him to sign her. He soon did. Anna found yet more outside encouragement from Brian Eno, which came about when a man who happened to be a friend of Eno saw her perform at London’s Luminaire, and urged music’s most eminent producer and agent provocateur to check her out. Eno was so taken by Anna that he asked her out for lunch. ‘He was the first person from the outside world who heard what I was doing and validated it. It was quite a pivotal moment in my life. He sent me a letter saying that the music was full of intelligence, romance and passion, and what more can we want from art? It was like the water at the end of the desert.’ The element of light at the end of a long, dark tunnel permeates both the music of, and the story behind, the album. ‘I just wrote and recorded all the time on an eight-track in my parents’ attic. I then spent two-and-a-half years making this album in secret in a basement studio. It was very unhealthy, actually. I didn’t see the sunlight for a long, long time. It was such a great experience to then go and work with Rob Ellis’. Rob Ellis is, of course, the producer, composer and musician who has had plenty of experience collaborating with strong female artists through his years with Polly Harvey. Of Rob’s production she says, “It was great to find someone who understood.’”
Anna is justly proud of her first album, and picks out two songs where she feels she’s got close to what she ultimately wants to achieve: “Love Won’t Be Leaving” and “ The Devil”. But before the album – out March 1, 2011 in the US – there was a very first release. Anna has embarked on a one-woman mission to reclaim the ancient and noble idea of the debut single that stands alone from an album she views as a complete work. Hence her incredible version of a song made famous by Edith Piaf, “Jezebel”. Anna explains this non-album track as the first single, “The album is such an entity in itself. It’s a story and a journey. So I didn’t want to take anything out of the album before it was released. I wanted people to hear the album as a complete thing.’ Anna recently toured Europe with Grinderman – highly appropriate, as Nick Cave is, of course, the master of love songs that present love and sex as wild and uncontrollable forces. I put it to Anna that that idea is as close as one could get to a concept for the intense unleashings of lust and need that make up her debut album. ‘That’s fair. Music’s so sexual. How can you not express that in some way? Playing guitar is a sexy thing to do. And there is that thing of… when you love someone so much you think that you could kill them. I’ve definitely felt that.’ Anna Calvi smiles sweetly.
