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“I started out singing with my sister,” remembers Kathryn Williams. “White denim mini skirts, pink tops, she played keyboards and I sang. I was about 14, but she was 16 – she should be ashamed of herself. We played at the school hall in front of all our year. We got asked by our music teacher if we wanted to cut a record, man. We didn’t do it. The whole experience put me off playing live for a bit. In fact, it’s probably where my stage fright stems from. I’m probably only getting over it now.” She coyly refuses to divulge what material this remarkable sounding duo performed, but anyone wishing to know how Kathryn Williams got from assembly-wowing sibling synth-pop combo, through her early days as a self-financed artist, releasing her own albums and so stricken by stage fright that she had to sit down onstage “in case me legs went”, to where she is today – perhaps Britain’s best singer-songwriter – need only bend an ear to the tracks on Relations, a new album of cover versions.
It was a project approached with some trepidation (“I thought people might think it’s me trying to be commercial, but it’s not like I’ve dried up as a songwriter - I’ve got the next couple of albums ready.”), and you can see why. It’s easy to baulk at the very notion of a cover versions album, largely because of the bad smell created by previous entries into this sub-genre. Relations however is fabulous stuff: beautifully chosen songs, performed exquisitely. It also functions as a kind of musical diary. There is a warmth about Williams’ interpretations that belies the personal memories that come attached to the songs, whether it’s her first meeting with her manager Alan McGee (“He was going on about Oasis and everything and I had to say to him, "Look, I'm sorry, I'm not really interested in Oasis, the main reason I wanted to meet you was because you once put some Ivor Cutler records out.””), the ex-boyfriend who lent her his Lee Hazlewood album (“Which I never gave back, but he was awful anyway, so never mind.”), or her guitarist Dave’s disconcerting announcement that “If he had to do a man, it would be Steve Malkmus, but he would only do it to be polite.”
Elsewhere, Relations collects together formative inspirations and pays respect to the artists that shaped Kathryn Williams’ sound. Some are obvious – anyone who has paid attention to her three previous albums of gently affecting acoustic melancholy would presumably have guessed that Williams has a fondness for Tim Hardin and the muted 3am melancholy of the third Velvet Underground album, which she claims is “One of the most perfect records ever made: all the lyrics, all the humour, all the haphazardness of it.” Some are less so – even the most keen-eared listener to Old Low Light or the Mercury Prize-nominated Little Black Numbers would be hard pushed to detect the influence of journeyman guitarist Python Lee Jackson, famed in Britain for his one-off hit with Rod Stewart, ‘In A Broken Dream’, and back home in Australia for performing with ‘Emergency’ Ward Austin, Sydney’s answer to Dave Lee Travis, who dressed in Confederate Army gear and boasted the catchphrase “rickapootie and fandoogly”. Nevertheless, as Williams points out, “Most of the people I’ve covered on this album make me really glad that they exist in the world. They make you feel a lot better as a musician, because they make you feel there is scope for strangeness and there is scope for not being cool and there is scope for not fitting into a genre. Music doesn’t have to fit this pattern or that pattern.”
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We end up with a quirky, individual roll-call of heroes and heroines, where Steve Malkmus rubs shoulders with Barry Gibb (“His songs have been covered by Nina Simone and Westlife,” notes Williams. “Oh, the irony of life!”) and Ivor Cutler ponders the precise meaning of “rickapootie and fandoogly” with Mae West. The latter provided a curiously brassy soundtrack to an outbreak of teen angst in the Williams household. “My gran had a big record collection, she had loads of strange things like Ertha Kitt albums, Marilyn Monroe records. When I was about 15, I took a record player and a teasmaid up into my bedroom, and decided that was how I was going to live. I wasn’t going to live downstairs with the rest of the family. I had what I needed: my gran’s record player and a teasmaid. I think I lasted about a day and then I was really hungry. You hear stuff about Pink and Britney Spears and people think it’s a new thing, like, “Oh, women have gone to pot,” but Mae West is like Missy Elliott – records from the ‘40s talking about whether your fella’s got a big one or whatever. There’s something gorgeous about realising people from history are people, rather than just putting them in a period outfit.”
Other artists covered on Relations invoke happier memories of adolescence. “I first heard Neil Young while I was doing an art foundation course in Liverpool. That’s the brilliant thing about doing art: you don’t have to talk to anyone while you’re doing it, you can just have your headphones on, so I used to listen to music all the time. Neil Young comes across as this real out-there rock and roll bloke, but the brilliance of it is that lyrically he can be so tender. His voice is like the picked-on boy at school, thin and reedy. Do I ever feel the urge to rock out like he does with Crazy Horse? I do, actually. My version of rocking out is probably everybody else’s version of being acoustic, but I’ve been recording songs for my next album with electric guitars and drums high in the mix. I never used to think loud music could come out of me, but it’s getting more like that. I can feel the energy of it.”
Towering over all Williams’ influences, however, is Leonard Cohen. “He’s so cool. If you haven’t heard him, get the best of, the one with the brown cover, and imagine you’re sitting in a little bedsit and you’re 19 years old and you’re looking for a bit of meaning in your life. I was working in a pub to help me get through college, and I went back to this other guy who worked in the pub’s bedsit and played Scrabble through the night and listened to Leonard Cohen and felt like the world has possibilities that I had never thought of before. Not possibilities as a musician, possibilities as a person.”
Relations offers possibilities too. Some of the more recherché selections might pique the listener’s interest and cause them to track down the originals. They might discover Big Star, or the quiet genius of Ivor Cutler, or insanity of the early Bee Gees, with their songs about racing drivers and joining the airforce. But Relations is more than an act of musical archaeology. Williams’ versions of these songs are blessed with an aura and a personality entirely of their own, as much proof as you need of her unique talent. “Sometimes I feel underrated,” she admits, “and sometimes I feel lucky as fuck. That’s sort of the reason I did this album, because I was feeling disillusioned with music. I was getting really cynical, I was getting really bitchy. I think this album saved me as a person.”
New images of Kathryn Williams can be found at: www.image.net.
Visit the official Kathryn Williams website:www.kathrynwilliams.net.
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