It's Elle out there
Colin Irwin pursues Elle Osborne via global telephony
CDs, eh? They come, they go. Some decorate your lives forever, some make fleeting acquaintance and flee behind the back of the sofa, others scarcely make it through the shrink wrap before being retrained as a missile under orders to deactivate the milkman. Late last year, this CD sailed through the letterbox, landed on the mat and immediately bounced straight up and bit my head off. It was called Testimony by Elle Osborne.
First a disclaimer. The album is not everyone's particular mug of strychnine... but me, I love it. Elle Osborne plays fiddle and sings a curious mix of traditional and contemporary songs, often unaccompanied, as if her very life depends on it. Her voice isn't conventionally attractive and her highly individual sense of phrasing offers a breathless, even eccentric take on a repertoire that veers sharply from hackneyed old trouts like Still I Love Him and Riddle Song to Richard Thompson's sublime Withered And Died and the equally heartbreaking Testimony Of Patience Kershaw. It's an unnervingly sparse album constantly teetering on the edge, and you gawp and gasp as she sways along the tightrope, exciting every emotion in the book. In terms of singing, playing, arranging and selecting material, she's captivatingly fearless, and while it ain't pretty, Testimony is the album to make you sit up and take notice. Whatever else, she had to be worth talking to
This doesn't prove to be as easy as anticipated. Elle (and yes, it's pronounced Elly) was brought up in North Lincolnshire, with both parents and grandparents deeply involved in a local folk scene revolving round Grimsby Singers Club and Cleethorpes Folk Festival. Summer holidays were spent at Whitby Festival. But when we track her down she's not in Lincs, or even her adopted home in Brighton, but in Perth, Western Australia where, she gleefully informs me, the temperature is 40 degrees. It was just that a couple of years ago she was hit by travel lust and a morbid fear of the English winter ... and before she knew it she was Waltzing Matilda. She did a couple of gigs in Australia... then a couple more... People kept asking where they could buy her CD so she thought she'd better record one. And now people are picking up on that CD in Blighty, she's back home to gig in May and June, and take in a few of the summer festivals.
Calling the album Testimony is significant. The song Testimony Of Patience Kershaw, a gripping and true personal account of a girl's experiences working down a mine, was popularised by Roy Bailey... Frankie Armstrong and the late Peter Bellamy also had a profound influence on Osborne the younger. “I was such a big fan of Peter Bellamy when I was a kid. I'd go to Whitby [festival] each year and he'd always be there. And The Watersons were a big inspiration, too, coming from over the river in Hull.” There have been many other influences along the way. Dylan has been a constant inspiration, Neil Young, Leonard Cohen, Lou Reed, Beck. “Basically,” she says, “I regard it all as soul music, that's the common theme.”
A move to Sussex led to regular appearances at Lewes Folk Club and inspiration from local resident Barry Dransfield (“my fiddle doctor”). “Barry was very inspiring musically and intellectually. He badgered me into playing fiddle songs so I gave it a go.” Her Lewes appearances led to gigs further afield... the ultimate one being in Fremantle.
“What I'm finding in Australia right now is that I'm playing a lot of places that aren't folk clubs. You walk into a club and there's like drum ‘n' bass on the sound system and you think ‘Oh no, they're going to hate me' and you start feeling all apologetic about the F-word because people do still think they don't like folk music. But the more it speaks to people the more they like it and it's amazing who you can appeal to. Like those Late Night Extra sessions at Sidmouth are like teenage parties!”
The material on her album may seem bizarrely diverse, but it all seems perfectly natural to Elle. “The only song I actually sat down to learn was Lord Gregory, the rest were all songs I was brought up with. Like Still / Love Him is a song I always associate with Lincolnshire and the first song I ever learned on the fiddle, though I couldn't quite bring myself to sing ‘Do you love an apple, do you love a pear?'
“I write my own songs but I wanted to do an album that sounds like I sound when I'm on stage. That's as close as I could get to it, just me - and cello on a couple of tracks. And I had to include Testimony Of Patience Kershaw. It was the song that really started it for me. It made me realise I had something there that reached people.”
She seems a bit perplexed when I ask about her unorthodox vocal approach that terrified the cats. “I don't know, it just feels natural to me. I'm not deliberately trying to be different, it's all quite instinctive. I've listened to a lot of other singers but I don't really feel I've been influenced by anybody. I just put my own interpretation on to a song and that's the sort of sound that comes out.'
Do you get people rocking back in their chairs in shock when you sing? “No, but I know it can be quite disarming for some people. It does seem to stir up a lot of emotions. But that's just the way the songs speak to me. There's a real emotional depth to those songs which I reflect and some people may find it too revealing. It's all about feeling. It's all soul music...
Reproduced with the kind permission of fRoots
