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Vice Blog

BEHIND THE MUSIC WITH ANNA CALVI

Hello. Anna Calvi here. Ready to bask in your warm critical epithets. Accomplished. Confident. Sultry. Brooding. Just lob them at me like stale bread rolls, folks--I'm stood here gob agape, waiting to gulp down praise for my effortless maturity and mature effortlessness with all the pious good grace therein implied. Did someone say "promising debut"? Too kind! "Astounding confidence"? Just leave it on the pile. Oh, and you'd like to offer me some kudos for being an "antidote to beige Brit School femmes" too, would you? I thank you kindly.

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As you'll have determined by now if you've heard my debut album, my "thing" is to combine flamenco, torch songs, and slow-burning rock noirs. Not the most obvious of musical bedfellows, granted, but combining unobvious musical bedfellows is the sort of thing that makes very attentive bedfellows of the bored, undersexed men of the music press. You remember in the early-80s, when for a brief moment people thought Manhattan Transfer epitomized a vogue for music made in the 1920s? Well it's back, and it's me. Yes, I'm the Nouvelle Vague of the Zola Jesus generation, taking the sort of sophisticated worldview once represented by fondue sets and matte black toothpaste, and retooling it for the 2010s. So grab another focaccia and join me for one helluva wild (yet cautious) ride. I'm all about raw emotion. Raw emotion within safe boundaries. And molten sexuality. Molten sexuality conveyed on wet Tuesday nights through latex in the missionary position.

Stragglers may be wondering how I've managed to become so rapidly touted. It's Nick Cave, basically. One night Nick's at a dinner party and turns to someone over the mashed potato, and asks: "Hey, heard any good music lately?" My name comes up, and I get the call to support Nick on tour. Suddenly, I'm "a more mature Florence Welch." Edith Piaf? Debussy? Get that a lot, yeah. Seems like they've confused La Mer with On The Beach, but whatevs. Give these poor hacks a break--they spend most of their waking life having to compare everything to Gang Of Four. Everyone, after all, would like it known that they spend their evenings locked in A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu while Claude D. wafts from the phonograph; instead of what they're actually doing: watching Coppers repeats on E4 with an Indian locked in their bloated guts.

If it's not Florence, Claude, or Edith it's--sigh--PJ Harvey. Gawd, that's so flipping sexist! Please don't think that I'm trying to draw you into certain lines of thought here, but my record was entirely produced by Rob Ellis--that guy who won't leave PJ alone for two minutes. While we were writing it, I kept saying to him: "What would PJ do in this situation?" Then he'd get a dead baby and throw it against the wall, painting radical feminist slogans in its blood. "That is what PJ Harvey would do," he'd say. And then I'd just sort of trail off and get back to practicing my minor pentatonics.

Right. I'm off to the bookies to lay a bet on me writing a Bond theme within the next five years. You Only Kill One View. Never Is The Last Kiss For Tomorrow. For The Love Of A Spy… something like that. You just hum it, darling, and I'll warble throatily along out of my immaculate, pristine, and remorselessly tight, white face.

AS RELAYED TO GAVIN HAYNES