Around 100 gigs into her fledgling career, young Derry star Soak (aka Bridie Monds-Watson) has given quirky sermons in St. James’ Church and fended off competition from passing samba bands. Both were early milestones – Other Voices and a packed acoustic tent at Glasgowbury – announcing her startling, raw talent to a nation. Now, just before Christmas, she’s in Dublin having supported Heathers and is gearing up to play the Workman’s Club. I meet her in the empty venue where she takes to the stage for an afternoon video session with hotpress.com. Dressed in a hoodie and baseball cap (though, she points out, she generally “dresses like a Victorian child”), she’s chatty between songs, and a joy when she picks up the acoustic.
It does make you feel vaguely uneasy, being around such a prodigy – at 24 I suddenly realise I’ve been wasting my life – but at least she pretends to be a little unsure of her surroundings too.
“Everybody speaks weird, everybody’s an elf!” is her altogether unclichéd view of Dublin. “Villagers, for example, all of them look like elves. And they know it. Conor looks like an elf! Great band though.”
As Soak, she has the potential to be huge. Whether it’s in 2013 is another thing – she’s sensibly not going full-steam ahead with the career until she wraps up music college. But expect her to be around for a long time and to win over the world when
she’s ready.
Session done and dusted, we leave her father, roadie and mentor for another chat in the front bar, and end up talking about ‘Lancelot’, Bridie’s book of lyrics. Whether it’s the unrestrained voice of youth or, you imagine, her own unique view of the world, it’s a different kind of interview with talk about dinosaurs and the merits of the word ‘fish’ as an insult.
More on topic, she tells me about her songwriting process.
“The notes part of my phone is completely full with lines that have popped into my head,” she explains. “There’s a bridge I used to walk over every day to get to town. Nobody can hear you on the bridge, so you can just shout to yourself. And I just remember those vocal ‘riff’ things. I don’t need to write them down. I just get these short bursts of, ‘Oh my God I need to write something’ or I’ll hear a song and want to write something like it. But you can’t force a song, you have to feel like you need to write it.”
‘Trains’ was the first fully-formed tune, arriving when she was 14 (and a half).
“Nobody knew I could sing, I didn’t even know I could sing... it was just something I did to entertain myself when I was bored, whenever I had these emotions that I wanted to keep to myself. That was the best way for me to be open about them – write them down and be able to play them. They were just for me, and then my dad was like, ‘How’s your guitar coming along?’. I said, ‘I wrote this’, then played it. He was like, ‘You didn’t write that, did you?!’. He didn’t believe me for a while, then he started hearing all these other songs. My mom was like, ‘Holy crap, what’s going on?’ and my dad was asking me how I was writing this stuff. I told him I didn’t know, I don’t understand how it works either. My head’s a strange place.”
In terms of influences, she cites Bombay Bicycle Club as an act she adores, but doesn’t quite get many of the comparisons being thrown her way.
“Somebody said I sound like a Slovakian person,” she says, scrunching up her face.
At this point, Soak has put out two EPs, and she’s already critical of the first. It’s a perfectionist attitude that will serve her well.
“The Sea Creatures EP sounds like what I would listen to. It’s everything I wanted it to sound like and more, I’m really proud of it. That why I was like, ‘Damn you Trains EP!’ because I would love to re-record that to the same quality as Sea Creatures is, because I still really like the songs. But I think they’re better live than they are recorded.”
She acknowledges that her lyrics aren’t exactly your standard pop song fare. There’s a lot of surreal stuff floating around her head.
“You can ask my friends,” Bridie smiles. “They think I’m a proper weirdo, but they like me for it. I’m not a straightforward person, I’m pretty odd.”
That’s not to say there aren’t romantic themes abounding. Has she ever been in love?
“Have I been in love?” she ponders. “That’s such an odd question! Erm... I don’t know. Maybe. I mean, I’ve liked people... I know a lot of my songs appear to be love songs, but it can be in a more general sense.”
The singer was more than a little bemused when, having been interviewed by a gay publication, the resultant article was headed ‘16-year-old lesbian singer-songwriter’.
“I hate that,” she admits. “I write music. What has that got to do with my music? I don’t really understand the difference between gay people and straight people, I think it’s all ridiculous. And then it was like, ‘Blah blah, she does all this and she’s gay!’ Why is that such a big point? Why can’t that be in the interview as a tiny point? Why does that have to be the headline? I don’t even think about it, it’s just there, it’s like having ginger hair or something. I mean, there’s so much more to me than just that.”
We couldn’t agree more.