A Frank Sonata with Tchaikowski

You can’t talk to a musician called Tchaikowski without inquiring as to whether they are related to the Russian 19th century classical composer.
“Not as far as we can tell,” Claire Tchaikowski informs me with a laugh, adding that her family is Polish, not Russian. In fact, she’s practically a one-woman United Nations, being Swiss-born, based in the UK, with an Irish mother, a half-Polish father, one Polish and three Irish grandfathers.

Still, with that name, she was surely fated to be a musician, no? She agrees: “My Irish mum was classically trained and she sang all over Ireland. I come from a very musical background, with uncles playing fiddles and pianos and whatnot. I’d done a lot of amateur theatre work from about the age of 11. Then I met Luka Bloom in Switzerland. When I moved over to Ireland to work with horses I ended up living close to where he was living. We had a lot of contact. He was very influential in me eventually coming to realise that I should make music myself.”
But it took a horse to, literally, kickstart her career.
“I actually got kicked by a horse one morning. It was at about six a.m., and I just lay there in the field thinking maybe this is not what I want to spent my life doing. So I eventually found the courage to really get into my music and take it seriously,” she explains.
The gestation of her debut album Those Thousand Shores lasted five years.
“Through my flatmate I got a demo to [Katie Melua, Boyzone & Manics producer] Mike Hedges and he called and told me he’d like to produce an album. He’s been a rock-solid support, especially when I just wanted to give up. We started without any label. Mike put a huge amount of his own money into it. I recorded some of my vocals in Dublin. Some of what’s on the album was salvaged from my bedroom recordings. In all, I think we used at least six studios and a variety of approaches to getting it the way we were both happy with it.”
Those who’ve heard the album will have warmed to its drizzle of Celtic mist, especially on tunes like the title-track and ‘Dance Around’, and wondered where that influence came from.
Tchaikowski tells me, “Beforehand, I thought I’d be writing funky Jamiroquai material. When I started, all this quiet stuff came out. People said, hey, that’s quite Irish, and I wondered what that actually meant. Mike said I should be ‘conscious of it but allow it.’”
So would she welcome being lumped in with the so-called Celtic music scene?
“I should be so lucky!” she says, “It would be a massive honour. There’s a sizeable Celtic music market in Switzerland and there are lots of Irish pubs and Irish music festivals. I’m aware of how respected that music is.”
And her influences are eclectic too. “I reckon my influences triangulate between Enya, Dido and Kate Bush and Tori Amos. Luka Bloom was another major influence from way back. Lately, I’ve been drawn to Counting Crows and the Dave Matthews Band, mainly on account of the quality of their songwriting. I think I’m attracted towards music that has a lot of longing in it.”