Confessions Of an Irish Harpist

SOME YEARS ago, Ursula Burns had this recurring dream where she found herself trapped in what she now describes as an ever-decreasing box of music. The box was shrinking, and as it did, the music got louder and louder and louder. It was almost like a torture.

Up until this point the Belfast native had been making a living as an actress, doing folk theatre with a travelling company, working with wagons and horses, cooking by campfire, getting around on foot, the whole strolling player bit. It's a period she remembers as "the best time of my life". But, like any self-respecting Jungian, she eventually elected to follow that dream and return to her original vocation.

"My calling in life was music, and I ignored it for so long that I got deeply unhappy," she recalls. "I had to face all my demons to face my music. And I had to go back home to Belfast to do it, which was quite funny. I had to sign on the dole and sit in a one-bedroom flat and pull the harp towards me and go, 'I'm 25, I don't even know where to start—it's too late to start fuckin' around with instruments, I should've been doin' it years ago.' You know, that sinking feeling you get—you think most people know what they're doing by the time they're 16 these days, let alone 25. I'd no idea that I was gonna end up as a professional musician with an album, a load of songs, no idea that I was on the right path. No-one comes down with a great big wand and some reassurance tickets that you're gonna be alright, you're not gonna starve to death. All I knew was that I was unhappy and I had to do something about it."

So what drove the harpist away from music in the first place? Paradoxically, but not uncommonly, it was the intimidating fertility of her family's musical background.

"I grew up in a folk environment," the singer explains. "My Mum played the harp and my grandpa played the fiddle, there was music coming out every orifice of the family. I didn't want to be domineered—my Mum did an album ten years ago of Yeats poems set to music, and she is an incredible woman, very strong in her own way, but very folk, not what I considered to be the music I wanted to do. I just didn't feel strong enough to stand up to that, so I left. I ran away at 14, joined the circus, came back to school, went over to the National Youth Theatre, got a degree, then went and joined this touring company for three years."

Which is where the dream comes in. And now, years later, the singer is nursing a pint in the snug of the Octagon Bar in the Clarence Hotel, on the eve of the release of her debut album According To Ursula Burns.

She's a likable character, this Ms. Burns. Impish smile, hair plaited into natty dreads, glitter around her eyes. But as the conversation progresses, you realise she's still an ingénue in many ways—this writer is mildly shocked when she intimates that this is the first time she's admitted to the autobiographical nature of the domestic abuse scenario played out in "Sinister Nips", something one would've thought she'd have hashed out in the press many times over the past year. And the harpist seems a riddle of insecurities; about her prowess as a musician, her dyslexia, the fact that she feels she slipped through the net as regards education.

But then, one also suspects that Burns can look after herself, as indicated by the spine of iron running through songs like "Venus De Milo" ("I want you to cut off your arms / And put them in the box under my bed / Then I want you, to make me breakfast / You know how I like my eggs") or "Walk Into The Sun" ("Walk into the shit house / With your head between your legs"), dedicated to the women who worked in Belfast's Linen Mills.

"The lyrics just come out with the music," Ursula reflects. "There is a conflict there; the music is calm, and the lyrics can be violent, but there's no calculated thing about that, it's just the way they've come out. But 'Sinister Nips' was more like a healing thing, something that had to be written, and I did realise that it was slightly unusual to put such a gentle tune with such violent lyrics, but for me it was a way of exorcising myself. I wasn't trying to create a tension, it relieved me of the tension."

But does it hurt all over again to dredge up those past experiences when delivering lines like, "You laughed and then put my head through a window / I wasn't hurt but I lay on the floor / Cos it's fun to milk a situation / Together we swept up the pain / You smashed the glass you were drinking from / When you saw me talk to a friend / Your pepperoni pizza slid down my wall / I could never remove the stain"?

"No, it doesn't," she answers. "It's quite strange because the process of writing it dredged it up, it really hurt, but it was like a final closing of a chapter. Writing a song finalised it, sorted it out, categorised it and got it out of my system. I like to sing it with as much emotion as I can, and I like to portray through my voice some of the pain, but I don't feel it again, because I let go of that when I wrote the song. When you finish writing a song like 'Sinister Nips', the relief is fantastic. The release."

Does she find it uncomfortable to talk about?

"The only discomfort I felt there was saying, 'Yes, it's autobiographical'," she admits, "but the other point I think to myself (is), well, 'How the hell could you make something like that up?' And y'know, fuck it, I'm not gonna start getting into the business of lying, I can't be bothered lying about things. It's easier to write about something you're passionate about, or you've experienced yourself, things that make you feel emotions."

Burns might betray an inferiority complex when it comes to her expertise as a harpist, confiding that, "the fact of the matter is, when I started recording the album, I hadn't even started playing the harp, and I had only started singing. The way I learned the harp and the way the songs came out was through just blind experimentation."

But despite (or because of) this, the album is a splendidly arranged work, with the core elements of harp and voice cannily rather than crudely embellished with guitar, cello, violin, clarinet, accordion, Northumbrian pipes and whistles, suggesting pentatonic cross-pollinations of Northern folk and rural Japanese musics on tunes like "Kisses In The Wind" and "Blueprint".

Not all of the tunes are as clear-eyed—at her most mannered, Burns can evoke the hyper-affected delivery of a Tori Amos, while elsewhere, on "Alcoholic Monster", she's doing Weimar via Mary Margaret O'Hara. (Ursula later remarks that manager Ross Graham "keeps talking about Canada, and thinks the Northern hemisphere is better for me.") But such idiosyncrasies can only reinforce her maverick credentials: while most contenders of her gender are still stuck in hackneyed rock chick or MOR songbird roles, Burns is harpying on about domestic abuse and spoiled Irish mother's boys, frequently utilising surrealistic language and the tones of a drunken cherub. And here's a songwriter open to all sonic possibilities—including beats.

"I certainly wouldn't wipe that out as an option," she considers. "A friend of mine took 'Kisses In The Wind'—didn't finish the track, but just to give me an idea of what it would sound like, took it all apart and did it in a Massive Attack cum William Orbit cum Portishead sort of style, and I loved it. I couldn't actually believe it was my song. Obviously it wouldn't be fitting on that album, but I do like very mellow spacey beats. I wouldn't eliminate any way of going.

"But the other thing is, I'm naturally a melody person. I hear everything in melodies and harmonies, and rhythm is something that has come to me secondary. I've only understood this through meeting and understanding other people who work rhythmically, so obviously beats aren't the initial way to go, although I would find it very exciting to explore. But it's all in the future and we'll see."

For now, Burns is obviously proud of her work, but a little frustrated that the album (completed almost a year ago) doesn't reflect the progress she's recently made as a musician. But these are natural misgivings, and, if anything, According To . . . affords the listener the rare opportunity of glimpsing a player still in the first honeymoon bloom of mastering her instrument.

"The songs that I've written are just songs that I had to write, and I wrote them on the harp because that's what just happened to be lying about," she concludes. "But the way I look at it now is that I came to it at the right time in my life, when I'd made all the mistakes, and the fact that I'm technically not the world's most fantastic musician is irrelevant because I've the soul of the music, and the essence of what I need to say is quite untouched and uninfluenced and raw."

According To Ursula Burns is out now on Freerange.