Green In All The Right Places

The most important day of Liz Green’s life began with the Manchester singer lying on her best mate’s sofa, too hungover to remember her own name. “I was due to perform at a Nico tribute concert at the Royal Festival Hall in London,” remembers the much-blogged-about folkie. “The line-up was amazing. John Cale was going to be there, along with Mark Lanegan, James Dean Bradfield from the Manic Street Preachers and Mark Linkous from Sparklehourse. I was really nervous about it, so the night before, my friend says, ‘Come have a beer’. I drank all the beer, then all the wine, then all the rum.”

A dentist’s drill migraine did little to take the shimmer off Green’s performance, which reduced Cale to speechlessness and convinced Dean Bradfield he’d witnessed the future of UK acoustic pop. Then again, it wasn’t the first time Green, matey and unassuming in that distinctive north of England way, had performed in surreal circumstances. In 2007, when she was working as a special needs teaching assistant, another pal entered her for a songwriting competition. The top prize was a slot on the headline stage at Glastonbury.
“I didn’t even know she’d put my name down for it,” says the singer. “The first I heard was when I got a phone call saying I had to go down to play for [Glasto supremo] Michael Eavis. Nobody in my school could believe I was involved in singing. Then they saw my picture in the papers. After that, all they ever asked was if I knew Simon Cowell!”
Pre-Glastonbury, her experience of live performance had been confined to open mic nights around greater Manchester. So she was understandably knock-kneed about singing to several thousand punters – in the blinding glare of the British media at that. That was until she discovered she would have her own dressing-room, outfitted with a towel (handy for mopping down the post concert sweat) and – sing hallelujah – a bottle of rum.
“It was early in the morning but I had some of the rum to calm my nerves,” she laughs. “Actually I might have had a lot of rum. All of it, in fact. So I wasn’t jittery – at all.”
Gracing Glastonbury’s main stage might have opened doors for Green. But she was wary of the attention and hadn’t yet decided if she really wanted to commit herself to a career in music. She’d been raised to look on the arts as essentially frivolous, not the sort of thing ‘serious’ people got themselves involved in.
As a child, she had dreamed of standing in front of cheering crowds, she admits. But music had nothing to do with it.
“I wanted to be a professional snooker player,” she says. “I wanted to be the first woman to win the Embassy. I used to love watching Ronnie O’Sullivan. He’s incredible, totally rock ‘n’ roll. Music wasn’t on my radar.”
After Glastonbury she ignored all record label entreaties for the best part of four years. When she finally capitulated, she decided to sign with an indie label and to record in the distinctly bling-free environs of Toe Rag Studios in London, the all analogue room best-known for having birthed The White Stripes’ Elephant.
“It is a tiny studio entirely constructed from scratch. The most modern thing is a CD burner hidden under all this 1950 BBC reel-to-reel machines. It was hand built by Liam Watson, who also engineered The White Stripes. I learned a lot from recording an album. You could say it’s a beginner’s album, really. Hearing my voice on record sounded funny to me. I suppose I was quite precious about the process early on. I’ve learned to step back a bit. I used to have a lot of disagreements with myself. Often I needed Liam to tell me to stop, to let things go.”
Soaring and soulful, on her debut LP O Devotion Green’s voice has been likened to Billie Holiday and Judy Garland, as well as Antony Hegarty of Antony and the Johnsons.
“You can’t really complain when people are comparing you to those sort of artists,” she proffers. “That’s the way reviews work at the moment. There's so much music out there, people like comparisons."
She didn’t discover Billie Holiday and the other greats of American soul until her late teens. Before that she’d hung out in a dingy pub called The Moshpit and subsisted on a diet of aggressive punk music and Pulp.
“It was like, ‘Whaaat? There was music before Britpop?’ That was a bit of a revelation for me. I used to wear black and lark about with the other geeky goth kids in my school. We listened to The Clash, Stiff Little Fingers – punk and Pulp, really.”

The album O Devotion is out now.