Hot Press meets Anna Calvi

If you know Anna Calvi only from her strident, sensuous music,  perhaps you are all a-flutter at the prospect of a face-to-face encounter.  With her scarlet-lipstick pout and super-model glare, frankly she comes across as rather terrifying. She sings about love and heartache – the usual stuff, really – but with an intensity that verges on ferocious. In person, you suspect the Mercury-nominated Londoner will be one of those whip-cracking, ‘don’t suffer fools’ types that the music industry hasn’t quite managed to vanquish yet.

Actually, she’s the exact opposite. Off stage, Anna Calvi is…well, the anti-Anna Calvi. She’s softly spoken – a dormouse in fact. It’s not just the low talking voice – it’s the self effacement, the shyness. How absurd that this is the same person who  scary-croons her way through such tumultuous guitar dirges as ‘Desire’ and ‘Suzanne and I’ , and, on her new album, One Breath, sings forcefully and with tremendous wisdom about bereavement and the ways it can cause your universe to bend at its edges, refracting the light into shapes you hadn’t imagined possible.
“When I’m performing I am able to access a strong and fearless part of myself,” says Calvi. “It comes out in a really exaggerated form in concert. I often get asked would I like to be able to bring those two elements of myself closer, for them to mingle. I don’t know about that. I like the fact that they are very separate. I can enjoy them in specific moments. It makes it more special. It seems to puzzle other people. To me, it makes perfect sense.”
There’s always been a lot of darkness in Calvi’s music (it is no coincidence that her early cheerleaders included such flag-bearers for the baroque as PJ Harvey and Nick Cave). On One Breath, though, she travels to some properly bleak places. She recently suffered the loss of a close family member (intensely private, she declines to get any more specific); the album came together in the shadow of that pain.
“I would like to think it’s a record that has to do with hope,” she says. “That it is about moving on and feeling stronger and accepting change. It [the bereavement] did influence many of the themes. It is why it is a more reflective LP than the first. I suppose I was wrestling with this sense of not having control over your life and how you want to resist that and how, ultimately, you have to surrender to it. It’s all in there. “
She is anxious to clear up the misconception that she wrote the songs while suffering from depression, however. This has been reported in several outlets – but simply isn’t true. “That was a misquote, “ she sighs. “I wasn’t deliberately reflecting on death. What happens when you write songs is that your subconscious suggests stuff and it is only afterwards that you think, ‘oh, so that’s what that is about’.”
The LP was recorded in France, at the studio run by ex-Frames man Dave Odlum. Calvi has worked there previously and jumped at the opportunity to return. Swapping the urban bustle for the hushed solitude of rural France was exactly what she needed. “It’s a really good studio – an old barn in the countryside. The big difference was that the first record was put together over two and a half years. This one was recorded in six weeks. The shorter time span helped, I think. If you have all the time in the world you can grow quite obsessive. For One Breath I followed my gut instinct, which is better-.”
She worked with producer John Congleton, best known for overseeing Saint Vincent’s Mercy. A laid back guy by all accounts, Calvi found him the perfect collaborator. He didn’t tell her what to do, wasn’t seeking to impose his ‘vision’ on her songs. Calvi has plenty of vision of her own, thanks all the same.
“We didn’t have a power struggle, which was fantastic,” she says. “We know our places. We didn’t struggle with ego issues. It worked well, though it would be hard for me to say the process was ‘enjoyable’. It is so incredibly full-on and intense. You have moments when things are sounding really fun and it’s all very exciting. Then you have periods of utter frustration. Really, it’s an up and down emotional roller-coaster.”
Calvi was born in London in 1980. Her family hail from Tuscany. A sickly child, she spent the first three years of her life in hospital due to a hip condition. She suspects it has shaped her as a person, and as a musician. “Both my hips were dislocated when I was born, “ she told Hot Press in 2011. “What happened to me was quite frightening when I was young. However, I’m sure it brought out my creative side. Even if it hadn’t happened, I would have been creative. But being in hospital so long forced me to look even more deeply into myself.”
She signed to influential UK independent label Domino half way through the recording of her debut, Anna Calvi. Being with an indie is a point of pride for Calvi. She is convinced her span in music would be brief and miserable were she with a major. “I would get lost under all the ‘big buck’ artists,” she says. “It would be career suicide for me to do that. I’m lucky I’m with an indie – one that has enough weight and power behind them to make a difference. It’s not like I can’t afford to tour. You get some really good opportunities with Domino. It’s a good balance. The best thing is that they are really hands-off in terms of your music. They don’t interfere.”
Shrugging off an early backlash (the chap from The Guardian judged her ‘banal’ and ‘hackneyed’), Anna Calvi was a major success. It sold well, was lavishly reviewed – then received the ultimate accolade, a Mercury Music Prize nomination. It’s fashionable to be leery of the Mercury nowadays – to dismiss it as a UK media shindig with little relevance to artists genuinely trying to do something different. Calvi disagrees. The Mercury nod was a personal highlight. “It was a big deal,” she says. “When I was younger I discovered a lot of artists through the Mercury. You’d read about them being nominated and check them out afterwards. The ceremony was in a hotel and, while I usually don’t get nervous before a performance, it did freak me out a little. That’s because it was on TV. I must say, television is the one thing that gets to me – everything is sort of fake. I was pretty terrified doing the Mercury.
“To have the album received so positively was an incredible feeling,” she continues. “I was very proud of it and happy with the music. To discover other people out there who felt the same was an enormous boost.”
Face to face Calvi, as we have intimated, comes across as shy - meek almost. You can imagine people mistaking her for a pushover – which she assuredly is not. Female artists often complain of being pressured into situations in which they are uncomfortable, whether that be at a photo-shoot or in the studio. Calvi avoids such predicaments by knowing when to say ‘no’. It’s a lesson she learned early on. “If I don’t want to do something I say I don’t want to do it. I’ve always been pretty good at that.”

One Breath is out now