Out Of The Dark

She placed fifth in the BBC Sound of 2011 poll, she’s one of MTV’s Brand New For 2011 and one of her songs is currently playing over the sultry Renault Clio advert starring Dita Von Teese, Rihanna and Thierry Henry, but it seems like Clare Maguire has done everything to avoid becoming a household name.

“I put up this picture of me on MySpace with my back to the camera, and people in the label just really liked the mystery,” she says, explaining the secrecy surrounding her campaign. “But I just did it ‘cause I didn’t think I looked very good!”
If the record label’s intention was to keep this Birmingham lass under wraps, they’ve done a damn good job so far. Nothing about the self-effacing 23-year-old I’m introduced to is familiar. Clare Maguire’s epic, booming singing voice is a deadringer for Annie Lennox’s basement drawl, but this girl speaks in broken giggles. Clare Maguire’s music videos are ploughed with mystique, but this girl’s welcoming grin hardly recalls the dark dynamism of the ‘Ain’t Nobody’ video.
Maybe it’s the idea of being back on home soil that’s got Maguire in such good spirits today – she’s got relatives all over Ireland, from Limerick to Rooskey, and she spent every family holiday here as a child.
“That’s where I get my main influence from, Irish music and my grandparents,” she tells me. “They were like my biggest idols when I was growing up. They all loved music, but no one took it as a career or anything. I was the first one.”
Maguire went full-time into music when she 17, after a teacher in school told her to forget about becoming a pop star.
“It was the wrong thing to say to the wrong person,” she says, sternly. “I went straight into the head teacher and said, ‘You can’t do that to people who are artists!’ He got upset about it and rang my family and they said, ‘You’ve got a year to make it in the music industry and if you don’t, you go back to college!’ So I got a job in Topshop and started putting demos online. I didn’t sleep for like six months, just obsessing over getting people to find me!”
Fast forward a couple of months and Maguire was the subject of an international record label bidding war.
“It was quite crazy actually,” she recalls. “All the labels around the UK and America were trying to sign me at the same time. That’s how I ended up meeting two of my heroes, Rick Rubin and Jay Z.”
Rubin invited Maguire to his home in LA, where he tugged at her heart strings by playing her unreleased recordings by the late Johnny Cash.
“He played them and I couldn’t look at him because I knew if I did, he would see me crying.”
Jigga took a slightly different approach to courting the young singer, choosing instead to ply her with booze in a New York restaurant.
“I remember just eating a burger and these five men walked in and the guy from the label was like, ‘You know that’s Jay Z?’ And I was like, ‘No, it’s not. It’s a lookalike!’ But as soon as he starts speaking you know it’s Jay Z! I couldn’t believe it, we all went upstairs and had drinks and he was telling me about how determined you have to be to make it in the music industry.”
While her debut album Light After Dark borrows heavily from skyscraping ‘80s pop, if there’s one refreshing thing about Ms. Maguire, it’s that she doesn’t downplay the importance of all those moody visuals.
“When I was a child, I was very, very highly dyslexic and I remember always understanding things in pictures or in colours,” she muses. “A lot of my writing comes from visual things.
“I like that,” she adds, flashing me a grin that the world has yet to see. “I like that someone can watch a video for 90 seconds on YouTube and instantly have a sense of the artist.”

Light After Dark is out now on Polydor. You can listen to 'Strangest Thing' on hotpress.com.