Rose above it

“I’m an Essex girl now,” Eileen Rose giggles. Hailing from a small North Boston suburb, the youngest of a family of nine with Irish/Italian parentage, the singer-songwriter’s been resident in England for the past ten years. “It kinda happened by accident. I feel like I was on a train and looking out the window and missed my stop,” she explains. “I came over to tour, met an English man and got married. We were together for five years before we got divorced, and I built up relationships and signed to a record company here. I’ll probably go back home eventually,” she adds with a sigh. “But it’ll be kinda like starting over if I do.”

Eileen Rose’s acclaimed debut album of last year, Shine Like It Does, was a very autobiographical collection of songs, in which her family life and youth in her small hometown featured heavily. She feels she’s moved on and grown up, although the lyrical sentiments of her new album Long Shot Novena are as beautifully dark and charmingly world-weary as ever.

“For the last record I was really at a low point. I broke up with my record company and my band and I’d gotten divorced. I was ill and my body weight was very low. With this record, I was stronger and healthier when I wrote it. It’s less about my own shortcomings and fears and more about broader subjects, general spirituality and anger about the state of the world.”

Proud to have a backing band made up of what she describes as “old punks”, Eileen was joined by Glen Matlock of the Sex Pistols, Kris Dollimore from The Godfathers and long-term collaborators Seggs and Orlando from Alabama 3 for the new album.

Eileen first encountered the Alabama 3 boys when she did a support slot for the Reverend Larry Love (who wanted her for his very own Emmy-Lou.) “After the gig, Larry asked me for a tape. He called me a couple of months later to tell me he’d been in Italy having sex to my music! I said, ‘I’m glad you like it, but I really didn’t wanna know that!’ So we started playing together and performing on each other’s records. Just last week I did a bit of singing on their new album – their new stuff is really good.”

Her own music traces through a variety of styles. “There’s a track on the record ‘See How I Need You’ which is definitely pop, but some of it’s rootsy, some of it’s rock, some of it’s New York art school stuff. I haven’t had huge success or a massive fan base, so I’ve no-one to alienate,” she notes cheerfully. “I’m quite free and I make the most of it. There’s no Eileen Rose sound, I just have my moods.”