Take a chanson me

Carly Blackman is worried. “Did I sound okay?” she frets, emerging, guitar in hand, from the studios of Newstalk radio in Dublin. “That was kind of nerve-wracking. You wonder if you’re doing the song justice.”

It’s a cold January morning in the capital and Blackman – aka Carly Sings – has just performed on the national airwaves for the first time. It won’t be her last. Though without a record deal or, indeed, a record, to her name the 25-year-old Wicklow-born, French-educated chanteuse is riding a wave of... well, it seems cruel to call it hype. Despite her youth, Carly is clearly very savvy about what it takes to succeed in the music business. Aware that her sound – ’60s-tinged chansons freighted with soul grooves and dorm-rock earnestness – is in vogue right now, she fears she may be seen as cynically surfing a fad. “Sometimes, I’ve stopped and thought to myself, ‘God am I actually a trend?’ I think it’s cool that women are being creative and getting lauded for it and being original and daring and being on their own. That’s really brilliant. But I don’t want to be another something.
“Gypsy pop” is how Carly describes her smoky, retro-tinged songs. She’s honed her repertoire to a glossy shimmer over the past three years, having started out posting DIY recordings onto her MySpace site before graduating to French jazz clubs. Twelve months ago, she returned to Dublin, set on launching herself as a singer. “If I wanted this to happen I needed to come home, because for me Dublin has a really strong music scene,” she says. “Besides, my lyrics are in English mostly. I wanted English-speaking people to get it.”
In Paris, Blackman studied drama, supporting herself with a bizarre series of odd-jobs, including a stint as an assistant at Paris Fashion Week: “I met all the big super-models. I met Karl Lagerfeld... and Jean Paul Gaultier. I usually got to dress Russian girls who were quite focused – they were like, ‘This is my job, this is what I have to do’. Sometimes I got an American, they were very down-to-earth and cool and very young. They were like 16 and they were happy to have a girl close-ish to their age to chat to.”
Because of her exotic looks, Carly is often assumed to be of French extraction. In fact, she has Spanish ancestors to thank for her dark eyes and dusky complexion. Her impeccable wardrobe –today’s she’s a picture of understated bohemian chic in knee-length boots and red neckerchief – can be credited in part, to her mother, a stylist and designer. “I know I have to present myself in a certain way,” she says en route to a photo-shoot. “I’m aware that image is something I have to think about, because people will make up their minds about you very quickly.”
Slated for released in early spring, Carly’s long play debut, The Glove Thief features lush production work from Halfset’s Steve Shannon. They hooked up when Carly’s then boyfriend, Crayonsmith front-man Ciaran Smith presented her with a half hour of session work with Shannon as a birthday present. “Steve was like, ‘Hello! I want to work with you.’ He just said it after ten minutes. I’d played four of my songs and walked out and he gave me a CD and said that was cool.”
Does she ever fret so much early attention might prove her undoing? “At first I was overwhelmed by the attention,” she says. “And I was like, no actually. Let’s be honest about this, you’ve worked damn hard and you’ve maybe not done it publicly. Maybe you’ve been in your bedroom beavering away but I have been doing so much artistic stuff my whole life that my life. In college I wrote plays. I write musicals. I was constantly producing stuff. Everything I’ve done so far has built me up to a moment.”

The Glove Thief is released in March