MUSIC

Julian Owen goes on a journey with the peripatetic Leonie Evans.

Somehow, when you begin to learn the residential history, the singing voice follows. Leonie Evans currently lives on a boat, following a summer spent in a tent and a Spanish cave, and having previously dwelt in caravan, cottage and van. In short, a style that’s as impulsive as it is intuitive. Like Raymond Briggs’s Snowman clasping the small boy, the voice leads you by the ear to soar and dive across fantastical scapes of a singular imagination. There’s Baez-like rich precision (the singers’ equivalent of RP) and sense of Bjorkish playfulness (check those mute trumpet approximations), both imbued with the growl-punctuated, self-confident sass of her beloved early blues-leaning singers like Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday. If you’re smart enough to let it, it’s a musical world that can swallow you whole.

“So many people get wrapped up in their own ego, being technically perfect, rather than just trying to express themselves,” she says. “It’s nice when you’ve got the two, but I’d rather watch someone slightly out of tune putting everything they’ve got into it.”

She was raised well. First there was Dad, a band man himself, with “guitars all over the walls. We used to have The Chair, where he’d make me sit and close my eyes, put on some 20-minute Ozric Tentacles, The Orb or something like that, and go ‘Right, we’re gonna go on a little journey...’ and swivel the chair round.” Soon he was proffering a “sh*tty guitar” (“if I buy you a fancy one you won’t appreciate it”), upgraded once she’d locked herself upstairs and finished her first song, and now augmented by a renovated beauty discovered in a skip. “The neck’s snapped off three times and it still needs a little love, but I always wanted BB King’s guitar and so this is Lucille Jr.”

Meantime, bands: becoming bassist in a death metal group - the first of “10 or 15” ensembles – aged 11. Next, a musical theatre course led to a workshop with Palestinian activist/folk-jazz singer Reem Kelani. “She started singing screaming – well, singing powerfully – in my face and I didn’t know what to do,” recalls Leonie. “But by the end of the play I was dancing around screaming my lungs off. We’ve been in close contact since. She changed everything for me, that lady.”

The experience was echoed in that Spanish cave, jamming with Rajasthani Gypsies. First, shyness brought on by incomprehension, then the penny-dropping surge of confidence. “It’s another discipline compared to Western music, being able to control all the notes in between the notes – that’s what I’d like to get to.” She was there as part of a degree-fulfilling proposal to research music that only happens in a specific location. Thus, flamenco in Andalucía. “I did lots of web searching [for somewhere suitable] but they all looked a bit too shiny. Then I found this lady with her own cave studio, and she said ‘You can stay in the cave below mine’. It was loads cheaper. She got me some gigs over there, took me to some jam nights with Senegalese musicians playing flamenco/Senegalese fusion – she just mothered me, really.” It also built on sounds and visions experienced touring Europe as part of gypsy swingers The Mandibles: “We’ve been to Switzerland, Italy, France and more, meeting amazing bands and street performers.”

And the degree? Dartington, in the sadly late music college’s final year, and possibly the biggest influence of all, with the spirit engendered by trying to save the place still burning in a network of former students spread across Brighton, Bristol and London. “We’re such a close unit,” she avows.

The key to the future, meanwhile, lies in Leonie’s native Kent, and the Canterbury prog scene-inspired Dawn Chorus collective. Founded by psychedelic rockers Syd Arthur, and also including Rae (Leonie’s jazz-leaning folk-blues troupe), The Boot Lagoon and Liam Magill, it centres on a splendidly old school analogue studio with equally old school echoes of the spontaneous creativity engendered by EMI’s Abbey Road or Island’s SARM West: bands milling around, guesting on each other’s tracks. “Between the four bands there’s so many instruments, stuff we’d never be able to do otherwise. We have this continuous usage of the studio: when one band’s recording, another’s writing, and can then come in and record when the first has gone off for mastering.” It’s where Rae recorded the ‘Era’ album (“imagine Amélie scatting with Ornette Coleman,” said our own Steve Wright), and from whence later this year Leonie’s solo album will emerge.

Back in Bristol, there’ll be further High Noon promotions, the company formed with fellow Mandible Alex Jefferies, whose first gig packed out Thekla by staging Polar Bear. Clearly, that promise first made by The Chair-swivelling Dad – “We’re gonna go on a journey” – shows no sign of reaching final destination just yet. “I don’t really have a radio, TV or laptop or anything, so most of my favourite music is people that I know and see live. That’s the beauty of around here – there’s so much, in abundance, it’s crazy.”

LEONIE EVANS PLAYS EVERY FIRST THURSDAY OF THE MONTH AT LEFTBANK, AND PLENTY ELSEWHERE BESIDES. FFI: FACEBOOK (TINYURL.COM/CZNLFQT) AND WWW.DAWNCHORUSRECORDCO.COM

Copyright Julian Owen 2012