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Interview: Diane Birch Rises Up | reviews, news & interviews

Interview: Diane Birch Rises Up

Interview: Diane Birch Rises Up

Diane Birch's album 'Bible Belt' is an instant classic

It's probably a bit early to start picking the best albums of 2010, but I would seriously consider a legal challenge if Diane Birch's Bible Belt isn't there or thereabouts when the votes are counted. Like a long-lost singer-songwriter classic, it accomplishes the trick of sounding instantly familiar, yet Birch herself doesn't sound quite like any other artist you've heard before. Her voice can be soft and supple, but it also has a raw, rasping quality that can saw through a song like "Choo Choo", with its vamping organ and garage-band guitars. By contrast, in the hymn-like "Forgiveness" she sails up to a top note that could bring Airedales and Labradors running from miles around.
We meet in a Shepherd's Bush hotel, near the BBC where Birch has been preparing for an appearance on Later.... Tall, slender and willowy, she apologises that she can't shake hands because she's just painted her nails. "Sorry for being so girly!" she exclaims. But, despite a slight patina of ditziness and a fondness for "wow"s and "amazing"s, Birch is far from an absolute beginner, even though Bible Belt is her debut album. At 27, she has amassed an encyclopedia of formative experiences, and has been travelling the world virtually since she was born.
"My family is South African, and I grew up in Zimbabwe and then we moved to South Africa," she recalls. "Then we moved to Australia, and then to Oregon when I was about 10. My dad was a preacher and a Seventh-Day Adventist. He'd travel around and preach, and also kind of work in the church headquarters wherever they may be around the world. But I think early on my parents could tell I wasn't going to go down the religious road."
Diane_Birch_small_bwThe young Diane was presented with the choice of following in the family business, or taking an independent stand.
"My family are lovely, but when I was growing up they were conservative, so I felt repressed a little bit. So I became quite rebellious and had to make my mark in the secular world. I got really into Goth, and a lot of those bands like The Cure and Bauhaus and the Sisters of Mercy. It was definitely a tough pill for my parents to swallow, when their daughter shows up at church wearing a black velvet cape and full make-up".
Birch grew up learning more about classical and church music than pop, and she began learning piano via the Suzuki Method when she was seven.
"It's an ear-training method, so I did learn classical but I don't read music," she explains. "You were constantly given these CDs and you'd listen to them repetitively, and when you were looking at the piano notes you'd go 'Oh yeah, that goes there and that goes there' because you'd already heard it. It's almost like putting together puzzle pieces. But I had a naturally strong ear anyway, so I ended up faking my way through most of it."
Though she amused herself by creating a fantasy world in which she became a romantic 18th-century heroine, and invented an imaginary, Mozart-like friend called Valentino (memorialised in song on Bible Belt), the truth eventually had to be faced that far-flung Oregon was not the epicentre of civilisation. She moved south to Los Angeles, despite less than wholehearted support from her parents. Her original plan was to become a composer of movie soundtracks, but in the meantime she supported herself by playing piano in bars and restaurants, accumulating a repertoire of pop songs and standards while working on her own music in her spare time. She became successful enough to be employed regularly at such elite haunts as the Beverly Hills Hotel and L'Orangerie.
The going became tougher when she tried to launch herself as an artist in her own right, playing her own songs to small crowds who remained stubbornly unimpressed. At first she hadn't even considered herself a singer, believing that you had to sound like operatic titan Joan Sutherland or Barbra Streisand before you could properly lay claim to the term. "But people said, 'You have your own voice, it's unique,' so I started taking myself more seriously and it slowly evolved from there."
But the time wasn't yet right for a Birch breakthrough. She hadn't fully worked out what kind of artist she wanted to become, though she had been soaking up the work of songwriters from Gershwin and Cole Porter to Paul Simon, Randy Newman and Carole King, and audiences could detect a lack of direction in her performances.
"It was tough in LA, because people would say, 'What are you? Are you pop, are you alternative, are you rock, are you jazz, what is it, blues?' I'm like, 'Well, I don't know,' and they'd say, 'You need to have more of a defined sound that people can understand.'  I realised LA maybe wasn't the right place to start. It was maybe a better place to go back to once you'd done something."


Somewhat unpredictably, a lifeline was flung to her from across the Atlantic. She'd become an enthusiastic user of MySpace, where she posted demos of her songs, and she was contacted by manager Will Bloomfield in London. He'd heard her demos and invited her to come over to England.
"I saved up some money and ended up coming over for a little while, and he hooked up all this stuff for me and we ended up working together. I just noticed there was a lot more interest coming from over here than there was in LA. A few months later I got an offer of a publishing deal from EMI Music Publishing, and I signed it. That was what really started everything. I had free time and the means to live in London, and I could just play music all day long and record. Will is still my manager and he's amazing. I've been really fortunate, because I've landed up with an amazing team of people, whether it's musicians I work with or on the business side."
More confident and better prepared, Birch was ready for a record deal. She found herself flying out to New York to record for Steve Greenberg's S Curve label, and discovered that Greenberg was thinking big. He wanted to present Birch in a framework of vintage musical craftsmanship, and he was prepared to jump through hoops to get the results he wanted. Musicians appearing on the album include Patti Smith's guitarist Lenny Kaye, bassists Adam Blackstone from The Roots and George Porter from The Meters, saxophonist Lenny Pickett and Lenny Kravitz's drummer Cindy Blackman.
"Steve Greenberg had such a great Rolodex of people he knew," Birch raves.  "We went through each aspect and thought, we want a New Orleans feel, let's go to New Orleans and record with George Porter. Steve wanted a particular vocal line on one song, 'Don't Wait Up', and he said, 'I want to hear a voice like Frankie Valli, who's playing Frankie Valli on Broadway?' So he got the guy from Jersey Boys to do this part.
"He really wanted everything to be authentic. I walked into the studio one day and there was a 35-piece string orchestra, and I was completely in tears. I thought it would be like a 10-piece, and even that would have been amazing, but there were all these members of the New York Philharmonic. Steve was going, 'We're making a real record here!'"
Whether Birch will let a producer run amok to quite such an extent on her future discs remains to be seen, but she's dazzled by the results, which successfully pitch her as a natural heir to artists like Laura Nyro or, especially, Carole King, with whom she shares a gift for melodies which seem to have written themselves and lyrics which stick in your memory. Pieces like "Photograph" or "Nothing but a Miracle" seem particularly King-influenced.
"She's unbelievable and such an amazing songwriter, " says Birch. "The odd thing is I didn't really grow up listening to her. I started listening to her more when people started making comparisons, and then I thought I could see maybe why they were saying that. It's a big compliment."
Diane_Birch_small_longSomething Birch has learned is that although in her mind "I'm a very obscure and dark artist and I write all this moody music," in fact it's writing commercial pop songs that comes easiest to her.
"When I wrote 'Photograph' it was just a fun thing, I wasn't even writing it for something for me to sing necessarily. Then when I came to England people were going, 'That song "Photograph" is amazing!' I was saying, 'Really? It's so cheesy, it's silly, it's a pretend song!' I started realising that I write music like that really effortlessly."
The best thing you can do with Bible Belt is hear it for yourself, though I must give a tip of the hat to "Ariel", a song for Birch's boyfriend which seems to share some of its DNA with Sir Elton’s "Daniel", and the poignant "Rewind", a kind of road-not-taken song about a chance meeting with an old lover. Among other things, the latter features a perfect reincarnation of the classic Burt Bacharach horn sound ("that came to me in the middle of the night! I woke up bolt upright thinking 'I have to remember this horn line!'")
Perhaps more than anything, Bible Belt is tangible proof that Diane Birch has grown wings and learned to fly. As she sings in "Rise Up", a riposte to her mother who once told her she was “meshing with the Devil” and heading for perdition, “Why not tell it like it is, even if it don’t make your mama proud?”

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