A touch of the diva

Anna Calvi can be self-conscious off stage – but is a passionate and self-assured performer on it. She explains the transformation to TONY CLAYTON-LEA

What more do we need to know about Anna Calvi?

My father is originally from Tuscany, but he’s been living in London for years, so I’m half Italian. I went there a lot when I was younger, which has influenced me. I’ve always liked really passionate music, and my dad used to play me Italian opera. Also, my Italian family is very musical – my grandfather would have played tango, so I’d say my musical education would have started at a very young age.

I’ve always been quite obsessed with music. Even when I was four I was begging my parents to get me a violin, so a connection with it was always there. And aside from Italian opera that my dad played me, he also had a wide range of tastes, so I’d hear the likes of Captain Beefheart, The Rolling Stones, Nina Simone.

Was there a drama in these types of music that connected with you?

It’s not really that I feel a particular connection to melodrama, it’s more the sense of passion and not holding back – giving everything – which is something I get from singers such as Nina Simone and Edith Piaf.

Old-school tastes?

Yes, but I have modern influences as well. I like Antony The Johnsons, Arcade Fire. I like a wide range of music, which is the best way, surely.

Was there a pivotal moment in your life when you knew it was going to be music?

When I’m into something I really commit to it. I used to record music, even when I was 11 and 12, and I’d practise the guitar for hours. When I was 16 I made a decision to study music. I was into art, and planning to go to art school, but after college I changed my mind. I felt that music was the way to go.

Doing that opened my mind to listening to much more music than I would have if I had stuck with art. I studied 20th-century opera, orchestrating, arranging, theoretical analysis of Bach, and so on. Funnily enough, I found the academic side of things really interesting, but as a writer of music I don’t rely on that background, even though it certainly gives you a level of confidence and makes you better informed. I write from a very emotional place.

You feel quite empowered when you’re on stage, and having seen you on stage in Dingle, at Other Voices, I can see why

It enables me to access a side of me that I can’t get to unless I’m on stage or playing music. It’s a very liberating feeling – a feeling of being powerful in some way. Not powerful in having actual power over the audience, but just strength in yourself, bravery in yourself, and engaging with a sort of wild abandon.

Off stage you seem quite self-conscious, but on stage not so. From where does the wild abandon come?

Well, I’m naturally more reserved with people I don’t know. It sounds cheesy, but the wild abandon thing is a bit like a Clark Kent/Superman thing.

You’ve been described as a “Tarantino vamp”. What do you make of that?

Have I really? I’m not sure what that means, but I kinda like it. I think the music certainly has a filmic quality to it. Movies, too, inform what I do.

When I record a song I don’t just record a melody and strong guitar. Ideally I want to create a whole world the song can inhabit. It needs to be tangible. It needs to be all-encompassing. All of the musical ideas and arrangements, the instruments too, express the story as much as the lyrics do. Like film, my music evokes a mood, a story. I love films that are visually stunning, and I get really affected by great beauty, and therefore I like to make beautiful music.

• Other Voices, featuring Anna Calvi, will broadcast from early February on RTÉ2. She plays The Workman's Club in Dublin on February 23