Weaned on Tom Waits and with a voice hewn from blues and soul, Cold Specks tells TONY CLAYTON-LEAof her journey from small town Canada to London and why it's not all doom
Hi Cold Specks – or should I say Al Spx! Where on earth are you from and who are you?
“I’m from Etobicoke, Canada – it’s a really remote place, so not many people have ever heard of it. I was in high school and got very much into Tom Waits, so he can be blamed for totally sparking my interest in music. I started off listening to his album Rain Dogs and then worked backwards and forwards through his records. I have to be honest and tell you that I’d never heard anything quite like him before or since. After that, I began to explore quite a few old blues and soul singers – people like James Carr – which kinda got me to where I am today.”
What we’ve heard of your voice so far – it’s really something else, to be honest. You’re in your early 20s, yet sometimes you sound as if you could be 70.
“The singing? Well, that was a by-product of boredom. I had moved around from town to town, didn’t really know anyone, had a lot of time on my own, had a guitar that was tuned very strangely and just experimented. I started out writing basic acoustic-styled songs, recording those with a computer mic, and sometimes a video camera. It was very DIY; in fact, I didn’t even know what I was doing. So I can’t say I understood the structures involved, but at the age of 16 I suppose you’re not geared up to it.”
You moved from Canada to London a couple of years ago – why travel so far?
“I dropped out of university and worked at a terrible job. But I was slowly developing my songs, and as soon as they were finished I sent them to a good friend of mine who was living in Wales. He then passed on the songs to his brother, who happened to be a record producer – and that same guy is now my manager.”
Travelling from a very rural town in Canada to London – that’s a big shift, culturally and in many other ways. What did you make of the Big Smoke?
“I hated it at first – I found it far too overwhelming, with way too many people, and too many new faces. I tend to fail miserably in social situations, so it was a bit of a nightmare. But, you know what, I love it now.”
Not much is known about you, and unusually, there’s very little about you online. Do you want to keep it that way?
“I’m a very private person, yes, and I like having the aspect of mystery – not deliberately, though, it’s just the way it should be, I reckon. I also want people to listen to the music without attaching a story behind it. I love people like Bon Iver, for example, but whenever you read about him, it’s always about some dude in a cabin. I’d much rather the music tell the story.”
Speaking of which, is it true you have described your music as ‘doom soul’?
“Oh, no, please don’t tell me that’s out there! I was hanging around my manager’s place one day and we were constructing a Facebook page for me, and when it came to writing what the music was about, I wrote ‘doom soul’ as a joke. Unfortunately, it caught on. It’s absolutely ridiculous that it has become the best way to describe what I do. I hate defining my music but in many ways you’re forced to. I’ve been called the new Adele, for goodness sake, but my music is nothing – and I really mean nothing – like that. I don’t like to categorise, either – we should just listen to songs.”
So not ‘doom soul’, yet there is a strong sense of melancholia to what you do, isn’t there?
“Yes, some songs of mine are pretty depressing. They’re sad songs – you can’t get over that, to be honest. They were written, I guess, during morbid periods of my life.”
Would you like to explain what happened in those times?
“No, not really.”
What are you like as a person?
“I’m quite shy, and I have bad nerves. I get really bad stage fright now and again, and panic attacks sometimes. It’s getting better, though. I’m dealing with it. I’ll just ease more into it. I guess I’ll have to, as there isn’t a Plan B for me to fall back on!”
Cold Specks’s forthcoming album,
I Predict a Graceful Expulsion
, is released in April. She performs on
Other Voices
, which is broadcast on RTÉ2 throughout March and April
