World class romantic

ONE glance at Katell Keineg's record collection gives the game away. Set right alongside the usual suspects such as Tricky, Dylan, Nina Simone, Al Green and Aretha Franklin are albums by French chanteuse Jane Birkin, opera singer Cathy Berberian and a fascinating double CD entitled Desert Blues which features West African singers such as Oumou Sangare and Youssou N'Dour. It is precisely this layering of world music influences on top of her rock base which defines Katell's latest album, Jet. This is so not just in terms of the use of instruments such as hand drums, bouzouki, lyre and tamboura but also on a vocal level when, for example, she temporarily breaks away from a main melodic line and sings tablalike percussive beats in the style initiated by Indian singer Sheila Chandra.

Likewise, in Ole Conquistador, Katell creates a Malaysian influenced sound collage by "miking a bag of gravel and placing a speaker on a trolley and moving it around, in order to approximate the sonic movement of a South American parade". Such soundscapes, compounded by relatively unorthodox chord progressions, certainly make Jet less than "easy listening", particularly in terms of tracks such as Battle Of The Trees, which opens the album. Nevertheless, Katell rejects the suggestion that her music is either inaccessible or self indulgent.

"Well, firstly, in terms of the World Music influence, growing up listening to Breton music and to an extent, the Irish music my parents listened to, and South American music, it all feels much the same to me," she says, sitting by the window of her apartment in Dun Laoghaire.

"Besides, when you come from different places as in my coming from Wales and Brittany and living for so long in Dublin - you don't have the view of culture as being just one thing. To me, my culture is everything, musically and otherwise. So I can't see something like The Battle Of The Trees as inaccessible, or self indulgent. And the second track, One Hell of A Life really is relatively simple. As is Smile - and Veni, Vedi, Vici. But I don't mind if people say my album is difficult. I'm proud of what I've done. Besides, too many artists listen too much to what others have to say about their work. Or what can and can't be done in music.

"As for Ole Conquistador, instead of being linear, with a bass line set under a guitar line and so on, it's like one musician starts at the beginning of a bar, someone else plays the middle and another musician plays the end. These progressions may be difficult to some, or even the idea of miking a bag of gravel but, to me, that's just an interesting way to create music, through a collage effect.

"The whole point about music is that it is endlessly out there. If people think miking a bag of gravel is strange I don't understand that criticism."

Also, on a cultural level, Katell was influenced by the fact that both her parents were "politically active" - though her own point of focus is "personal politics" she says, somewhat self consciously.

"Only because the phrase `personal politics' is a bit naff these days," she explains, laughing. "But, to my mind, the main political issue for women is how to navigate in a broadly misogynist world. That's something that comes out in a lot of my songs, most of which are love songs - as in Ole Conquistador which has been described as an attack on a Latin Lothario, but is more an attack on the urge to conquest, not necessarily just in relation to men and women. Yet that urge is the thrust of masculinity. It moves forward and it is running amok these days, which is why the song ends with my focusing on the conquest of nature.

"And, let's face it, elements of masculinity are more valued in the world. This is definitely true in terms of music right now, with all the emphasis on `laddish' rock bands. I'm totally aware of that and move against it as much as I can. I'm more interested in achieving a balance, between masculine and feminine, in terms of who I am as a musician and a woman.

Again, Katell Keineg visibly draws back, even scowls at herself for using the word "balance". Why?

"Because of New Agespeak which, to me, is meaningless and has devalued such words. All that New Age stuff is just infantilism," she responds. "Human beings are too complicated to be reduced to the kind of equations you find in New Age philosophy. It's just an industry based on people's dissatisfaction with life, exploiting their spiritual urges, selling them books, calendars, crystals. I've no time for any of that, at all."

Couldn't the same be said of rock music, laddish or otherwise? Aren't rock icons from Elvis to Tricky deified to a tellingly desperate degree? Isn't their music often sold as the aural equivalent of "crystals" or calendars that allegedly access the cosmos, to cull a few cute phrases from frequently infantile popspeak?

"Absolutely," Katell enthuses. "Pop stars are sold as quasigods. But all this, to me, is disempowering, in that once you invest power in pop stars, or whoever, you remove it from yourself. So, in much the same sense that you see things when you look through the wrong end of a telescope, the pop star becomes huge and the fan shrinks to next to nothing. That's not the way I see things.

This, too is partly why Katell rejects the cult of the personality. She also prefers to draw a line when it comes to discussing her private life and, as such, is clearly reluctant to answer the question of whether or not she herself has ever perceived any man as "god like" or turned love into a form of religion, as is suggested by many of her songs.

"My music is extremely personal, so all I have to say on the subject is there in the lyrics, which I hope are universal enough for people to be able to access without knowing the details of my private life," she responds. "I also have an aversion to people using the interview as an analyst's couch. That's undignified. And I don't feel any need to display myself, at that level, particularly in terms of my relationships.

"In general, I'm more comfortable talking about what women do in relation to men rather than what I have done in relation to any particular man."

Nevertheless, there is the perception that Katell Keineg is a "romantic obsessive". Is she?

"Well, to go back to your earlier question, there is a way in which romance is fed to us as something to take the place of God, certainly in the media and music," she says.

"Ninety per cent of advertising also encourages the idea that, `if you only had this person you would be complete'. On the other hand, there is the concept of courtly love, the form of personal love that started with the troubadours, in which those characteristics that make a woman unique become the object of love, as opposed to merely her generic femaleness. It's that philosophical base I explore in my songs. So then if someone reads my lyrics and says I am a "romantic obsessive" that, to me, is a reductive tag, because it is pathologising something which isn't pathological. I study love but I'm not obsessed with it. And there is a beauty in the fact that a woman will seek to find the spirit through the erotic urge as in the meshing of the spirit and eroticism. Because a lot of that hyperromantic streak in women is also, basically, eroticism. Or rather, a sublimation of eroticism, the only one open to most women.

"But why can't the erotic urge be the higher yearning? In Eastern traditions it is. Tantra and courtly love are related, in that sense. In other words, eroticism is romantic love is spirituality. That's my view, too.

Asked if these also are the fundamental impulses that sit at the soul of her music Katell Keineg, replies, unhesitatingly: "Yes". So if the reductive perception of a romantic obsessive is not what she would want listeners to take from Jet, what image of this particular woman would Katell prefer it to project?

"Well, it is very much about the power of erotic yearning, at the level we've just talked about. It is a mighty force. And it's a mighty force that is more female than male, more particular to women than men," she says, conceding that such comments are sexist.

"Even so, overall, it seems to me that there are generations of men who don't even aspire to the fulfilment of union, in a real sense. They need immediacy. Certainly, in terms of love they can't wait for the feast, so they settle for McDonald's. But I find that the more I explore love the closer it comes, in its true form. And if people want to hear that philosophy it's there on the album. Jet definitely is a group of songs that very much sums up where I am right now. Not any one song, all the songs.