Nancy Elizabeth
Abi Bliss meets the pitch-perfect post-folk Lancastrian
“So long as I can remember I’ve always had tunes going round in my head. And then when I got older, it made sense to make sense of those noises, to put them out in some kind of form, because I always used to just hum constantly and not remember anything or record it.”
A familiar story for most, if not all musicians, perhaps. But for the young Nancy Elizabeth Cunliffe, there was one major obstacle: “I was convinced that I couldn’t sing,” she reveals, as FolkingCool tries to stifle snorts of incredulity at the other end of the phone line. “I knew I could sing in tune, but I felt that the sound I made was horrible. But I’d written these songs so I was in a real dilemma. I used to sing really quietly, to try and get the song across but so hopefully no-one would hear my voice. That went on for many years.”
“Now I still don’t sing that loudly,” she adds, “but I’m very confident in my voice; I know what it does and what I can do with it.” And happily more and more of us do too, now, with Cunliffe currently touring in support of Danish post-rockers Efterklang (her buddies on the ever-impeccable Leaf label), a headline show at London’s Borderline scheduled for November, and the recent release of her second full-length album, Wrought Iron.
Following on from her 2006 debut EP, The Wheell Turning King, and 2007’s Battle and Victory LP – for which she dropped the surname – Wrought Iron finds Nancy Elizabeth a more assured-sounding and distinctive voice than ever. If the bracing cascades of crystalline harp on Battle and Victory drew a few backhanded compliments of the “Wigan’s answer to Joanna Newsom” type, then this album reveals the much darker, starker side that was hinted at in its predecessor’s quieter moments.
Although too uneasy with the precise definition of “folk” to place herself squarely within its bounds – “I take it to either mean the old stories that were sang and passed down through generation after generation [or] another meaning, that folk is just music that people make without money, and without a big record deal” – the 25-year-old singer confesses to a teenage fascination with Pentangle, “Which is strange because it wasn’t fashionable at all. I had to keep it quiet from all my friends,” before adding that she was equally into Radiohead and Aphex Twin.
From the sparse upland atmospheres of its opening track Cairns, featuring just piano and the merest breeze of voice, Wrought Iron draws you close to whisper its secrets in your ear, its stark, raw passions and quiet endurance anchored by Cunliffe’s unaffected but versatile voice.
Admitting that she’s “quite sociable. I’m always chatting, and when there’s lots of noise going on around me I find it hard to write”, in order to compose the songs on Wrought Iron, Cunliffe hid herself away in some of Europe’s most peaceful spots: the Faroe Islands, the Lake District, and a small village in Spain where she was the only English speaker.
“It’s quite an introverted record because I was on my own. I wasn’t speaking to anyone much, so I went a bit mad,” she jokes, before going on to explain that the album’s shift to having piano as the dominant instrument was mainly because, “I didn’t take my harp to Spain. I forgot it!”
“When I’m in Manchester, I don’t have a piano but I can often go into churches and make friends with the vicar and go and use the ones there, because vicars tend to be quite friendly, so that’s how I play piano here,” she says.
“I thought it would be the same in Spain, but of course, it’s not. I was disappointed, but then I got drunk one night with the man who had the key to this old music school. I tried to speak to him in my broken Spanish and I asked him if there was a piano in there. He said there was, but that it was out of bounds, that the place was being demolished next week. I was like, ‘Oh god, this is awful; there’s a piano there and it’s ready to be played but I can’t go in.’ But the drunker we got, the more I appeased him and he ended up giving me the keys and telling me not to tell anybody.”
Fortunately, the Spanish stereotype of mañana held true in the case of the demolition date, which finally arrived not a week, but a month later. “I used to sneak in and I was dead paranoid that everyone in the village would know. Maybe that’s why it’s so quiet, as I was scared that people would hear me!”
When the time came to record the songs, Cunliffe kept the stark piano bones at the centre of many of the songs, with just touches of understated accompaniment: nimble, urgent drums that sweep through the centre of Bring On The Hurricane; icicle-sharp vibraphone chimes on Feet Of Courage and stoic, unsentimental brass swells on Divining.
“I’m quite keen on arrangements and I like making the decision to leave things out rather than put things in. I came at it like that: ‘What does this narrative need? What is the song about?’ And I naturally built it from there,” she says.
Playing most of the parts herself allowed her to keep control of the album’s spare, still presence: “I tend to be quite respectful of people so if I ask someone to play with me, it’s because I like what they do. So I’m not going to then try and make them do what I think they should do, because I might as well get a robot or do it myself,” she says. “But I did most of this album myself, because it’s easier and I understand what I need, and other people don’t.”
With the songs revealing a range of emotions from steadfastness (Feet of Courage) to the unabashed, greedy lust of The Act – “Then we followed desire and kicked her towards death / As our bodies engaged in unhindered redress” – is she ever fearful of exposing herself in such an apparently personal way? “I do worry sometimes, but at the same time I have to really trust that I’ve got nothing to be ashamed of. I think it’s good to be really honest, but if you were honest with people just over a cup of tea, it would probably ruin all your friendships. But you can be like that in songs, and people pick up on it and I think they like it.”
She adds, “I love storytelling as well, though, but I think it’s a blurry line between the two. You couldn’t say either it’s personal or not because you bring your personal opinions and experiences to everything.”
Still, there must be that slightly uncomfortable feeling when playing to a hometown crowd, that somebody might recognise themselves in a song… “If someone wrote a song about me and I was thinking, ‘Is that about me?’ I’d never have the guts to say it. So some people might have an inkling, but they’d never say it to me, and I think if they did I‘d probably die,” she laughs. “I’d hide forever!”
Abi Bliss
