25 f A Voice In A Million
Olivia Chaney has one of the greatest voices in English folk music. Tim Chipping attempts to find out why she still hasn’t made an album after all these years. He may or may not get an answer, but enjoys the challenge… Photos by Judith Burrows.
I
first saw Olivia Chaney in the sum- mer of 2008. She was playing a sup- port slot at the newly opened Café Oto in Dalston – a single-level, blank canvas of a performance space, its
programming committed to the experi- mental, underground and odd. Pulling at a harmonium, eyes shut, was a woman who gave the impression of rarely being in the same country for long and whose hair looked like it could tell stories. But it was her voice that held court.
I don’t remember exactly what she sang. It would’ve been a mixture of fairly familiar traditional material, perhaps Died For Love or You Rambling Boys Of Pleasure, and her own songs, some of them romantic allegories while others were more like verbal sketchbooks – the observations of an emotional tourist. But all of it sounding how I wanted English folk music to sound at the time. Because of her voice.
Olivia Chaney sings in the same way trained dancers move when left to their own devices. She has in her voice a free- dom that knowing all the rules can bring. Defined, precise and beautiful but also bold, subtly ornamental and coloured by sad and serious thought.
Olivia is not always a folk singer. She may not be one at all. And we will talk about folk music at some point in this interview. But we need to talk about other things first. To start at the beginning. Where were you born?
“I was born in Florence, Italy. The heaviest on record in the hospital: 10lbs. All the nurses smoked and apparently were dropping ash on this fat baby they were calling ‘Vitellone’ – little cow. And I was late, of course. I’m late for everything.”
Olivia is frequently fascinating. A talk-
er. You could listen to her for days. She admits that she’s the type of person who’ll talk to anyone. When we meet she tells me how she’d just been attempting to explain Ivor Cutler’s poem Egg Meat to a local trader who’d sold her half a dozen eggs.
“I don’t think he knew what I was
talking about but he seemed so interested.” I know the feeling.
When Olivia was aged three, her father got a fellowship to Oxford and the family moved back to England. And there began a recognisably troubled childhood.
“I hated school. I felt like a misfit. I was bullied for being really good at
everything. I know that sounds like a very arrogant thing to say but it’s true. I played cello and piano and I sang – I prac- tically ran the music department when I was a kid at school. I don’t like to think I was precocious but I was really curious and hungry for information. So other kids hated me and would tease me for walk- ing home with a ‘beetle’ on my back – which was my cello. So I stopped practis- ing, started smoking and befriended the people who were bullying me. And then it all went horribly wrong, got quite dra- matic, and my parents were splitting at the same time. I had to get out of town. Psychologically. The Cowley Road in Oxford is not a big place.”
The details of what went wrong are
none of my business, but at the age of 14 Olivia won a scholarship to Chetham’s School Of Music in Manchester. It rescued her. “The fees are more than Eton. But it’s a means-tested scholarship. If you’re rich, your parents will pay but you still only get a place if you’re talented enough. So I was supposedly talented enough but my parents had no money so it was an amazing privilege.”
The prestigious co-ed school has been in the news recently for all the wrong rea- sons. You can Google it later. But back then it became a place where the misfitting Chaney could belong.
“The thing that I loved possibly the most, though not more than the rigour and incredible musical education, is there’s no outcast. It really is like everyone’s accepted. But I felt like an outsider artisti- cally. I’d been like a big fish in a small pond in Oxford, thinking I was really great at classical piano. And then you get to Chetham’s and there’s a seven-year-old practising the same piano concerto in the room next to you. In terms of precocious, forget me! It was just terrifying. As a kid it’s not very natural to be thinking about how driven you are. But it was like, ‘Oh shit, I thought I really loved music and was serious about it, but if I’m serious about it I’ve got to practice ten hours a day and be better than the person next to me.’”
“But the friendships I made are peo- ple who are still my best friends. When you’re in a place like that, under constant pressure, you either really support each other or you’re rivals. And I’ve never been into being rivals with people, and I strug- gle with that in the music world. I feel like there’s enough room for everyone to have their voice out there.”
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