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ravens divvy up a dead body between them. “Owls, they’re quite dark as well,” she continues, “but it depends on where you are. Outside British folklore they can represent fertility, and wisdom is an obvious meaning, but I was interested in how barn owls repre- sented ruin. If you saw a barn owl, ruin was going to come to you.” She explores that on Hawk To The Hunting Gone with the quiet desperation of her original, Oh Ruin.
And then there are doves. A duet with Alasdair Roberts, Doves takes the traditional song Turtle Dove and combines it with Prince’s 1984 hit, When Doves Cry. Looped sounds and murmured words provide its baseline; those words are those alternate region- al bird names. “You can’t necessarily hear what I’m singing,” she says, “but I take the sound of the word. I’m using it as inspiration, as another level of the lore.” Then there are the very different but oddly complementary lyrics of the two songs, expressed well via the contrast of Kerry and Alasdair’s vocals. “I thought, it needs a different voice on here. So I got in touch with Alasdair, who I know a teeny bit, and bless him, he did it.”
Doves, Kerry explains, was led by her producer, MaJiKer, who had previously worked with French avant-pop artist Camille. That singer’s 2005 album, Le Fil, was piled high with layered vocals, yelps and phlegm-shifting throat sounds as often as words. “I heard that [Le Fil], doing those wonderful things with vocals, and I managed to get in touch with him. We did a show, and then I asked him to produce this album. He comes very much from a pop background, an electro-pop background. So maybe that’s part of a reason why the album sounds particularly poppy. I’ve never worked in pop music on its own, never as a performer, but I’ve been immersed in that world. I do teach songwriting at the Uni- versity of Kent. I also used to teach at the Brit School.”
I
Crikey. The Brit School, a space to nurture young British musi- cal talent or an unbearable production-line hothouse (depending on your point of view); its importance in the current British musical landscape is undeniable. Gossip please. “It was my first job,” she says. Anyone famous? “I will not make any claims of actually teaching them anything,” she says, “but Adele was there. Katie Melua was there. Leona Lewis was one of my first. I accompanied her on piano, she was aged about fourteen. She was singing Han- del arias! She was really, really good.”
f she doesn’t identify with a pop background, she’s even more alert to her lack of folk chops. “I don’t come from a folk singing family,” she says. “I am conscious that I’m from a very different background. I came to it from just being a musician who loves to sing. But I started to listen to Eliza Carthy when I was at university. I came across her 1998 double album, Red Rice. I really liked how she had one album of purely traditional renditions, and one album when she was trying to do something different, almost an electronica fusion. And she looked really funky,” she says. “I can still picture that album. Her red hair. That was my starting point for folk. And then, over the years, I’ve listened to more. What I’ve found is I just really enjoy singing folk songs. I like the strange sound, it appealed to me, and I seemed to have that type of voice. It starts from the story and the melody before anything else. I look at the song and just see what comes out of it. I’m never trying to impose things. Actu- ally, I don’t think of compartmentalised genres at all. They all bleed into each other.”
That’s also true of different forms of artistic expression. “I’m a bit bad at having lots of things going on at the same time,” she says, with understatement. As well as her numerous solo and group projects, she teaches music and also leads community vocal work. She writes poetry, helms an internet radio show, casually drops in that she’s halfway through a novel, and also keeps a foot- ball blog, the wonderfully-named Fever Bitch. “I haven’t written it for ages,” she says. “I’ve actually really gone off football. I still keep an eye on Wycombe [Wanderers, her home team]. They’re doing quite badly.”
In the same way that we give different birds personalities and identities, we also impose meaning upon the wolf. Wolves are associated with transformation, which seems fitting for Kerry as she runs between her different groups, projects, and personas. Is the wolf meant to represent that? “Well, I decided I would have some sort of band name,” she says. “I love animals, and I love ani- mals that have these folkloric personalities, but actually, this is a really stupid answer. My husband’s surname is Furlow. And I mixed up the letters.” She got U R WOLF. “It’s sweet, but it’s a bit cheesy. And it is a confusing name. Saying ‘I am You Are Wolf’ sounds a bit strange. I like that.”
www.youarewolf.com F
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