REN HARVIEU | INTERVIEW AND ALBUM REVIEW

 

When Lauren Maria ‘Ren’ Harvieu was discovered on MySpace and signed to Island Records at 18, her star seemed to be on an upward trajectory. A BBC Sound nominee in 2012, her debut album Through The Night was released that year, its highlight being the title track, a lush, evocative song with entrancing, honeyed vocals. A life-threatening and life-altering accident led the singer to largely disappear from the public eye, but almost eight years later, Harvieu’s second album Revel In The Drama has just come out to rave reviews – scroll to the end of the interview for another. Speaking to Buzz, it sounds like she’s in it for the long haul this time.

 

Great to see you back with a new album. You had come out of nowhere –

And then I went back again! [laughing]

 

What happened?

It was a combination of things. The album was finished, but then I had quite a serious accident just before it came out. Promoting the record was quite a good distraction for me, but once that was over, I realised I was quite sick. It took me a long time to get in an OK place to start thinking about music again. I was signed so young. The manager I had at the time was quite controlling. I had no experience to know anything could be different. There was a lot of unpicking to do.

Once I’d come back down to earth from the record coming out – because it surprised me that it did OK – I wasn’t expecting anything. There was Jools Holland [Later TV appearance] and certain things happening, but it disappeared as quickly as it shot up. I just needed some time. I was signed at 18, and that’s very young to be signed to a major label and make an album. I had to take a few years to figure out where my head was.

 

Do you mind if we talk about your accident?

I suffered a broken back. It was a freak accident – somebody fell on top of me, ran into me. It was dark and it was outside. It was all quite surreal, and a bit life-or-death; the album was done, but by the time I got out of hospital and was to be promoting this album, my whole world changed so quickly.

I felt – in a sense – a lot of what I was doing was a bit trivial. I was in a strange place – angry, and pretty broken-hearted because there was a lot wrong with me I didn’t let anybody know about. Also, I didn’t realise at that time I wasn’t going to make a full recovery. I’m glad I didn’t know then because I was only 20. I was dealing with real shit, and then having to put on this façade of trying to make something appealing and polished outwardly to people because that’s what I felt like I should do was difficult.

On the inside, there was so much going on, but on the outside I was a nice, 20-year-old girl from northern England who has this big voice. Isn’t that wonderful? And on the inside there was an entirely different world that I didn’t feel people wanted to know about.

 

Not just the accident, but other things?

Yeah, my life, I’m from Salford. I didn’t have an easy life; I’ve been through a lot. When I was a teenager, I felt very streetwise [laughing] even though I wasn’t. You’re a different kind of kid when you’ve been brought up quite poor. You’re sharper in certain aspects – not all – but so I knew how it would work to be packaged. That was a part of me, but there was a whole other part of me. I guess if I was to say I was shy, maybe that was easier to deal with than “I know exactly what’s going on.”

 

The streetwise act wasn’t a façade, but at the same time you were shy. Nobody is one-dimensional…

I was well in on it. I was like, “OK, the retro thing’s been kicking, and I’ve got a big voice, so you want me to go down that route?” And, “OK, I understand if we do this in this way, that would work.” Sometimes the idea of somebody being like, ‘Oh, OK, is this cool?’ [astonished voice] I happened to wander into this vocal booth to do this take.’ That’s the thing that you learn when you’re young. You don’t realise you know so much. Maybe it’s a female thing as well.

Instinctively, I knew what I was doing a lot more than I realised. When I listen to Through The Night now, I feel so proud of that person. At the time I didn’t think I’d done anything that special. One of the songs from it, Walking In The Rain, came on the other day, and I was sat there and thought, “Fuck, this is an amazing song!” I was smiling listening to it. This girl from Salford who’d get on the train trying to get the £60 together to make this train to make these writing sessions. Then this sound happened.

 

(I mentioned to Harvieu that I’d had spinal surgery for a degenerative condition that could eventually paralyse me, and that in informing me of the risks, the neurosurgeon had to list the possibility of my vocal cords being cut if a mistake was made. I asked if her surgeon told her the same.)

Yeah, there was a talk about that – that my vocal cords could be damaged.

 

It’s scary, isn’t it?

Yeah, it’s really scary. I was telling the nurse apparently, “I don’t know if I can sing. I don’t know if I can sing.” She put me in a wheelchair and said, “Let’s take you to an empty room in the ward and you can see if you can sing”. I remember her shutting the door, and the only thing in the room was a model skeleton. That was my audience! As soon as I sang, even though I was frail, and I was in a wheelchair, it was just there, strong. It was like nothing had changed even though I was really ill. It was booming.

 

In an interview, you mentioned a favourite song of yours, Sandy Denny’s Who Knows Where The Time Goes?, and that life is precious. Time could be short, make the most of it.

I guess from the trauma you can take that because that is a great gift to know that. To know how precious life is – and how privileged you are to be here. I was sharing a ward with other girls around my age, and they weren’t ever going to walk again, and I was showing signs of being able to walk again after a couple of weeks. That was really weird for me to get my head around – why can I walk and these girls can’t?

The surgeon said it was the worst back break he’d seen in 20 years – my spine was curved around in my back. There’s no way that I should be able to walk. This was also something that weighed heavy on me afterwards – I was asking a lot of questions to myself, and was really depressed. I thought, “You shouldn’t be able to walk. You need to pull it together.”

So yeah, it is, and it helps a lot now. The other day, I was doing the Quay Sessions in Scotland, live filming in front of a live audience. I was getting nervous, and I have this thing where I smile to myself and I just go, “You know how fucking tough life can really be. This is a game, and it’s fun. There is nothing bad that can happen. You’ve been in a situation where you might die. This is a situation where you might look shit on camera. It’s alright.” It’s not like the nerves disappear completely, but it does help.

 

Parts of the new album – which is wonderful – touches on the dark side – Spirit Me Away and This Is Our Love, which I thought is very haunting. Does it go into those depressing times after the accident?

Thank you. Oh totally. [sighing] I fell into a very deep depression after the first album. It was a scary time for me. I was living in Salford, had no idea if I was going make music again, was trying to get to the end of the street and getting really tired, and I was like 22. I was terrified. The label had dropped me. I had no money. It was a very, very bleak time that I didn’t think I would ever get out of – I didn’t envision making another album.

It was such a traumatic time that I could only write about it years later. These songs are written around 25, 26, 27. It took me getting out of a black hole to see it, so yeah, Spirit Me Away is a song about depression and the black dog don’t follow me home. It’s also about being from Salford; feeling like “Who are you to think you can do something with your life?” and wrestling with that. But there’s hope. It’s always been important to me that there’s hope in all the songs because I have got songs that are depressing from start to finish, but why would I do that to the listener? I don’t want to make things worse. I’m thinking all the time about who’s listening to it.

In Spirit Me Away, it was important to me to have the section of the song where it says, “I’m a big star, I’m a huge star”. If I want to acknowledge that and say that in the song, that it would just be a sad song, but I had to find the defiant spirit. With This Is Our Love, I was going through a breakup – the loneliness that you can feel when you lay next to somebody. It’s almost worse because at least if you’re alone, you can understand it, but if you’re sharing space with someone and you’re crushingly lonely, that doesn’t make sense. So that was the situation I was in. I wanted to write about it.

The song is about me basically saying to somebody, “Do you still love me?” We used to have this thing – “Will you still dance on my grave if I go before you? Do we still have this thing that’s ours, or is it gone?” So yeah, it did end up going down the tubes but for the better – I’m much happier now.

 

Regarding songs such as Yes Please, I’ve read that you were inspired by director David Lynch. Was that from the film Blue Velvet?

It was, certainly the video shot by David Lynch and Lynn Shaw. I wanted to do a sexy tune that was a little bit spooky somehow and strong. That song is about a woman being in control. You don’t hear that as much when it has to do with sex and stuff like that. There was a trend at the time, but I was hearing a lot of “I’ll please you” kinda vibes, and it used to bug me. Fuck men. You want to appease blokes? Really? Have you seen them? You can dance for me. That was in my mind when I was writing that sexy slow jam. [laughing]

 

Do you play other instruments besides the guitar?

Just guitar, although I pick things up and get sounds out of them, like on the organ. I can get a tune. It might be the xylophone. I’ll sit with it on my lap and something might come along, or I sing a lot of melodies and find where it is on the instrument. I do a lot of jams – I’m doing it tonight at my friend’s. We meet in his basement, and we make music up all night long. It’s honestly probably the most joy I’ve ever had in my life.

The third album is going to come quickly – not another seven or eight years, I hope, if Bella Union keep me on. I’ve got another album pretty much ready to go.

 

Did you play anything on the album?

On this one I just did the singing and arrangements. I’ve got Romeo Stodart [singer, songwriter and guitarist of The Magic Numbers] – we share the lyric and music duties.

 

On Revel In The Drama you can definitely hear there’s much experimentation.

There was no rush, no deadline and no label. So we had time to play, but we wanted to keep a delicate balance. You don’t want too much time, and then put too many things on it, but in this instance, that really worked to hone the sound. It wasn’t until the record was completely done that Bella Union got involved – there was nobody apart from Romeo and Dave [Izumi Lynch, co-producer] and I making this record. There’s no management at that point.

 

The album is very diverse. When I heard Cruel Disguise, I immediately thought of the Cramps.

That’s cool! It’s about female rage. I don’t think there’s a rage quite like female rage. I was sick of feeling like I had to apologise for being a female and having to apologise for having opinions. When I wrote that song, I was at the end of my tether. I was pretty much sick of everyone – and myself. Sometimes when you’re enraged, it’s quite an addictive feeling because you feel so alive within that. I wanted to use that anger, so I put it in a rock song.

I was saying, “There’s no need for this and there’s no need for that. There’s no reason for this and there’s no reason for that. Fuck it.” Obviously, I don’t think like that but using that drama for the tune… that feeling when you’re so angry you don’t see the point in anything and it’s about the power that comes with female rage. Women are powerful, but that anger – it’s not something that’s accepted like anger in men.

 

Everyone says you’re a bitch.

Yeah, you’re a bitch. You’re bossy. I wanted to find a place for the rage at that point. Cruel Disguise came out, and I was so happy. That was, I think, the first song that Romeo and I wrote together – we had a strong connection. I felt like I could be that intense with him.

 

I understand that initially, you didn’t want to be a singer. You had tried out for your school’s musical theatre, and the director didn’t like you. That can really knock your confidence when you’re that young.

Yeah, it massively knocked my confidence. It seemed like they had a personal vendetta against me, I don’t know why. I didn’t even get into the college choir in Salford. I was singled out quite a lot. When the debut album came out, someone messaged me and said, “They’ve got a picture of you in the drama department – ‘Big success from Pendleton College!’” I was like, “You’ve got to be joking me!” They were awful.

When I went back, I said to my tutor, “Sorry I’ve not been back, but I’ve been signed to Universal.” He went, “Ah, OK, well don’t come running back to me in six months when you’ve been dropped.”

 

I think he’s a woman-hater.

It was run by men, and it did feel like that quite strongly.

 

Or he didn’t achieve success, and you did. Sounds as if he’s jealous and very vindictive.

You could feel that. I had my own little sound going on and I think they found that irritating. “How dare you have a sound? This is musical theatre where you stay in line like a soldier. We must get it out of her. We must beat it out of her somehow.” But they didn’t!

 

You sang a favourite Bond theme of mine, You Only Live Twice, as well as Nobody Does It Better with the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra. You should do a new song for the franchise one day.

I’d love that!

 

You have a stunning alto, but you can go higher.

I had no idea I could sing high until I was about 20. When you sing lower, if you’re a little shy, it’s not a big deal, is it? These huge, high notes, you can’t do that quietly, so it was a bit of a shock to me.

 

I’ve read that you may want to do opera.

That’s something that interests me for sure. Hey, maybe that’s the third album!

 

Ren Harvieu’s new album Revel In The Drama is out now. She plays Clwb Ifor Bach, Cardiff on Tue 24 Nov (rescheduled from Tue 28 Apr). Info and tickets here.

words RHONDA LEE REALI

 

REN HARVIEU ****

Revel In The Drama (Bella Union)

Ren Harvieu started off promising, but even before her debut album was released in 2012, she suffered a major injury. Later, more setbacks occurred with no more solo releases. Resurfacing, her second album is worth the wait. It’s her emancipation declaration: from using other’s songs, taking orders and insecurity. She embraces her body and sexual self (Yes Please and My Body She Is Alive) and sod off to those who can’t handle it. Her talent as a songwriter and arranger is abundantly clear, likewise that of co-partner Romeo Stodart of the Magic Numbers.

Her exquisite voice goes from smouldering alto to soft country twang to semi-operatic soprano; just when you think she’s a delicate hothouse flower, Harvieu knocks you for a loop, soaring and belting. Though she’s been compared to Lana Del Rey for one, her voice is all her own, no cookie-cutter singer she. Revel In The Drama is, in turns, jazzy, soulful and bluesy, with smatterings of psychedelia and pop. Lush, plush and orchestral, it’s filled with sweeping strings and dramatic keyboards. Superb acoustic/steel guitar playing and in the wee small hours of the morning drumming weave throughout, also.

The chanteuse revels in retro and noir glamour, visually and vocally, exhibiting a throwback sensuality: more Bacall sparring with Bogart in The Big Sleep’s double-entendre horseracing scene than overtly in-your-face. There’s vulnerability, too. Each composition is its own soul-baring, short film, from the rage-fuelled, Cramps-like horror of Cruel Disguise to Spirit Me Away (depression, yet hope) to haunting breakup song This Is Our Love. Look out world, Ms. Harvieu is back in town. RHONDA LEE REALI