Emmy The Great shows her dark side
A YOUNG singer-songwriter who is set to release her first album is heading for a Tyneside date.
Emmy The Great's debut record, First Love, comes out on the Close Harbour label on February 9.
But don't let the title fool you into thinking it is full of slushy songs about the first flushes of love and romance; far from it.
Although beguiling, it is full of savage observations and stark admissions, cloaked in arrangements of disarming simplicity.
"I like to romanticise the English countryside," says Emmy – London-based Emma-Lee Moss. "But I also notice that everything in nature is always having sex and dropping dead."
The apparent prettiness of Emmy's songs is undercut by some brutally candid lyrics that could float by unnoticed on first listen.
"Our guitarist Euan says our songs are passive aggressive – people think we're harmless unless they're really listening," she says.
Emmy The Great has been reducing rowdy crowds to an awed silence for some time, releasing her debut single in April 2006.
She grew up as the only Western kid in a Chinese school in Hong Kong, and her early music influences included Weezer, Smashing Pumpkins and The Lemonheads.
This led to an outsider's resilience that helped see off the overtures of label bosses and managers who proposed collaborations with hit-factory songwriters, and appealed to her to 'put a few more choruses in'.
"I ended up really depressed and confused, and almost tried to quit," she says. "Then I remembered that a lot of my favourite artists had had to strike out on their own."
Her album arrives self-funded, self-produced and self-released, and it is Emmy's answer to the pigeon-holers who would have changed her.
Initially, she started out playing solo acoustic shows, but since the release of the single Gabriel in November 2007, Emmy The Great has developed from a solo venture to a band formed around a core of Emmy, guitarist Euan Hinshelwood, and pianist Tom Rogerson.
"Emmy The Great is now a project that we all contribute to," she says. "The three of us come together as equals."
Filled with this fresh confidence, Emmy decided she had to make an album immediately, "otherwise I was going to explode and kill everyone".
Her current single We Almost Had A Baby has been playlisted at 6Music, and she promises to be one of those artists who creep into the consciousness.
Emmy The Great is at The Cluny in Newcastle on Tuesday, February 17. Tickets, priced 7.50, are available from 230 4474.
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