I was born in Luton the year John Lennon was assassinated. I imagine my dad was shocked, but I’ve never asked him. I remember him singing me to sleep when I was about the size of a breadbin. And my mum’s hair down to her bottom. Some of the neighbours called them gypsies, but they were just hippies. 
I’m an only child and spent a lot of time drawing naked people with side partings, making lions using cotton wool and PVA glue and panicking about war. I liked the clicking sound of my abacus and learnt early lessons from a set of children’s biography books: Helen Keller, Alexander Graham Bell, and Louis Pasteur.
At primary school I was precocious but weird. To humour me, teachers let me tap dance in assemblies with umbrellas; dress up as a rabbit; perform plays with friends. I believe my lack of self-awareness came from having a very free childhood. By the time I was a teenager, life was all about self-awareness: Charlie Red perfume, Rimmel lipstick and B&H cigarettes.
When I was growing up I loved to sing, but battled with the knowledge I wasn’t very good at it. My voice was thin, tight and wavered. Part of the problem was that nobody had told me it was okay to access the ‘head voice’. When I tried it I was alienated by how grown-up it sounded – like I was being a pervert, or doing something unnatural. Still, we sang to each other, us girls in bomber jackets: Whitney Houston, Chicago, Extreme, The Bangles, Mariah Carey. Gemma Stevenson and Eleanor Whitcombe were the best at it. We were more into disco dancing, back then. We made up routines we could drop into at our little raves: Rachel and I loved to do that, in our knee-high boots. Indie music didn’t get through to our group, and perhaps our proximity to Luton meant music education was largely: Dreamscape, jungle, Bob Marley and Cypress Hill.
I’m glad I came from that background though, because I tasted a lot more than suburban lower-middleclass life. I wasn’t an arty misfit, or bookish or studious. I hung around the Arndale centre with my friends making a nuisance of myself in ways that I won’t write here since I do stuff in education now. I remember a nail-biting drive to get my GCSE results, realising the bunking off might have huge repercussions. The regret was sickening.
My dad had been in music for most of his life before I was born. He left Wales for London in his mid-teens. I’ve never really got to the bottom of why he quit music the first time round – but I think there was a lot of despondency in the industry at the latter part of the seventies. I loved his tales of hanging around Rockfield Studio, managing bands and driving around Monmouthshire in clapped-out vans; and then setting up office on Denmark Street. London back then must have been glorious: hedonistic and blooming with colour – Carnaby Street, Portobello Road. I suppose the atmosphere changed in the seventies: The Notting Hill race riot; the punk explosion and emergence of DIY labels; inflation and a bleak economy.
For whatever reason, my dad got a job in a car factory and my mum made things, and music was something we associated with a much-mourned and vibrant past. My poor dad – he really doesn’t know what the 80s sounded like!
This oddness about music is something I’ve inherited, and my friends often hear me say: I hate music. I don’t really – it’s just it’s so powerful. It anchors us to people and places and feelings.
Having experienced music without being fanatical, when I came to want to write my own songs, I had no idea what good music sounded like, so found myself being inadvertently lawless. Mercury Rev, The Velvet Underground, Sonic Youth and Frank Zappa were an absolute revelation to me. Like many of my peers, I remember where I was the first time I heard The Soft Bulletin by the Flaming Lips.
When I signed to Twisted Nerve as Luma Lane, I still didn’t know any Kate Bush. That label was in a state of flux at that point – Alfie had not long gone, the friendly Dave Tyack had disappeared in Corsica, Badly Drawn Boy had just gone utterly International with the About a Boy soundtrack, and everyone was rather caught up in a new artist called Aidan Smith. It was a premature move, signing with them, because I’d only given them a couple of demos that I’d painstakingly packaged up with shells and candy like a naive 22 year-old girl might. When Nicegirls came out, nobody phoned me to say the release had been put back, or explain why. In fact, nobody phoned me at all after that. It was my first experience of proper heartbreak. It made me zip up my mouth for a good while.
The Twisted Nerve Office, back in 2002, was in the Northern Quarter, which is like a mini-New York – grubby red-brick buildings with soulful windows, many of which seemed to be boarded up. The office smelt like Indian food because of the takeaway in the basement – and looked like a Victorian hospital ward. Manchester, with its sooty walls, huge pubs and Industrial sprawl got under my skin. I moved there well after my relationship with the label broke down, and first did an MA in Novel Writing, and then became a journalist. I saw and heard a lot of the city through stories, exploration and house parties, and it definitely exists in a lot of my songs.
This has been a very long first installation. I have to stop now because the friends I live with want us to watch an episode of The Wire.
(^-^)
I’m back: whisky in hand, listening to Edith Piaf. I bought some flowers today – a bunch for my room, and a bunch for my friend. I lived with a girl once who had a little square box of tissues and a vase of flowers in her bedroom, and thought, one day, when I have a box of tissues and a bunch of flowers in my room I will be in control of my life too.
Earlier, I went to a training day with a colleague. The van wouldn’t start so we took my dishevelled car. I picked him up at the time of morning that is still blue, and you can see mums in kitchens, framed by yellow light, pouring cereal out of plastic Tupperware containers. The training involved flipcharts, marker pens and a buffet lunch, and on the way back I felt a bit delirious and we talked about his kids and whether there is anything to be done about love.
I should speak about Norwich music and its influence on me. Kaito, Magoo, Bearsuit, Shane Olinski, Charlotte Morris, Master Solo, Le Tetsuo, Tell Me How, Transept, Horses Brawl, Hoofus, Christa Harris, The Checkout Girls, Matt Riviere, Alto 45, The Neutrinos, The Cruiser Chimps, BK & Dad, Teknikov – it’s all mattered and made a difference. I have been listening. There are new kids around here now, and that’s good too, but I’m listening less because it will never be as fun as being twenty-one, at Mojo’s, with pint and cigarette in hand, dancing to Pizzicato Five’s ‘Twiggy Twiggy’ with Charlene.