Kathryn Williams
by Teddy Jamieson © The Herald
Here are six random reasons to like Kathryn Williams (you can cut them out and keep them if you like):
1. When she was a girl, aged about seven or eight, she used to keep Cat Stevens’s album Teaser And The Firecat beside her bed. “The back cover of that was just a really close picture of him,” she recalls, “with a really big beard and I used to kiss it every night before I went to bed. All my friends were into Duran Duran and I was kissing a beardy Cat Stevens.”
2. She speaks with the softest Scouse accent you’ve ever heard.
3. The fact that she loves the fact that she’s just spoken to Robyn Hitchcock about an upcoming gig they’re doing together, and all he talked about was eating a bagel and being watched by a pigeon.
4. When she worked in a cafe, she once left customers waiting for 15 minutes while she pretended to go to the toilet but in reality wrote down a song, Flicker, that had just come to her, on the toilet roll.
5. She goes on tour in late February, which means she will be climbing on to small stages like Glasgow’s King Tut’s while very heavily pregnant (her due date is April 2). “I’m going to be so massive,” she laughs. But then she has done it before, when she was expecting last time around, so she’s used to it. “I have to side-saddle with the guitar but, yeah, I’m just going to wear really tight tights and hope for the best.”
6. Her new album The Quickening is really rather lovely. It’s a soft-voiced, intimate collection of songs full of rain and road journeys and electricity pylons and love and loneliness. “Mellow” is the word she uses to describe it. “I wanted to say organic, but that sounds a bit poncey.”
Poncey Williams is not, neither musically nor in conversation. She doesn’t appear to have been blessed with any show-off genes. The best she can say for herself is she’s a lot less nervous on stage than she used to be. Today she’s been playing with her young son, run some errands with her husband Neil in Newcastle where she lives, and had that aforementioned conversation with Mr Hitchcock. Now she’s come upstairs to lie on her bed beside her 17-year-old rescue cat Jess and talk to me – about music and kissing Cat Stevens and her 11 years in the music business.
“My first record came out in 1999. The weird thing is it’s really odd how it’s changed through that time. I started off on my own label and at that time there was hardly anybody putting stuff out on their own label. And then the internet happened and now most people are putting stuff out on their own label. And now I’ve gone and signed to a label.”
The Quickening is coming to us via One Little Indian because, Williams says, she couldn’t afford to put it out herself and “give it the chance I think it deserves”. Of course she was once signed to Warners which was, she says, a very disorientating experience; she talks of “the strangeness of how out of place I was in between Peter Andre and The Darkness at a Christmas party.” For The Quickening, One Little Indian sealed the deal because founder Derek Birkett didn’t talk to her about business. He just played her some songs he liked.
Music has always been key for Williams ever since she was a girl growing up in Liverpool, falling in love with Cat Stevens and sometimes seeking solace in Janis Joplin. “I was bullied quite a bit as a kid and I remember listening to Cry Baby by Janis Joplin every morning to be brave enough to go to school.”
Williams spent a lot of her youth playing her parents’ record collection. “They had about 40 records beneath the stereo and these big, brown headphones, and I used to put them on.” Dad’s records included Paul Simon and Dylan. Mum was the Joplin fan, though she also liked Dr Hook.
As a teenager Williams’s taste developed along moodier lines. “My mum was seriously worried about me when I was into Leonard Cohen. I was into Cohen, Morrissey, the Velvet Underground and Joy Division, just mad on them. I remember her shouting about Morrissey, saying he was a terrible man to make a happy girl so miserable. I used to be a teenager going and listening to him in the nearby graveyard, and thought I was really deep.”
Cohen continued to get her into trouble at college where her sporty flatmate – “we weren’t a very good match” – once broke down the bathroom door “because she thought I was committing suicide listening to Leonard Cohen. I said ‘What the hell are you doing?’ She said, ‘I thought you were killing yourself.’ I was just having a bath.
“People have funny ideas. Can you imagine being depressed and listening to [S Club 7’s] Reach For The Stars or something? I think melancholic music is far more uplifting and humorous and soul-expanding than ...” She stutters to a stop, unable to think of anything melancholic music isn’t more uplifting and humorous and soul-expanding than.
Her first album, Dog Leap Stairs, cost £80 to make back in 1999. Her second, Black Little Numbers, gained her a Mercury Prize nomination in 2000. Between then and now there have been another six albums, including an album of cover versions (Cohen obviously, but also Kurt Cobain and Ivor Cutler among others) and an album with Neill MacColl, Ewan’s son.
The Quickening, produced by Williams herself and Kate St John, was recorded in four days with a “crack band” of musicians, although, as Williams says, it was a long time in the planning. “It was planned so that when it came to the studio, and we were all there and setting it up, I’d play a song and they’d hear it and people weren’t thinking too much. They were just reacting emotionally to it and off each other. They weren’t trying to play a demo they’d heard before. It had to be that quick. A bit like Quentin Blake draws really quickly. He says that his pictures are always better when he draws quickly.”
As in recording, so in the writing. “Usually, annoyingly, the best songs are the ones that come all in one go. It’s almost like someone’s switched the radio on in my head and I’m scrabbling round for a dictaphone or a piece of paper trying to get all the parts down. Those are nearly always the best, but you never feel like you own them. It’s like someone’s beamed something into your head.”
In her case it’s usually something good...
Here’s three more random reasons to love Kathryn Williams:
1. “Up north where I live,” she sings on the last track on the album “the skies are bigger”. She thinks geography has an influence on the music she makes. And the amount of it. “It’s colder up here so I’m going to spend more time writing songs inside.”
2. She is writing an album of songs for children with a friend who used to be in a band called Delicate Vomit. There’s one song about disco teeth, there’s a “Velvet Undergroundy song called How Hot Is A Toad” and another about robots in the rain – an image so poignant I’m tearing up even as I type it.
3. Kathryn Williams sings sad songs that will make you happy. What could be more uplifting and humorous and soul-expanding than that?