The album "A Hand Full of Hurricanes" is out now!
January 2006: Rose and producer Charlie Francis are holed up in his attic mixing studio listening, and listening again to the rough mixes that will become her debut album for One Little Indian Records. Daring and eclectic, combining stunning multi-hook harmonies, explosive instrumental fills, delicate frippatronics, circus beats, and glorious a cappellas, the as yet untitled opus already sounds, in this unmixed and unmastered state, like it’s going to be an instant cult classic.
July 2006: Rose stamps on her RAT pedal, looks up to acknowledge the cheers and breaks into a huge grin. It’s not just the cheers making her smile, nor is it the brilliant, instinctive musical and personal rapport she’s struck up with drummer Annette Becker, guitarist Anton Maiof and bassist Joe Garcia. It’s not even the fact that the advance copies of her album, now called A Hand Full of Hurricanes and set for a release in January 2007, arrived this week and look and sound just as brilliant as she’d hoped. No, what’s really making Rose smile is that every time she looks up on the stage at Biarritz she sees the Atlantic Ocean stretching out before her, surfers pausing on their waves to listen. Debut gigs with your new band don’t come much better.
Despite being only 21, these are but the latest steps Rose has taken in what has already been a long musical career. As the daughter of Steeleye Span’s Maddy Prior and Rick Kemp, Rose could have had it easy, could of traded on their reputation and fitted comfortably into the folk world. Indeed it wasn’t as if Rose had much choice! Blessed with an amazing voice Rose was, rather inevitably, ushered in the studio and onto the road while still a young teenager. An album of a cappella songs, the critically acclaimed Bib and Tuck, released by the trio Maddy Prior and The Girls, featured two of Rose’s self-penned songs and the 15 year old leading on several more. A year later and Park Records had signed up the teenage singer for her first solo album. Glance was released in 2003 but despite the quality of the songs and Rose’s own stunning vocal performances, something about the album didn’t quite ring true to her. She was only just beginning to learn the guitar, so most of the instrumentation on the album had been beyond her control, and the result felt just a little more pop and a little more safe than what she’d heard in her head. Something had to change, and the indignity of having her album reviewed in the same article as her mother’s album proved to be the last straw. Rose realised that if she wanted to find her own sound she’d need to leave the folk world behind. She would have had it so much easier if she’d stuck to the folk route, but where musical direction is concerned Rose is totally uncompromising: she would be herself or nothing at all.
Since then Rose’s musical journey has taken her from Oxford, to London, to Bristol and on tours from Cornwall to Glasgow, Brighton to Swansea. It began in Oxford when Rose, inspired by a musical diet of Oceansize, Tom Waits, Elbow, Beck, Glassjaw, The Mars Volta, 90 Day Men and Eels, found a band. Rose was swinging a pink, sparkly telecaster, looking to move away from the acoustic scene and searching for collaborators to help her get louder. Mike and Will, from The Fourers, fitted the bill nicely, and took sick leave to help her throw down the classic self-released mini-album that has been praised to the heavens ever since. Swiping a drummer, Pete, and moving to London, Rose and her new electric outfit set about building a following in Brighton, Bristol and London, and laying down demos further exploring Rose’s new sound.
However, it was in Bristol that Rose really found an audience, and the encouragement to play solo and sing a cappella once more. The city couldn’t get enough – she was name dropped as one of the Bristol’s best musical acts in the local weekly music magazine after she had only played three gigs there! A chance collaboration with local wrong-hop legend SJ Esau and multi-instrumentalist Max Milton led to a totally new musical direction for Rose, a direction so new in fact it required its own name, leading to the formation of the avant garde, experimental, genre-mashing trio Jeremy Smoking Jacket. In the face of such a warm welcome from the West County’s musical underground, it seemed a natural step to stop slumming on hers sister’s sofa, get out of the crushing bustle of London and head west.
Arriving in January 2005, the 20 year old Rose was soon inundated with gigs. She became so busy that the demands of her gig calendar became simply too much for her London based band, so they amicably agreed to part company at the end of Rose’s March tour. Finding them at first to be irreplaceable, Rose didn’t replace them. Instead Rose held her own as a solo act alongside some of the loudest and most energetic bands around, touring the UK, and even Italy, repeated and to huge acclaim. Confident, inventive, dynamic and expressive, her live solo sets mix heart-breaking songs with rock-out progressive movements, complex, looped harmonic hooks with bruising riffs. Now with her new band, themselves musicians and songwriters from bands well established in the Bristol scene that has adopted Rose as one of their own, the live sets have grown to be affirmations of Rose’s devastating talent.
