Gwyneth Herbert

Biog

Gwyneth Herbert releases her new album, All The Ghosts, through Naim Edge on July 6th.
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Actresses have always grumbled that Hollywood doesn’t serve up enough female roles worth getting stuck into. They should try being a singer – they would find their options even more limited.

In a sense, there has probably never been a better time to be a girl singer – the charts are full of ’em – but these are within strictly defined market niches: the mid-’00s were all about the ‘retro chanteuses’; this year’s thing is ‘chicks with synthesizers’. Simply being yourself, it seems, isn’t good enough. In this fiercely strategized atmosphere, the sound of an honest, uncontaminated voice is worth more than gold.

Gwyneth Herbert is just such a priceless talent. At 27, she has already plunged into the world of record deals and promotional schemes a couple of times, and yet she resurfaces again only more pure, more committed in her belief in music’s power to communicate emotion and experience to a listener.

Gwyneth first broke onto the scene five years ago, when she was signed up by the Universal conglomerate as a jazz crossover artist. Finding that role too stifling, she soon struck out on her own, as a singer-songwriter, inspired as much by Janis Ian and Joni Mitchell, as by Billie Holiday or Nina Simone. In 2007 her Seb Rochford (Acoustic Ladyland/Polar Bear) produced album was picked up by Blue Note.

Her latest collection, ‘All The Ghosts’, continues further along her own idiosyncratic path. It carries ten terrific songs, which speak to you directly, without forethought for genre or category. In their melodic immediacy and observational characterization, you might hear the Lennon-McCartney of ‘Sgt Pepper’, or the Ray Davies of ‘Lola’, rather than any jazz stereotype.

The songs are populated by a living, breathing cast of beaten-down dreamers, jaded city-dwellers, and women in a quandary. There is a beautiful prostitute with a split lip, pining to be free to return to mother Russia. There is also a wicked, myth-enshrouded temptress, luring in young men with drink and drugs. And there is a Mini, the same age as the singer, as human and ‘real’ in its wheezing everyday tasks as any of the other folk. These, simply, are songs about people, about life, as the singer has precociously learnt to understand them at her tender age.

In the run-up to the release of ‘All The Ghosts’, Gwyneth has been performing across the UK, as well as incubating some intriguing side projects. She recently worked with the London Sinfonietta on a project called ‘The Art Of News’, alongside Simon Munnery, John Hegley and Nathan Penlington. She has also been commissioned to write a musical about Phyllis Pearson, the eccentric British artist who walked every street of London and invented the A-Z map.

Recorded at Real World Studios and mixed and mastered by Robert Harder. All The Ghosts features: pianist Steve Holness double bassist Sam Burgess, percussionist Dave Price and guitarist Al Cherry.

Live: Thursday 25th June, Café Oto, Dalston, LONDON

For more information contact Jim at Ampersand PR
020 7738 6402 jim@ampersandpr.com


www.gwynethherbert.com
www.myspace.com/gwynethherbert