Interview with Smoke Fairies
Two adventurous spirits intertwined, aged just 11, and they’ve whipped around each others paths, and chosen some interesting voyages that have got them to where they are now, seemingly starting to get the recognition they deserve. Childhood friends, Katherine Blamire and Jessica Davies called Chichester their birthplace, but have adopted New Orleans, Vancouver and London as their homes in their time too. It all makes for an exquisite blend of blues-folk that we discover the naissance of as we caught up with Katherine…
You’ve got a bit of time off at the moment…Yes, we’ve just come back from our European tour, which was quite full on, so we’re just having a bit of time to regroup now really.
Everyone’s treating the recent weather like an apocalypse at the moment, but you must have experienced some weather, living abroad – Vancouver must’ve been cold?!Well Vancouver was actually a much more temperate climate than I imagined; we did get some snow, but there was always snow up on the mountains that you could see from where we lived, but it was a bit like England – it rained a lot.
But a mountain view – that must be unbeatable.Yeah, you certainly did get the feeling like everything was near – the mountains and the sea; everything was so accessible, which made it a really nice place to live. Also quite good for music, because I think the environment we live in is quite important to us, so Vancouver was really inspirational. It’s not like living in London now, where you feel like you’re a million miles from anything. It feels like it’s just concrete; it’s a bit claustrophobic.
I read that 52% of Vancouver residents don’t speak English. What’s is like living somewhere that multicultural?It is a very multicultural place, but the best thing about it was that you could get really cheap sushi! So many people were making it, that I pretty much just lived off sushi, then I came back to England and it was really expensive. I used to go straight to the fishing boats and buy fish direct off the boat as well, which was quite fun. It’s also quite a small city as well though, so although we enjoyed our time there, we felt the limitations; we kind of became quite desperate to get back to somewhere like London, where the opportunities were sort of endless.
Do you find that you take in cultures and sounds quite naturally like osmosis, or do you go somewhere and have to make a conscious effort to immerse yourself in that environment?It’s interesting I think, because we went to live in New Orleans when we were younger, and that was a very conscious decision; we looked at the options available and thought that New Orleans was very well known for its music, but I think a place inspires you in ways you’re not going to expect. Everywhere has a different atmosphere and weight of its own history that gives you its own character, and that can affect you in different ways – not necessarily always musical. You create a life somewhere, and the process of being absorbed into a place and then having to tear yourself away from it has the biggest affect on you and your music, because there’s a lot of emotion involved with that.
Tell me about SXSW – that must have been a highlight of your year…Oh yeah, it was amazing. It was almost overwhelming because I’d always wanted to go there. This time it felt like the right time to go; we had a record we were putting out in the States. It’s a lot of money to go over there and you have to decide whether that’s the right thing to do. We made lots of connections and we ended up going on a tour of the States afterwards. There’s just so much going on; every single bar has a band coming out of it. It was pretty intense; we were doing a show in a restaurant out of town, then realised we had to get back to do another show, but there were no taxis, so I ended up hailing something that I thought was a taxi and it ended up being a pizza truck!
You mention a pizza truck, but that wasn’t your first foray into fast-food related vehicles. You and Jessica once worked in a burger van together, didn’t you?Yeah, we’ve always supported ourselves while making music and it’s taken us a long time to even make a vague living from it, so we’ve always had to support ourselves with different crap jobs. That was one of the really early ones; the burger van sticks in our minds because it was one of the really awful ones; we were stuck in this tiny van and it was boiling, with a queue of customers going off into the horizon. We were trying to serve these half burnt burgers and everyone was complaining! One of my jobs was to cut a whole sack of onions every day. There was onions all over the floor, so if you wanted to go from one end to the other, you just sort of got on a piece of onion and launched yourself!
My best friend and I also formed a band when we were kids, called Tear Gas, haha, but unlike you, we didn’t stick it out. You’ve lived out my childhood dreams!Yeah, it’s weird really, the journey we’ve come on. I sometimes think back to us as 11 year olds making plans in our exercise books at school, and I think how did we manage to stay together for so long. It does seem mad and I don’t think anyone expected us to stay together this long, but sometimes you find someone that you have a really special connection with; it always just seemed like a really big shame to lose that. Music becomes its own entity and you just have to go with it!
This may seem like a strange thing to say, but I can’t age you two. I don’t want to either, but it’s just something that struck me, that you’re ageless.We kind of like to keep it like that! I guess we just haven’t really specified what age we are because it isn’t important.
For a brief mad moment, I thought you might be vampires… I don’t know if that’s a rude thing to say?We might be. It’s obviously an option. We’ve been quite lucky with the old… I don’t want to say older people, but more established musicians like Richard Hawley, who have been really encouraging to us, maybe at times where the music industry hadn’t cottoned on. It’s always been other artists that have given us the breaks. I think it makes you feel validated as an artist…
Emma Roberts
Smoke Fairies come to NAC on Saturday 29th January. For tickets, go to www.ueaticketbookings.co.uk or call 01603 660352. Read the full version of this interview on Outlineonline.co.uk
