Emily Maguire interview, part 2...
Not surprisingly yeah! There must have been a heck of a contrast from the venues you'd been doing...
Oh yeah! I mean aside from the festivals, the main purpose of my tour was that I wanted to play my songs to as many people as possible, so we'd just booked gigs in as many pubs and folk clubs as we could, up and down the country. And then, with the Don McLean tour, suddenly I'm playing in venues like St Davids Hall in Cardiff, and Bridgewater Hall in Manchester, and in one gig you can play to as many people as we were playing to in maybe ten gigs before, which is just a fantastic opportunity to play the songs to people. You've got a couple of thousand in the auditorium at night, it's just a completely different experience on a big stage with a big sound and also just being able to reach that many people at once.
You've got the big one coming up with the Albert Hall, haven't you?
Yes, we've got the Albert Hall this Friday night which I'm really looking forward to, that'll be amazing. I used to go to the Albert Hall when I lived in London to listen to the Proms. I love Classical Music, always have. I didn't have much money so I'd queue up and go and lie on a cushion in the Gallery, there weren't any seats or anything, you could just lie down and listen to Bach and all the different music that they'd be playing. I've never even been down in the stalls, so the idea of being on the stage is quite amazing actually, really looking forward to that!
What was Ireland like? Have you toured there before?
No, I haven't actually. Ireland's great. We did the first two gigs of the tour on the West Coast, which was a great warm up for me. I got back yesterday from four days in Dublin, we did a couple of gigs there in an amazing theatre called the Olympia. Really old and historic. It had loads of posters out the back of every band you could think of that had played there, an amazing heritage. I love being in Ireland, my father's originally from there anyway, and being a MacGuire I felt right at home there!
You've got this incredible career now, on opposite sides of the planet; the UK and Australia. Is it hard keeping the momentum going?
To be honest, the music momentum is all here. I don't really tour in Australia, I go back there to book another tour to come back here really. The live music scene in Australia has changed a lot over the last 10 or 20 years. They've brought in fruit machines in the pubs, they're absolutely rife everywhere, so a lot of original live music has disappeared. The territory's also so huge, I've driven 12 hours each way to do a gig. It's that kind of size. I tend now to go back to the farm to write, recuperate and to book the next tour and make cheese to finance it! At the moment we haven't been there, I was last there in June, so it's quite a while to live out of bags over here. Actually, we've had a housesitter on the farm, otherwise it gets taken over by creatures. We've got these huge pythons who live on the farm, the biggest one's called Dudley and we've just heard he's taken up residency in our shack! He's not being evicted as he's too heavy to lift!
That's what happens if you will go off touring round the UK!
Whenever we've been back before and we haven't had anyone housesitting for us, we've opened the door and have had to look really carefully in every corner and cranny. I once found a snake that was sleeping in a box under the bed, it must have been there for weeks. Fortuantely it wasn't poisonous!
Christian, your husband, is he Australian?
Yes, he is. He's actually an old friend of mine from London. I went out to visit him about 4 years ago on what was supposed to be a short holiday, and everything stemmed from that. I ended up just staying and making the first album, and then the holiday that was supposed to be 3 weeks turned into 3 months!
Well something must have worked because what you've produced is really good quality. Do you think that the huge difference going from South London to Cambridge to Australia has affected the way you write?
I think one interesting thing about being in Australia, not in Sydney, but out in the bush, is that you're incredibly insulated from what's going on in the world.I really have very little idea of any music that's happened in the last four or five years in the UK or the US. Australia's very isolated from any other culture that's going on, especially the UK. We've don't have a TV so I don't get exposed to what's happening, I listen the the local radio station and that's it. I come back here for a month or whatever and do a tour, and I'm listening to the radio and there's all these bands I've never heard of. I'm really out of touch. But in some ways, it makes the album quite pure, not being affected by what's going on at the time. We're purely concentrating on the best way to arrange the song to bring out the lyrics as much as possbible. Christian, my husband, he's also my producer, he's absolutely amazing, he can see how it needs to be framed, how it needs to be arranged and brought to life on an album. That's something I've always found diffcult to do.
That separation must be one of the reasons why you sound so fresh and so different when you're over here...because you haven't been soaking up the atmosphere and the music scene so what you produce is 100% you.
Thank you. I guess so. It's great to come over. I was sitting in a hotel in Dublin the other day and watching music videos, and there were all these bands whose names I'd heard and I was like, 'Oh that's what they look like, that's how that song sounds'. It all sounds so fresh to me. All really new because I haven't heard it.
Newsletter
Headlines