Heidi Talbot
Growing up in the rural village of Kill, Co. Kildare, Talbot sang in the church choir run by her mother, Rosaleen, meanwhile absorbing the vibrant array of music that filled the family home. “I would mostly have heard what everyone else was listening to, whatever was playing in the house. With my Mum, it was Nana Mouskouri and Dolly Parton, but then there’d be Guns’n’Roses and the Pogues coming from my brothers’ bedroom - just a bit of everything, really.”
At sixteen, Talbot enrolled at Dublin’s celebrated Bel Canto singing school, studying for the next year and a half under its founder and director Frank Merriman - “the best teacher in the universe,” according to Sinead O’Connor, another former student. Adapting the classical bel canto technique, mainly associated with opera singers like Maria Callas, for vocalists of any style, Merriman’s method – also known as “bel canto storytelling” - focuses on using the voice as naturally as possible to communicate a song’s narrative elements, teaching that certainly tells in Talbot’s intuitive, eloquent phrasing.
Perhaps the pivotal juncture of Talbot’s early career, though, was when she moved to New York aged eighteen “That time totally opened things up for me,” she says. “Living in New York, there was so much music going on, from everywhere, stuff I’d never have been aware of living back in Kildare, and that’s definitely fed into the types of songs I’ll choose to sing. Plus I met loads and loads of musicians, and through that you get to see that it is actually possible to make a living at this; I was able to survive on singing songs.”
One of those encounters, via the city’s thriving Irish musical community, was with Cherish the Ladies’ founder and frontwoman Joanie Madden, who Talbot asked to play on a demo she was recording. Shortly afterwards, during 2002, Cherish’s then lead singer, Deidre Connolly, announced her departure, and Talbot was invited to join as her successor.
After moving back to Ireland in 2005, however, and having recently relocated again to Edinburgh, Talbot decided that 2007 would be her last year with the band. “It was just getting too much flying back and forth every couple of weeks – I was never home,” she says. “And I’d got to the point where I was ready to concentrate on my own stuff – it just felt like the right time.”
After bidding a fond farewell to Cherish the Ladies, and launching her new album In Love and Light during Glasgow’s world-renowned Celtic Connections festival in January, Talbot will be touring extensively during 2008, in between several high-profile studio projects. She is to be a featured guest on the forthcoming solo album from Radiohead drummer Philip Selway, and on a new trio recording from John McCusker, Kris Drever and Idlewild’s Roddy Woomble. Drever has also invited her to sing on his next album, the follow up to his award-winning Black Water.
