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| At St Pancras Old Church on Friday night |
It’s bloody freezing. My legs
ache. And I’m heading down a long dark road. Am I about to get stabbed? Well I
hope not, ‘cos I’m really keen to check out half-Iranian folk singer-songwriter
Sophie Jamieson tonight.
I whizz into the small, echoing
space of St Pancras Old Church. Tea lights flicker in the darkness. I think the
coast is clear of knife-happy Londoners here. I perch on a creaky wooden chair
at the front, perfectly positioned next to the blast of a heating duct. Sophie
tunes up and apologises for her trembling nervousness.
Plucking sweetly at her acoustic
guitar she begins with ‘Waterloo’, a song she wrote when she started gigging
lots in London. “It’s about being lost in a big crowd and not feeling alone”,
she later tells me.
Light greyish-beige chords and a
navy cardigan wrap around her olive skin. And her trainers have the biggest
loops of laces I’ve ever seen. She’s modestly beautiful and the lines on her
face really reflect the words falling from her rosy lips. I’m reminded of
Daughter as she locks us in a haunting hold with her stunning vocal.
She gives an appreciative smile to
electric guitarist Liam
Hoflay, who adds atmospheric coating to her lyrically strong songs. Sophie goes
on to sooth and sting us with ‘Catch You Cry’, ‘Dinah’ and the “quite new” ‘I
don’t’.
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| Sophie Jamieson and electric guitarist Liam Hoflay |
After her set I sneak her up some spiral
stairs to the organ loft to find out a little more about her:
How did you find your time studying at Cambridge?
It was great. I really loved
doing history of art and Cambridge is a great place for music on both the
university and local levels. I didn’t actually discover the local music scene
until my last term. Cambridge is where I started to get a little bit of
confidence back doing music and really start enjoying doing gigs.
What’s your favourite place in London?
For a while it’s been the
Southbank. It’s one of the most beautiful parts of London. I am very much drawn
to the river, drawn to rivers in general. But I’ve also started to feel a very
intense fondness for London since running around it with a guitar for the last
year. There’s always a beautiful view from any point of that riverbank. The
fairy lights in the trees can make you feel really happy walking along there.
If you could have your portrait done by any artist, living or dead, who
would you choose?
Oh man, um… I really like early
20th century art. Maybe it would be a sculpture by Henry Moore ‘cos
then it would be really quite abstract and you wouldn’t be able to see any of
my features clearly.
Which musician do you fancy..?
At the moment I’m quite
infatuated with Matt Corby. He was actually a runner up on Australian Idol but
he’s transferred to the underground British music scene. He’s really beautiful
but he’s also an incredible musician. He has this one song called ‘Brother’.
There are loads of live versions of it on YouTube and in every single one you
can see he feels every single word he plays and it’s really sexy.
What’s your future music plan?
At the moment I’m only really
letting myself look as far as the E.P. because after that it’s quite hard to
know what’s going to happen. Things seem to move quite fast these days. I’ve
been lucky enough to get a manager recently and he knows what he’s doing and
he’s putting me on the right track. I’m applying to festivals at the moment
too.
'Waterloo' - Sophie Jamieson
Sophie Jamieson is signed to Folkroom Records and you can check out when she’s next playing on her Facebook page.
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Photography by Sophie Ellis
Friday 11th January 2013
St Pancras Old Church
