Talking To...Smoke Fairies
"Living With Ghosts" was my first encounter with Jessica Davies and Katherine Blamire, aka Smoke Fairies. It was a highly impressive self released debut that really impressed. Impressed so much in fact that the band were asked to be a part of the Fatea Showcase Session "Duos" which came out in the Autumn of 2008, Smoke Fairies contributing "We Had Lost Our Minds".
In the intervening two years, the Duo have put in a huge amount of hard graft to compliment their not inconsiderable talent and landed themselves a series of tours and more importantly a contract with V2 from where they recently launched their label debut, "Through Low Light And Trees".
I caught up with Jessica at the start of the festive season, just after the band had returned from their first European tour to catch up with what has been a very exciting time for the duo.
#JD=Jessica Davies #NK=Neil King
#NK I first came across Smoke Fairies just after you released your "Living With Ghosts" album. Now here you are, big label debut, about to go out on your first headline tour. I guess there's been a lot of hard work in the last couple of years.
#JD It's been very busy. We've been on a few tours, self released an EP, found the time to get lots of song writing done. There's definitely been a lot of hard work.
#NK And just getting to the point where it's starting to pay off.
#JD I hope so, it feels that way, a sense of something about to happen.
#NK I think you can hear that in your sound there's that retention of the dark, almost gothic side and yet you seem to have found a bigger sound.
#JD It was the next level we had to take it to. We had to up the game and find more depth and texture. Fortunately it all seemed to progress that way so we were ready to have that bigger sound when we went to record "Through Low Lights And Trees". I think we have a far fuller sound than "Living With Ghosts" but we've managed to retain the atmosphere.
#NK It's definitely still there, but you don't seem to be as beholden to it as you were on the earlier album, it's like it's now part of a greater whole and that's given you more freedom with your music.
#JD I think we've just written what's come naturally. I don't think we set out to be melancholic or not. That was the group of songs we'd written coming up to the album. We do like that dark, but we needed to give something with a different atmosphere as well.
#NK Its also the underpinning styles, there's a sense of both Americana and English folk through the album. It sort of includes both elements without compromising either.
#JD I hope so. Again, it's something that's just happened. We didn't set out with the intent to take a certain kind of music from The States and a little something else from the UK.
#NK As a duo how do you go about the writing process? One of the things I've really enjoyed about you music is the strength of the songs, a good lyrical focus as well as a musical one. How does creativity grab you.
#JD It's at odd moments. Sometimes when you're on a bus you come up with this really poetic line and it can stay with you for a couple of months and then you find the right place to put it. You can be playing on the guitar and it comes back. Me and Katherine tend to come up with the spine of our songs by ourselves, then we'll have a session when we'll show each other what we've been doing and bounce ideas back and forth. Maybe then the song will go off in a different direction to the one we were expecting.
What starts off as an individual song will become less so and I think we'd both be able to say that we'd written together.
#NK And that coming together of ideas has certainly delivered an album that allows the songs to be interpreted differently, depending on mood.
#JD That's nice to know. I think it allows for a deeper set of ideas there, rather than if just one of us had written it. I think when we set out to record these songs, we wanted to make it quite epic. Even so it's still subtle, there are bits that are difficult to pick up on the first time, undertones that people relate to more in certain moods and maybe ignore in other moods.
#NK That appears also to carry through to the album cover, look at it one way, it's a bit fey, yet it's also got that ghostly unearthly feel.
#JD When we set about doing the photograph....We gave Marie, the photographer, the brief that we wanted her to do a photograph that made the viewer feel like they were an outsider looking in on something, but not quite sure what. Asking themselves is it something they feel they should be looking at?
I guess we always wanted to take a picture of these two ghostly figures out on the road. It's where the name Smoke Fairies came from. We consciously wanted to make a cover that made the viewer feel slightly uneasy and also brought them into a specific world, which I hope the album does.
#NK Just picking up on how the name came about....
#JD We both grew up in rural Sussex, with lots of winding roads, hedgerow and dark woods. When we first learnt to drive...There's nine miles between where I grew up and where Katharine grew up so there was a lot of driving back and forth if you had to go out for the evening. When it was misty and both of us being quite imaginative, you could see figures in the reflections. We called those figures smoke fairies and the name just came from that.