Alice Gold
Alice Gold has just finished recording her album 'Seven Rainbows'. Comprised of dense, complex atmospherics and an effortless melodic sophistication, it was completed in just 22 short days with no money from any record label. Which makes it sound easy. And in many ways, it was easy. But from America to Luxembourg, to at one point living on a boat in London, Alice Gold has been on quite a journey. And she wouldn't change any of it.
Raised in Camberley, Alice had relocated to London, to garner some attention from the wider world for the songs she had been writing since the age of eight. Her arrival in the capital, though, only heightened her desire for adventure, for living life to the full. Of course, lots of people fantasize about the notion of a Stateside road trip, but Alice Gold actually did it: bought a one-way ticket to the America, won a 1978 Winnebago in a poker game and spent the next six months weaving across the US alone, recording songs, using her toilet as a vocal booth.
"Everyone I met before I left warned me of danger and strange people," she notes. "But the only bad experience I had was having to break into my own van after locking myself out." She made a stop in Nashville, Tennessee, performing gigs nightly. "Just seeing the way musicians do things over there, the standard of performances are higher,” she says. “Even the small acoustic nights were incredible - unsigned artists really putting on a show and giving it their all."
This is typical of Alice's lust for life, for taking in experiences and letting it feed into the one thing that matters to her: music. One time she could be found lodging for free in a Luxembourg castle in exchange for English lessons, recording late at night ("Until I got fired for having wine and joints in my room"); another she took up residence on a boat in London, as a cheap way of avoiding the nine-to-five grind. But through all of this randomness, the focus was always there. "I've always known what I was meant to be doing," she stresses.
The fruits of all this labour started to show and the inevitable serious interest began. Alice quickly found herself with a record deal, though for reasons too boring to go into here, and for reasons beyond her control, this led to the age old "parting of ways" before anything was released. But with more experience and gusto, Alice continued doing the only thing she knows how to do: write songs, play gigs, keep moving. Her intention now was to make her album by herself, so that she might retain absolute creative control. Testament, perhaps, to the headstrong nature that drives everything she does.
Then, the final part of the Alice Gold sound arrived, at more than one of said shows, in the shape of producer Dan Carey. "I needed a producer for the album," she remembers, "so I stopped and thought, which of the producers I've met has come to more than one of my shows and has told me he loves what I do? And there was only one person who fit the bill. That was Dan."
This is a man whose recording credits speak for themselves, featuring as they do everyone from Franz Ferdinand to Hot Chip to La Roux to Lily Allen to Kylie (with whom he co-wrote 'Slow'). And in Dan's similarly obsessive attitude to music, she had found the perfect co-conspirator. "We just clicked," Alice says. "I basically hounded Dan for six months to make room in his diary and told him he had to pay for it all too 'cos I was broke. But he did it. I played the stripped down tracks to Dan in his studio and explained the mad band in my head. He came up with these killer bass lines and the sound I was looking for began.”
“There followed a ridiculously intense bout of not much sleeping but a lot of recording. I've taken a band in the studio before and it's been really tricky because I’ve written all the material and the different personalities confuse the sound. Dan and I just clicked like old friends and wanted the same things at every step of the process, which made it such a special time”
This outside help brought together the songs contained within Alice's album, but the common thread that runs through them is all her. "Pretty much all the songs on the album are the ones that came quickly and were down in an hour or less. That's when you know you've got something special. That's what I'm always chasing. As soon as it becomes laborious, you're losing something," she notes.
The quality in the songs was and is obvious, so much so that labels were queuing up for the rights to release it. A deal with Fiction Records allowed Alice to put together the live band she had always dreamed of: far from session musician blandness, the noise they make is a reflection of the records Alice has always loved: Pixies, Led Zeppelin, Jefferson Airplane, taut, powerful, energetic, rough-around-the-edges. "I definitely write pop songs," Alice says. "But I'm inspired just as much by leftfield stuff, rock and roll and psychedelia."
"Basically, I love Janis Joplin but I've got a crush on Alicia Keys.”