INTERVIEW WITH NERINA PALLOT

By Louise Jones

Brit-award nominated Nerina Pallot spoke to Exeter List ahead of an intimate showcase at Exeter Phoenix for her upcoming album.

With a wry laugh never far from her voice, Nerina Pallot sounds incredibly relaxed and friendly for a singer-songwriter about to launch a yet-to-be-named album and tour. A souped-up re-release of her last album Fires in 2006 brought extensive radio play, Brit Award and Ivor Novello award nominations, and a hit single with Everybody’s Gone to War. Its emotion-driven songs clearly hit a nerve, but the pressure of building on that success isn’t getting to Nerina – in fact she’s ready to loosen up and have a bit more fun this time around.

“I’d say that my new record...it still has sadness in it but it’s much more, ‘well life is hard for everybody, I don’t want to wallow in this. Let’s just get through it’,” she explains. “There are songs where they are soul searching but I’ve tried to give them a sense of humour.” This ‘grin and bear it’ theme should strike the perfect note for recession-hit times. But, in the best tradition of singer songwriters, Nerina is keen to retain an intimate sense of connection between herself and the listener.

She says: “If you sit and you write a song it tends to be quite a solitary thing. You do tend to go up your own bum a bit but I definitely don’t want to leave the emotional side out. One of the songs on the last record Fires ‘Idaho’; it’s a little song but I meet people from all over the world who’ve heard that song and it really means something to them.”

The fact that she’s achieved this connection comes as a surprise to her: “You just go ‘wow’ this little thing I wrote that was about a very small thing becomes something a lot bigger to other people and so you shouldn’t really underestimate that. It’s important to write about those things that are quite personal, painful or sad.”

The ability to do this with a genuine empathy came out of real-life trauma for the 33-year-old. Although Fires brought critical and commercial success, it evolved during a dark time when her grandmother was sick with cancer. Emerging from this period gave Nerina a fresh desire to enjoy life and the fulfilment that her music brings.

She says: “When you get older you do have to come up against really tough things sometimes; it’s part of life. So far from feeling miserable I realise now the value of comedy. I never really understood comedy when I was a teenager, I never found anything that funny and now all I want to watch is comedy. I just want to laugh. I don’t want to think about all my problems because it’s just too much.”

Growing up in sleepy Jersey, she may have been a typical moody teenager but Nerina wasn’t barricaded in her bedroom listening to The Smiths. A lack of cutting edge radio stations meant that she developed a passion for 1980s pop, with added exposure to the polished song craft of Motown, Joni Mitchell, Simon and Garfunkel, and The Beatles.

Accomplished on piano, bass and guitar, Nerina’s multi-talented efforts took a while to get noticed (she compares listening to underselling 2001 debut album ‘Dear Frustrated Superstar’ to looking at old baby photos). After spending most of the Noughties braving the shark infested waters of the music business her mellowness betrays a streak of steel. She’s now producing her own albums with the help of in-demand producers like Linda Perry and is a veteran of live support slots for big-hitters including James Blunt and Sheryl Crow.

Pondering the mega success of those artists, she says: “I can guarantee you that James Blunt isn’t sitting in his Ibiza mansion worrying about what critics are saying. It really depends on how robust a person you are. If you think too much about what other people think about you, you’d go potty wouldn’t you? I remember my mum saying ‘honestly Nerina if you knew how little thoughts of you popped into other people’s heads, you wouldn’t care what other people thought’ and that was quite liberating.”

Nerina Pallot appears at the Exeter Phoenix, 27th February. Visit Exeter Pheonix listing.