Vanessa Knight is as yet relatively unknown singer and songwriter, yet she hopes this will soon change. Her Edinburgh run, two nights in the Rat Pack, was a sell-out success and on the second night she performed her own songs, for the first time in front of a live audience. She admits that this was 'scary' but it added 'I've loved it, absolutely loved it, everyone [in Edinburgh] has been so welcoming.'
I arranged to meet her to do this interview after being blown away by her live performance 'Hidden Song,' where she debuted such tracks as the beautifully impassioned 'Lay Down Your Devils On Me' and the heart-rending yet mathematically precise love song 'Circles'. Reminiscent in style to Camille O'Sullivan she performed with a pair of pale stiletto heels propped on top of the shiny grand piano. 'Oh that's because I can't play the piano in high heels,' she explains 'it's so important to be able to feel the pedals, but they're such beautiful shoes, it feels sad not to have them on display.'
As we sit over a table in Biblos, one of the few none crowded bars we could find, she tells me about her life as a musician and her ambitions for the future. She's been writing songs since she was a tiny child, and she laughs as she tells me that she won a Blue Peter badge aged six for a song she sent in. She is a classically trained musician, with a degree in Music and Drama from Birmingham University, but she never really thought she'd make it as a musician until she graduated and was offered a job singing in nightclubs in Scandinavia- 'I never knew that singing was a real job until that point,' she says, 'that this was something which I could do full time and make a living from.' Since then she has travelled round Europe playing and singing in different clubs.
I find Vanessa surprisingly easy to talk to, possibly as we are the same age and both recent graduates, so I know what she's getting at when she says 'I was going to go into advertising or some other graduate job, not because I wanted to, just because, well, you know, you think that's what you've got to do.'
When talking about what she does, she admits that she doesn't like to stick to one category 'Every genre has something incredible in it, Ilike to mix it up a bit,' - hence why she mixes bits of Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms and Radiohead in with her own music.'Genre doesn't matter,' she says, waving a porcelain hand dismissively over the table ' the most important thing in music is that it's sincere'.
She's also interested in bringing mathematics to to music 'there was a movement called serialism around the beginning of the twentieth century, all about using mathematical codes and sequences to generate music...it's very interesting, but it doesn't always sounds fantastic, however one day I would love to write a piece that is perfectly mathematical but at the same time sounds good and means something.'
The idea of music having meaning is a subject which Vanessa returns to again and again, 'I try to write about things other than love...it makes for fantastic songs but it's too easy to write oh-my-heart-is-breaking-and-I-think-I'll-die sort of things.' This perhaps explains her wide repertoire of song which touch on s subjects such as supporting an unstable but lovely friend (Lay Down Your Devils On Me) to a song about the wonder of a big city (London Lights). At present she is trying to choose which song to make the lead single on the full length album, which she hopes to bring out early next year. She asks my advice and I tell her that my favourite is Lay Down Your Devils. She thanks me and then tells me that she hopes to have her music on spotify within the next couple of months. 'It's always difficult to finish anything as an artist though,' she says 'you know how it is, you always think you can tweak it a little, make it that little bit better..'
I know what she means, however I think her music is great as it is, and she certainly deserves recognition.
And here is a link to Vanessa's website for those who wish to know more - http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#!/pages/Vanessa-Knight/323819526810
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