I started playing my violin and singing in sessions
round North London in the early
1990s. I picked up traditional tunes and began to hear lots of songs that I
loved – traditional and more modern Folk, and often
Americana. I was introduced to the music of Guy
Clark, Steve Earle….. I was also going to the wonderful music section at
Hackney Library and borrowing LPs. Anything that looked a bit folky or a bit
country from the cover. Evenings
in I would listen over and over and these songs have stayed with me in all
their feelings and rough around the edges detail. The rawness of the
instrument playing and the
singing, and the poetry of the lyrics had me enthralled and deeply moved.
I wanted to sing these songs, so I realised
I had to play the guitar. I had an old one at home, and learnt some chords
from a book. I soon became one of the singers at the pub sessions.
I started writing songs around 2000. I had just had my
second child and was working as a newly qualified
teacher in London’s
East End. I was so busy in those days, but I remember jotting
down lyrics in any spare moment – often on the bus or the underground. I was
very prolific in those years, I think because I had 30 years to write about,
and I had started late, They don’t come quite so quickly now.
I was playing a lot with Shuggy Fisher, a great
mandolin player, and he liked my songs, so we rehearsed, developed and
performed them at various gigs, often tucked in with a more traditional set.
My songs were urban, a bit hard-hitting (for folk!) and
emotionally-understated as they were mostly story-based. We recorded 3 songs
with Marcus Davidson at Sudbourne studios, and his enthusiasm encouraged me
to make it a whole album. Shuggy left for Holland,
so I used a lot of banjo on the recordings. I had bought one in a moment of
madness after my Great Grandmother’s funeral, in a lovely little second hand
instrument shop down in Devon. With my own fiddle and
harmonica, I got the sound I was looking for.
The album was “Angel Way.”
It took a while to finish, as the recording was done one song at a time,
with me adding instruments. There was a lot of live recording as I remember
– the early ones with Shuggy we just played a few times and took the best
take. Then I had to start making separate tracks, as it was really just me
and Marcus.
Here is a review from FOLK AND
ROOTS;
“Angel as in Islington… This is the debut album from
Emma, an East-London-based singer/songwriter who for the past ten years has
played fiddle with The Northern Celts. But rather than being a Celtic-style
musical venture, Angel Way
is very much an exercise in urban-folk, albeit with a strong
Americana
flavour that betrays Emma's influences (to my ears especially Mary Gauthier
and Gillian Welch). Her songs have an unassumingly raw and direct character
that derives as much from her plain-spoken writing as from the at times
harsh and unforgiving local environment in which her stories and
observations are set. Given that directness, however, it may seem curious
that in Emma's songs, emotion is not always on display in the shop window,
but harder to locate and fish out, being altogether more subtly incorporated
within her musical settings and delivery. Even so, her world always finds
room for affection, as portrayed in the charmingly unsentimental domesticity
of Little Hand and the back porch banjo musings of My Second Love.
Emma's singing voice is spontaneously
communicative, upfront and insistent in tone, on occasions slightly strident
even, but also possessing a touch of almost-sweetness that can surprise.
This combination actually suits the no-nonsense perceptiveness of Emma's
writing, while the entirely Gauthier-like uncompromising honesty in
depicting commonplace, banal happenings and feelings with keen and
thoughtful insight (and a not exactly unexpected element of self-pity)
surfaces most obviously on The Gap and It Ain't Good For Me (the latter
complete with scratchy matchbox-percussion obligato just to ram the message
home!). There's a kinda rough, early-Dylanesque aura to Devon
and Mary's Going Nowhere, while Neasden To Nashville neatly draws together
the two strongly place-driven elements in Emma's musical narratives. The
myriad of topographical references in Going Home sure has us pondering the
eternal enigma of why nobody ever gets off at Stepney Green…!
The ostensible emptiness of her characters' lives is
strangely aptly mirrored in the unadorned, dusty Americana-style musical
backdrops, open-toned yet quite claustrophobic, where for much of the time
Emma's lone acoustic guitar is gently embellished with only Shuggie Fisher's
bell-like mandolin and some overdubbed vocal harmonies; at times, Emma also
contributes some sparing fiddle and banjo to the mix - and to good effect. I
like this one a lot, and hope to hear more of Emma.”
I met Garry Smith at Folk in the Cellar at The
Constitution in Camden
Town. I liked the sound of his tricone
resonator, and he liked my songs, so we started doing some gigs together. He
gave the songs a more country feel, and was(is!) also very encouraging. I
decided to record the second album, and Garry features strongly on it. This
one took even longer, years to make. Once a fortnight I travelled
underground to Marcus’s studio in Brixton and would sometimes manage two
tracks (tracks not songs) in our
2/3hour sessions. I just had a flashback of how heavy my Devon
banjo is, carrying it with the guitar up Brixton Hill. Oooooohh…… Marcus
moved to Norway
towards the end, so there was a break where it remained unfinished. In the
end I took an uncustomary wild decision and took myself and my daughter over
to that lovely country and finished it off there! It was well worth the
effort, as I love the second album, “Dusty Words and Motorways.”
“…what really caught me about her music were her
lyrics. Dramatic and heartfelt, this introvert songstress painted vivid,
expansive portraits of everyday life like a poetic Picasso. Ms Scarr invited
the audience into her world where anguish and confusion could be overcome
through song. “
Review of Partners In Rhyme @
Walthamstow Library | 04.08.12Written By Matthew “Eli”
Bell
During this time, I had also been having a
lot of fun playing in a kind of English Honky tonky country urban
contemporary band with Johnny Black. The music was very upbeat and it was
fun playing in a bigger band. We did mostly his songs and a few of mine too.
Johnny is amazing at coming up with tunes, rhythms and ideas for songs, and
I am good at writing lyrics, giving the song a lyrical structure and
hopefully, I like to think, some poetry. We started co-writing. We wrote
lots of duets. With our rather different musical backgrounds and personalities,
I thought it might not work, but the tension coupled with the affection
comes crashing together to produce some of the finest composition and
arrangements that I have been involved in. The challenges of sharing
creativity – compromise and flexibility, can be difficult, but I only have
to listen to our album “North and South” to know it is all worth it. JB
produced the CD in one summer in 2011. It is 13 tracks of beautiful, lively,
heart-breaking/heart-warming songs that I could never have created alone and
neither could he.
I feel very lucky to have been able to enjoy a lifetime
of making music. I have met and worked with loads of talented, mad souls,
who will always give their time to this passion, because it is what keeps us
alive.
