EMMA SCARR
(VOCALS - VIOLIN - GUITAR - BANJO - SONGS)

"London Americana? Yes, it can be done!"
(Americana UK)
www.myspace.com/emmascarr

I am a singer-songwriter and musician from Leytonstone, East London. I've been playing sessions and folk clubs around London and (slightly) beyond for over 20 years now. I started off playing the fiddle, and played in various Irish pub sessions, mostly around Islington, Hackney and Camden. I  had a young son by the early 90's and couldn't get out much, so I borrowed LPs from Hackney Library for company in the evenings. I was listening to stuff like Steve Earle, Emmylou Harris, Chris Kristofferson, Joni Mitchell, The Band and Nanci Griffiths. Alt-country heaven, I was in. Also English and Irish folk - Fairport Convention, Pentangle, The Dubliners. I also liked old-time American music, and learnt to play some of those tunes. Lots of singers at the pub sessions loved country music, so I learnt a lot of songs from them. By the likes of Rodney Crowell, Guy Clark, Gillian Welch and Townes Van Zandt. I started singing as well, and soon realised I needed to accompany myself, so I concentrated more on my guitar. Later on I got myself a 5-string banjo, and I like to play songs along to that as well now. And pick a few trad bluegrass tunes.

I am very grateful to the musicians in those pubs who let me join in - often with a toddler in tow. Paddy P, who introduced me to Guy Clark, Aideen McConville, who showed me that women could sing as loud and tough as the best of them in a noisy Hackney pub, Fergie Campbell, who gave me his Yamaha guitar to look after in 2001. And I've still got it.
In 2000 I started playing as the full-time fiddler for The Northern Celts. A group of traditional musicians set up 12 years previously by the unstoppable Les Coughlan. I still have the pleasure of being with them, and we play sessions, ceilidhs, weddings, parties, festivals and all sorts. There are dozens of players we call on to join us, and what I've learnt from it all has been invaluable, as well as being extremely good fun! 
 
www.myspace.com/northerncelts

The Northern Celts run a folk club in Camden called Folk in the Cellar, at The Constitution Pub.
 
www.myspace.com/folkinthecellar

ANGEL WAY
 
 

www.cdbaby.com/cd/emmascarr/from/viglink

I released my first cd in 2008 "Angel Way." It is a collection of 11 songs, written over the previous, 7 or so years. I started writing songs in about 2001. People seemed to like them so I graduated from singing the odd one at sessions to going to folk clubs and open-mike nights to perform them. I was initially accompanied mostly by Shuggy Fisher, on Mandolin and mandola, and later by Garry Smith on Tricone resonator guitar, giving the songs even more of a country feel. We've played at Hove Folk Club, What's Cookin', The Walthamstow Folk Club, The Leytonstone Festival, The Watford Folk Club, Monday Monday (Folk and Roots) and many other places.
 

"..Character and place driven, they are songs grounded in first-hand experience and observation of the banalities and triumphs of everyday life.

The understated narratives of her songs, forgiving and non-judgemental, have a sense of resignation but remain ultimately undefeated.

Beneath the measured surface is where the raw emotions bubble-

the real texture is to be found in the heart-broken shadows of this collection of songs."

Alex Ogg  (Mojo-award winning author of

                   “No More Heroes”  press 1996

                   “The Hip-Hop years” press   2001)

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 backporch 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.”