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Angie Palmer

Angie PALMER : voix, guitare

Jack CIGOLINI : guitare

Paul MASON : basse

Early Years

Angie was born in Lancaster, but her father, who was a travelling salesmen, was always on the move. Never settling in one place for more than a year or two, Angie lived in over a dozen different towns. This rootless lifestyle meant her education was regularly disrupted and friendships didn’t last long; the only constant thing in her life was music. At sixteen she enrolled at Art College in Oxford, but after a year she decided it wasn’t what she wanted to do and left England for Europe to see if she could make a living playing music.

By living in cheap hotels for a year she managed to afford an old Mercedes van, which she converted into a living space with a bed and a small stove. After two years of busking around Europe in her van she ended up shuttling between Paris and Geneva before her mobile home finally gave up the ghost and she settled in Paris. For the next seven years she made a living playing cafe terraces, cinema queues and the Metro. Whilst living in a Paris commune on the Rue Nesle and mixing with some “strange and interesting people; writers, artists, and old ‘68 revolutionaries,” she met her current partner, Paul Mason, a lecturer in philosophy from Manchester Metropolitan University, in a cafe on the Place de Bastille. Nine years after leaving England Angie returned to the U.K. and is now based in Manchester.

Music

Angie’s first release Road was financed by the money raised from busking around Brighton, where she won the National Busking Competition. Road was an immediate critical success. It was the 5-Star ‘Spotlight Album’ of the Month in Country Music People and gained 4 and 5 star reviews in the major music press. The narrative quality of the songwriting earned her comparisons with Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell, thanks to lyrics described by reviewers as “intelligent” and “consummately literate.” The music writer and historian Garth Cartwright writing for HMV Choice said: “Not since Bob Dylan’s mid-60s output has a singer so successfully jammed songs with so many high-culture reference points.” For others her potent mix of country, blues, and folk served up with equal measures of aggression and tenderness led her to be called the ‘British Lucinda Williams’; and ‘the Queen of country-tinged singer-songwriters.’ Road made it on to the long short list for the Mercury Prize in 2004.

Her second CD Tales of Light and Darkness (which also made the long cut for the Mercury Music Prize 2006) cemented Angie’s reputation as a songwriter. Her music was now being championed by Bob Harris, who called her “one of Britain’s greatest singer-songwriters” and chose her as one of only two female songwriters to feature on his 'Best of British' programme on BBCR2. Since then her powerful live performances have taken her to most of the major festivals in Britain and Europe: Glastonbury, Cambridge, Celtic Connections and Montreaux Jazz amongst them.

An artist whose music crosses genres is not easily categorisable and though Angie’s music was initially classified as Americana, this only tells half a story. The Americana/Lucinda Williams tag is understandable, as are the comparisons with Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell. In particular, the narrative approach to songwriting of both these artists were an early influence on Angie's songwriting. Other early musical influences were as diverse as Carole King, Big Mama Thornton, Hank Williams and John Martyn. But Angie’s music is equally influenced by the musical storytelling she encounterd on European travels. Thus her last CD Meanwhile, as night falls... (2008) now mixed her British folk and American roots with narrative songs based on Russian folk tales and dark European fairy stories and was written and partly recorded in a forest in France. Meanwhile... continued the success story and was ‘CD of the Week’ in the Sun, and was called “perfectly crafted” by The Independent on Sunday, and “epic and beautiful” by The Guardian.

Given that her songs have been called ‘cinematic’ it is no surprise that she has appeared at film festivals in France and that recently her songs Fishtails and Premonition Blues, have featured on film soundtracks in both England (Call Me, which was premiered at the Cannes Film Festival) and France (In the Heart of Others.)

The last three years have been spent touring the UK and Europe, both solo and with her band ‘The Revelators’ and writing the songs for her new CD: Old Sticks to Scare a Bird. Angie is currently in discussions with a Parisian painter on staging a sound/visual arts project in Paris early next year

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