BBC London
Charlie Gillet
Radio Performance Review
27 November 04
Julia Vorontsova
By my standards, the song that launched
tonight's programme was a relatively recent oldie from 1976.
But for our live guest Julia Vorontsova, the first single by
Talking Heads was an unknown artifact made six years before she
was born.
Twenty-two years ago, the ubiquitous synths
and drum machines of modern pop music productions seemed to be
tolling the death knoll of the singer-songwriter era. But it
turned out that many of us still like the intimacy of listening
to a singer with stories to tell, and nothing but a guitar to
fill the spaces between the words. These days, my daily mail
invariably includes at least one such album, and some months
ago the postman delivered a package from the Abaton Book
Company of Jersey City , containing the debut by Julia
Vorontsova.
The combination of the jokey title, From St
Petersburg with Love, and the enigmatic photo of the singer
made me pick it out of the pile and wonder what it would sound
like. The song titles are listed in English, but are sung in
Russian in a fragile voice, mostly low-key and sombre,
accompanied solely by acoustic guitar. There isn't quite enough
variety to justify as many as 23 songs, and a dozen would have
made a better album. But I like her voice, the hints of dry
humour, and especially the rockabilly drive and echo in the one
called Rock n Roll.
Having lived in St Petersburg, Warsaw and
New York, Julia is based in Paris now, and agreed to take the
Eurostar to London to play some songs live for us. She claimed
to be nervous, but didn't show it as she sang three songs and
told us what they were about, in flawless English. When I asked
for the story behind Rock n Roll, Julia explained that she had
been following the instructions in a teach-yourself guitar
book, and this was her attempt to get to grips with the formula
of repeating each line in accordance with the classic blues
verse structure. I look forward to what happens next, if and
when she finds some fellow-spirited musicians to help her
explore new directions.
The album is available from the website of
the Abaton Book Company, and from Julia's own website, and can
be bought one song at a time from iTunes.
