In Conversation with Colin: Rosalie Cunningham

“I’m still enjoying it, which is very weird for me” says Rosalie Cunningham about her new album To Shoot Another Day due for release November 1st. “Normally I can’t really enjoy any work of mine until about five years afterwards because it’s almost verging on traumatic getting it out, and by that point I just don’t want to hear it anymore.”

The extravagantly-gifted British psychedelic, vaudeville and progressive rock inspired Rosalie Cunningham is one of the most exciting performers on the contemporary music scene – and one who readily and unashamedly admits that she was more influenced in her youth by British prog and glam rock bands of the 70s than by any other genre or era, as Colin Palmer discovers.

“With this new album it’s difficult for me to talk about influences because I don’t want to mislead anybody, and the album is so diverse,” she admits. “I really love glam very much including T.Rex but I’m more of a Slade fan.”

Progressive rock band Genesis were a particular favourite. “They were the first prog band I really got into,” declares Cunningham. “I was more into the psychedelic end of the sixties with the Beatles and I wanted to know more about that sound, but Genesis were the one that I absolutely fell in love with first so they hold a special place in my heart.”

Revisiting Wales and looking forward to playing at Acapela next month Rosalie remarks, “The stage show is perhaps not what people would expect from listening to the records, we’re definitely a more bombastic band live. But Acapela is a more intimate venue so that won’t be the full blown rock show but we’ll still be bringing that energy.”

Last year Rosalie and her band recorded a live album at Acapela. “Yes, we recorded there last autumn” she says. “It’s a fantastic studio, upstairs is a great recording studio and I think a lot of artists have done live albums there. We were recommended there as a place to do a live record because you don’t have the pressure of doing it in a large venue and having things go wrong in front of a big audience. Everyone was seated and it was cosy so we played the set twice and everybody appreciated it.”

Cunningham’s music contains a playfulness that, she believes is inherent in her personality. “It isn’t intentional but I think it’s just my character coming across”, she says. “Humour is very important to me and I can’t take myself too seriously even if I try, of course my work is incredibly important to me and I take that seriously but I’ve always got to stick a pun in there”. As if to emphasise the point she chortles with glee down the end of the telephone from her home in Southend-on-Sea.

On the new album song titles such as Good To Be Damned seem to bolster the humorous element in her writing, “that’s semi-comedy” she insists. The Smut Peddler continues in a similar vein, “that’s a name I call my boyfriend so I wanted to name it after him”. She continues laughing at the absurdity, “it’s quite a filthy riff when the heavy bit kicks in and I just thought it was suited.”

Her studio band features guitarist, partner and smut peddler Rosco Wilson, drummer Raphael Mura, keyboards are played by David Woodcock and Ian East (of prog band Gong) guests on clarinet and saxophone. The analogue character of Cunningham’s recordings affirms her natural artistic tendencies to inject the original flavours of psychedelia, prog and glam-rock into the modern age.

Released in July 2019 to immediate widespread acclaim, her eponymous début album was the result of an extended period of reflection following the break-up of her band Purson. Recorded to analogue tape at Lightship 95 Studio, a converted boat moored on the Thames, the tapes were then mixed at Gizzard analogue studio in Bow, East London. “Gizzard for me is tried and tested”, Rosalie enthuses. “Every album I’ve done apart from the new one has had some form of the process done there. Pretty much everything I’ve done album wise I’ve mixed there and a couple I’ve recorded there as well including the Purson stuff. What I love about that place is its pretty much 1971 in there, and it’s very basic compared to other top London studios, very little equipment but what’s there is absolutely the right tools for the job for me and for the sound I was after.

“With absolutely no limitations at home apart from the budget of course I have far more tools at my disposal now in my home studio than I actually had at Gizzard. I am trying to be as truthful to analogue processes as possible at home so I’m not doing all this digital jiggery-pokery, a lot of the tracks are tracked to a Revox A-77 reel-to-reel and they are great for putting the whole mix through at the end, I run the machine at 15 inches per second”.

Unlike many recording artists that leave the technical aspect to seasoned record producers, Rosalie appears obsessive with the recording process. “Absolutely yes”, she concurs. “That’s so much of the joy of it for me, I’m a bit of a gear head, bit of a nerd about that stuff but really the exciting part is tinkering around with the endless possibilities, I just love recording.”

The release of Cunningham’s second album Two Piece Puzzle was enthusiastically supported by feature articles in such leading magazines as RNR, Classic Rock, and Prog. For this album Rosalie again chose the converted boat for the recording sessions “The first album was recorded mostly there and the second one some of it was done there. So that’s Soup Studio but it’s now called Lightship actually, a wonderful studio, a hybrid but we rent the analogue room with the gear he’s got there and it has the most incredible drum sound in a boat, which is unexpected.”

Her forthcoming album To Shoot Another Day is set for release November 1^st. “These songs were written immediately after the release of Two Piece Puzzle so they are about two years old but it feels as if they were written a life time ago and I’m writing songs for the next album now.”

Her song writing score rate is verging on prolific. “It doesn’t feel that way to me” she counters. “But the frequency of releases considering how much of it I do myself I think it’s a healthy level of productivity I would say. But my next album is going to be a new band, it’s called Rabbit Foot and it’s with Rosco my partner, and it’s mostly his songs that he’s had kicking around for a while and he writes a hell of a lot and he doesn’t release any of it which is as frustrating as hell for me because I want people to hear this stuff. The live album at Acapela has the song Rabbit Foot on it which the band is named after and we’ve had that in the set for about a year so people know about it.”

So will this run in conjunction with future solo releases? “My solo stuff will take precedence for me but I just really want him to get this vehicle going for his songs, he’s a fantastic guitarist, singer and songwriter and he hasn’t done anything under his own name for about ten years and that’s just a real crying shame so I’m forcing him to do it and the only way to do that is to be in a band.”

Progressive rock by its very definition emphasizes ambitious compositions, experimentation and concept-driven lyrics. There doesn’t appear to be an obvious concept prevailing through To Shoot Another Day but there is a clear nod to 007 as the title might suggest.

“The new album has a very loose concept but there are themes running through,” suggests Rosalie. “I’ve done that Sgt. Pepper thing of bookending it with two songs that have a slight concept and then just putting whatever I want in the middle. So I wouldn’t say it’s a concept album but it’s got a film soundtrack vibe obviously, a James Bond soundtrack, there’s also a kind of breaking the fourth wall that I didn’t really intend to do but realised afterwards that I had done and that’s singing about the creative process”.

The opening title track is epic Bond. “Well, I had the opening chords sort of chromatic pattern and then I heard the lead guitar parts as horn parts originally do-do-do-doo-dee-do that part, and I immediately thought ok that’s a Bond theme. The rest of the song was unrelated really but a bit like Live And Let Die there are unrelated sections in that song. But To Shoot Another Day was the one song I was most insecure about to be honest, only because I don’t think I achieved the sort of grandness that I was imagining.”

The song Denim Eyes is resplendent with a particularly intuitive barking dog, “So my friend Dave Woodcock played piano on that and he goes absolutely everywhere with his dog, and he won’t play a show if the dog isn’t invited, and so the dog was sitting there as we were recording as he always does sat at his feet on the piano bobbing his head along – he’s quite a musical dog – and he waited for the silence on the perfect take that Dave had just done and he did a bark right in the middle, and it was in time so I kept it in.” Rosalie relays the story with great merriment as her sense of humour kicks in again. The other punch line that she didn’t mention was the canine’s name – none other than Barkley!

Does the new album differ from the previous two? “I think with the first one I felt as if I had a lot to prove production wise and song-writing wise and so I threw all my tricks at it, and although I had done two albums with Purson before, not many people knew that for the most part that was my recording project and a lot of people just thought I was the singer in the band.  

“The second album was during a difficult Covid time and I wasn’t able to go out and perform live and so that one feels to me a little more insular, I don’t know how it’s perceived by other people but it wasn’t the best time of my life. This one I feel I’ve settled a lot and it’s more joyful for me, I don’t feel I have anything to prove to anyone anymore because I’ve said it and done it, and on this I really enjoyed playing and I feel I’ve gone into territory that I maybe wouldn’t have gone before because I thought they were clichéd or cheesy, but Denim Eyes is more in a pop direction and there’s a more jazz direction as well on the album that I haven’t gone into before.”

Rosalie Cunningham plays Chepstow Summers End Festival on October 5th and Acapela on November 13th. The new album To Shoot Another Day is released November 1^st.