LISA HANNIGAN

IT MAY FEEL LIKE DAINTY CHANTEUSE LISA HANNIGAN HAS JUST STEPPED OFF THE SET OF AMELIE AS SHE INDULGES YOU WITH ENGAGED CONVERSATION AND EASY FUN BUT, DESPITE THE GENTLE LOOKS AND ENCHANTING LIGHTNESS ON HER FEET, IN PERFORMANCE SHE’S ACTUALLY A BIT OF A TOUGH COOKIE.

She has a sometimes delicate, sometimes mighty, voice that can roll you up into a ball or kick you to the corner of any room in which she sings (never more so than during profoundly sad LITTLE BIRD, let fly as if singing for her life). Her knack for unique turns of phrase sets about unravelling the heart to its bare threads; “Your heart sings like a kettle / your words, they boil away like steam”…
2008 debut SEA SEW and follow-up PASSENGER (2011), confirmed all suspicions that there were was much more to come than being a mere bit-part player in The Cake Sale or the essential but seemingly undervalued female component in early-2000s Damien Rice albums. Despite her best efforts to, as she once put it, “elbow a way out”, Rice’s unceremonious dismissal of his muse backstage moments before a show in 2007 left her bruised, leading to reassessment followed by untethered writing.

A more assured person emerged, solemnity and muted Rice-era stage presence replaced by a charmingly eye-catching tea-dress wardrobe and off-kilter bonhomie. She also sounded more focused, and – it has to be said – much happier, on the unfettered SEA SEW, where the secret crush flight-of-fancy I DON’T KNOW soared comfortably with the daydreaming of OCEAN AND A ROCK and the woozily half-awake half-asleep love song VENN DIAGRAM. SEA SEW was a beguiling introduction to Lisa Hannigan’s homespun arts-and-crafts approach to music, where yarns of all shades and textures can be knitted together to fashion something comfortably frayed but one-off and stylish.

Last year’s opened-out PASSENGER made more than good on the cosiness of the debut, with journeys (emotional / actual) figuring strongly. Pining HOME sat with fizzy KNOTS and excitable WHAT’LL I DO, guileless (and hilariously mumsying) SAFE TRAVELS (DON’T DIE) and Nick Drake yearn PAPER HOUSE. It was one of the strongest, most well-rounded, records of 2011. After a year of almost constant road-work, this month Hannigan is opening for Richard Hawley on his UK zig-zag, playing a stripped down version of her usual “plinky plonk rock”.
Backstage on a rainy evening in Holmfirth, minutes before the first show of the tour, Lisa spent a little time with The Mouth Magazine to talk about songwriting, and how she fancies her next record might just be a hybrid of Richard Hawley croon and disco…