This is a transcript of my appearance on Ipswich Community Radio’s Breakfast show with Izzy Lane from Friday 8th June this year at 7:30am. If you would like to listen to the whole show you can find it here
“Have you got a favourite track on your CD?”
“Um…That’s a funny question isn’t it! I’d probably pick 13 actually, unless you played it earlier in which case, don’t play it again!
“No, I played Welcome Home, Welcome Home’s my favourite”
“Oh, yes I’ve had several people play that!”
*pause* “So we’ll go with…”
“13 is track 8”
“Apocalypse Dreams..? Oh 13…the song!”
“No, you don’t want Apocalypse Dreams, that’s 10 minutes long and that forays into Prog rock, You don’t want that at this time in the morning!”
“Fancy having a track called thirteen AND a track number 13”
“Absolutely!”
“Okay, this is 13”
*13 is played*
“It nearly caught me out! We are joined this morning by local singer-songwriter Carys, good morning”
“Hello!”
“And we’ve just been listening to 13 off her new album, A Different Kind Of Normal. Can you start by telling us a bit about what inspired you to produce this album, as I’m not allowed to ask you about…what was it?”
“Brexit, North Korea and whether all unicorns should be tax-free.”
“No. Only invisible pink unicorns”
“Obviously it was the tax-free unicorns that inspired me to record the album. Yeah… Did you actually warn the listeners that you weren’t likely to get anything even relatively sane out of me? I might get around to talking about the album eventually…”
“No, I didn’t warn anybody about anything”
“Okay, fair enough…What inspired me? I think anybody who writes songs and does so over a number of years, the natural next stage is ‘I want to record these songs’.
I’ve wanted to do a solo album for about a decade, though I dread to think what state it would have been produced if I’d done it then. Its safe to say most of the songs I was writing 10 years ago don’t make it anywhere near the album. The exception is the first track Siren Call which was the first song I ever wrote which would have been in 2005. But then the next oldest one on there, not counting the two cover versions, Sir Dominick’s Bargain, I think I wrote in 2012. So there’s a massive gap where nothing actually ends up on there. Though that said, some of them have been released on bandcamp, so they’re already out there in a digital format.”
“You do quite a lot of work with other groups don’t you? Is that more singing other peoples’ material?”
“It’s some and some. Sophie and I do a pagan duo called Freyja’s Fire. Some of that is covers of chants, Inkubus Sukkubus and other bands I can’t remember the name of at the moment…”
“Its way too early in the morning to remember anything”
“.It is – and some traditional things, some songs I’ve written and some we’ve co-written. So there’s quite a big mix in there, it’s anything that’s got a pagan flavour that we like. Oh, Show of Hands we do a couple of theirs. There’s one called The Well that Soph does.”
“I particularly like their ‘Arrogance, Ignorance, Greed”
“Yes, great track. I must be good and not start singing it loudly. Not that one when I’m not warmed up! And then, I do vocals in a Nightwish tribute. For anyone not familiar with Nightwish, they’re Finnish symphonic metal. I do operatic vocals so that’s jolly good fun. We’re actually on hiatus at the moment because we’re minus a keyboard player. So if anyone listening – preferably in the Essex/Dagenham type area or able to get there – fancies being keyboard player in a Nightwish tribute do please get in touch and the guys will love you forever.”
“So you’re doing quite a bit aren’t you?”
“Yes, I haven’t even mentioned the work I do with David Wright who’s my producer because that’s actually the main thing. David has a band called Code Indigo which actually now is no more, because we played our final concert at E-Scape festival in Halesworth last Saturday. The band itself has actually been going since 1994. David and another musician called Robert Fox started the band. Unfortunately a combination of Robert’s ill health and retirement means he isn’t going to be doing any more live concerts, so Saturday was his last live concert and that was a bit emotional, but it was a really good night. Loads of photos on facebook, and quite a lot of video was taken, so I’m not going to say anything about a potential DVD release because I’m not allowed to. That would be naughty.”
“We won’t mention that!…so is that a case of one door closing and your solo career’s the next door opening?”
“Well I’m still very much working with David and we do stuff together as a duo as well. He’s an electronic music composer and we did an album together last year called Prophecy, which we toured. We took that to Germany and Holland and Norway…and Upnorthshire which obviously you need a special passport for”
“Yes, definitely! Even worse than Norfolk!”
“Yes, they check you for the extra finger obviously…am I allowed to say that?”
“I don’t know, I think you just did”
“I always feel its better to say something and then apologise rather than ask permission.”
“Yes, I do union work and we work on the same theory – do it first and then apologise.”
“Absolutely! Did I say that? I thought I only though it…”
“So this is your first solo album. Where can we get it? That’s an important question!”
“You can stop me in the street and purchase a copy, because I will always have a couple in my handbag. You can – and this is where I always mess up the website so I may have just dive my head into the bag and check. My website’s carysmusic.com and… this is where I always mess up the AD music site. I think its admusic shop. It used to be AD music online which doesn’t work anymore. I’m sure its admusicshop.com. It should be on there somewhere. There will now be a short bit of rustling while I dive into my handbag”
“Well the link’s off carysmusic.com isn’t it. If you go there you’ll get to it won’t you?”
“Yes! www.admusicshop.com”
“Where did you find that?”
“On a completely different CD that I happened to have in my handbag.”
“I have just spotted it, but its in very small print”
“Oh, I just grabbed out a compilation CD from last year that has it on in larger letters”
“So there’s a whole range of music on there we can go and get?”
“Oh, absolutely! Well, AD music is David’s record label. My CD is, the catalogue number is AD197, so that’s how many albums have come before. A lot of it is electronic. You will absolutely find something you will enjoy. If you’re into electronic type space music then definitely check out David’s music. There’s a fantastic female composer, Bekki Williams. Not very prolific unfortunately, she’s not done many albums, but really really great. If you enjoy folk type stuff I’d recommend Steve Orchard. There’s all the Code Indigo albums on there as well”
“Is there stuff by Celandine as well?”
“Celandine’s album is on the AD site as well”
“Going forward will you be focussing on the solo work or carrying on with the bands or mixing and matching..?”
“Yes! The priority is the work and composing I do with David Wright and my own solo work, which aren’t actually mutually exclusive because – obviously I’m doing vocals in both ways. The only difference is, when I do vocals with David it tends to be instrumental vocals so its using my voice as an instrument rather than actually singing lyrics. Lyrics are most likely to be spoken over the music. So its very different things and I struggle to only do one thing, I then get very excited by something else so I have this dreadful tendency to spread myself too thinly.”
“Tell me about it! You’re talking to the person who’s knackered because I’ve been out every night this week and only done half a set of interview notes”
“I was a good girl, I stayed in last night”
“I had some friends come round, they offered me free dinner!”
“You can’t say no to a free dinner, can you?”
“I would like to say good morning to my brother. He wants to know if its just rainbow unicorns that are going to be tax free…”
“Oh no. No, I think ALL unicorns should be tax free. Especially Deathstar. Deathstar is my invisible unicorn.”
“I think it should only be invisible pink unicorns…I can’t remember why they were pink…that’s another story…”
“Oh, I know, but unfortunately I’m World Leader, so what I say goes. And if I want to make all unicorns tax free I shall.”
“Um…you’re going to have that as…your policy…to…”
“AAAnd I’ve cracked up the interviewer! I’d love to say this is the first time this has happened..!”
“You mention on your website that you’ve got Aspergers syndrome. Do you want to say a bit more about that?”
“Fabulous! An open-ended question, I really deal well with those! Um…yeah…um… I’ve always…I’ve always been aware that I didn’t seem to, I don’t know, react to things like other people. I remember these dreadful circular conversations in my childhood when I would say something completely blindingly obvious and simple to my parents, and they wouldn’t have a clue what I was talking about, and I would tie myself in knots and end up howling and crying because I couldn’t get through to them. I actually remember wailing at them ‘But it’s so easy, why don’t you understand?’ And they… didn’t understand that perhaps I had originally been concerned that a pencil was pink instead of blue and I was trying to get through to them that there was the wrong coloured pencil on the table, and they actually thought I was talking about where we were going on holiday.
And that probably sounds completely bizarre, and that’s because that’s the only way I can describe something like that.
I live by rules, and they’re not the sort of rules anyone else would need to think of. One very impressive example was with my ex husband. He threw out a feather duster and I was absolutely horrified and devastated and I had a meltdown over it. And this was before we knew I had Aspergers. Much wailing and gnashing of teeth ensued. Eventually I got him to understand that because he’d thrown out a feather duster which was a joint-owned thing, I thought it was equally likely that he might come home and throw out our bed without asking. So we had to create a rule that he wasn’t allowed to throw out anything that cost more that £10 without asking me first.
So it’s things like that that apparently most of you would take for granted and the idea that someone would throw out a bed without asking would be ridiculous, but it didn’t even occur to me that… anyone wouldn’t do that. As it said in the song, ‘Absolutely anything can happen at practically any point in time.’ It can. It could. It could, I have already while we’ve been sitting here checked out all the possible escape routes in this building in case a nutter should come in through the door holding a machine gun.”
“Unfortunately there’s only the one. Well actually there’s a second one through the back door…”
“What’s really disappointing as well is that in the loo that trapdoor doesn’t go anywhere. There’s a loose floorboard and if you pick it up there’s only concrete underneath. There isn’t even a little cubby hole, and I was very disappointed when I checked under there. But I was excited that you’ve got orange swarfega soap in there.”
“I have no idea why we’ve got swarfega soap – like anybody’d get would get greasy in here”
“But nobody has swarfega soap anymore! That’s why it’s so exciting… I have a feeling I may have wandered off at a slight tangent here.”
“Only a slight one!”
“So, it was probably about a decade ago that I put a probable name to what I thought I had. And I mentioned it to a couple of friends and my boss in my day job, all of whom said “Well of course you have, tell us something we don’t know!”
“Yeah, I think some of these things are very obvious to other people. I do some work with a chap and I said to him one day ‘do you happen to have dyslexia?’ and he said ‘oh, no, no’ and then he’s come back more recently and said ‘I think I might have dyslexia’. Yeah, I know you have!”
“Yeah, about two and a half years ago my mental health crashed and – lets just say the doctors finally upgraded my anxiety to severe, which is kind of what it had been for about the preceding four years. But I’d been told ‘oh, its only mild, you’re fine’. So I’d thought that everybody spent an hour and a half trying to calm themselves down enough to go to sleep every night and had three or four panic attacks a day. I thought that was normal. I’d got into that state. But from that I ended up seeing a really great counsellor…therapist. And I said to him ‘I think I’ve got Aspergers syndrome’ And he said “oh right, okay’. And then a couple of weeks later he said ‘I’ve written you a referral letter!’”
“Oh right?”
“And I’m like ‘Okay, so I’m not imagining it!’ And I did all the questionnaires and my mother filled in a load as well about when I was small, and there’s a 2 hour psych review thingy, and then finally in May last year it was official – I am a Different Kind Of Normal!”
“Oh wow, it’s taken some time then”
“What the really strange thing is, if you get a diagnosis, I’m not sure if it happens so much with small children, but certainly teenagers and adults, you regress. Because after you get the diagnosis, it’s a very weird feeling of oh my god, I…I’m allowed to behave like this, I can behave like this, I don’t have to mask. I went through several months of real…bizarre behaviours I haven’t displayed since I was 11 or 12. I’m 41 now…and probably drove some friends up the wall. I’m trying not to rock at the moment because then my voice would do this (moves forward and back from microphone) and that would be a really bad thing wouldn’t it? Yeah, okay, so I won’t do that…”
“You don’t have to sit on your hands either”
“I’m not sitting on my hands, I’m grabbing my knees really really tightly so I don’t fiddle”
“I fiddle with all sorts of things!”
“What you do in your own time is entirely your own concern!”
“It must be quite difficult to get a diagnosis so late. Because its almost like you’ve kind of got used to it and people accept you for who you are, because I think with adults it’s very different isn’t it, we do accept people…”
“We learn to mask...pause...I don’t know, you kind of accept that your work colleague will just stop and stare into space for a few minutes every now and then or sometimes just gets angry and screams for no apparent reason. But…pause…I’ve apparently now come to the end of my personality, please ask another question.”
*laughs* “Well its a problem with having badly prepared notes, we’re back onto the tax-free status of unicorns which was actually a facebook joke that only makes any sense if you have fb”
“If you’re on my facebook friends it makes loads of sense!”
“And I refuse to talk about Brexit…”
“On the grounds that we might incriminate ourselves”
“I’ll only rant! So, is there going to be another album?”
“In the fullness of time, absolutely. But given that this one’s only five weeks old, then I haven’t even got past…actually the next one I’m going to be on in any format is David Wright’s forthcoming album, I think its a double, its called Stranger Days which is out sometime the end of July I believe. I should be finalising the vocals on that sometime in the next week or two. So that’s the next thing. I’ve got a download single release I’m going to be doing later in the year of a song I wrote back in March for a pirate songwriting competition”
“A pirate song? Do you have to say ‘ooh aargh’?”
“Oh, absolutely. Well, friends of mine, Sophie Sue and Mim, they are vocalists in a pirate band called CMRD, and there was a pirate day…”
“I didn’t even know you could have pirate bands! This is an education!”
Well Roy Mette who started the band, he’s written two albums worth of songs about pirates. One mostly the Caribbean pirates and one mostly the ones who worked around the Thames and the like. They’re very good songs, get hold of the albums if you can. So there were several bands having a full-on pirate festival day. And there was a songwriting competition. So I duly wrote a song, but then I was in the studio working on my album and I couldn’t go along so the song wasn’t used. I thought, I’m not going to not perform it, and I took it out, and its Max the Pirate Cat. It’s a jolly and very silly little ditty – it gets very sad in the middle, but it’s alright children, it has a happy ending…”
“I don’t want cat ditties that have unhappy endings…”
“No, no, Max is a very happy cat at the end of it. Without giving too much away, Max becomes Manx after a terrible battle at sea, over about thirteen verses. The next thing will be I need to record that and and release it as a download. So that’ll be happening at some point. I’ve got a musical half-written.
“A musical?”
“Yes. It’s called NightCity, its based on urban legends… but not just urban legends, also Victorian myths and some thing I’ve completely invented myself. Just say, you do NOT want to meet the NightWatchman down a dark alley! And… at some point I’ve got a vague idea in my mind of dragging Soph into the studio – I don’t think she knows about this yet – and recording all our Freyja’s Fire stuff and releasing those as a download. But both of those, we’re talking in the next year or two. And David Wright and I might well do another album in the next year or two as well. There’s no set schedule for any of those though.”
“We’ll just have to follow you on the website or facebook”
“Yes, carysmusic.com. I’ve got a blog on there, I believe the blog is called ‘Things’ and my biog is called ‘Stuff’ or it could possibly be the other way around…”
“I would look it up on my tablet and check, except my tablet won’t talk to the internet”
“That’s okay, don’t worry… the blog is kind of about performance and things. I’m still hopeless at self-promotion. I still forget to tell anybody when I’ve got a gig until two days before”
“Well that was one of my questions, I did remember to write that down. Where are your upcoming live performances? Because Celandine can be found at the Half Moon in…Walton”
“Walton near Felixstowe, fourth Thursday of the month. It’s a really great folk session, it’s very much a ‘come along and join in no matter what you play, what your level of ability’, just come along, have some fun and anybody can do a solo if they’d like to do a solo but bear in mind we’re very, very ‘joiny-inny’ and if you sing a song that anyone knows we’ll all be joining in by the end of the first line!”
“I’ll be alright. I don’t know many folk songs and I can’t carry a tune in a bucket”
“Depends what sort of bucket. I find orange buckets are best for tune carrying”
“No, I prefer metal ones”
“Fair enough…they do resonate better”
“They have ting-y noise”
“I have actually got an orange metal bucket at home”
“That’s slightly scary…”
“It is, because I had forgotten that…well, its a plant pot but it looks like a bucket”
“Oh yes, I had one of those they’re quite good fun aren’t they? They’re not big buckets are they…’she says, they’re about this big, holding up her hands’…”
“Oh, no, mine’s about this big…For the benefit of several listeners, I’m holding my hands about eight inches apart”
“Whereas I’m only holding mine about four inches apart. Reminds me a of a phone conversation my Mum had, when she phoned her Mum up and said ‘is this fish off?’ – it gets worse – and her Mum said ‘hold it to the phone and I’ll smell it.”
“If I’d been that Mum I would have gone *sniff, sniff* ‘oh gosh yes, throw that in the bin right away, don’t even give it to the cat!’ Anyway, going back to the original question…”
“Live appearances, yes”
“I’ve got quite a lot of things that are in the process of being finalised at the moment, so we’re actually firming up dates rather than saying ‘here, here, here and here’!”
“But they’ll all be published in due time, on carysmusic.com..?”
“They will be published either on my website or on my facebook page or on my facebook profile AT LEAST forty eight hours before the event. When I remember.”
“That’s facebook.com/caryssongs/”
“Facebook really confused me this morning. One friend had shared a video clip of the iconic rain scene from “Singin in the Rain” and the very next comment down was a old school friend of mine saying ‘That was the scariest movie I’ve ever watched!’ And naturally my brain at quarter past six in the morning put two and two together”
“So, you’ve got the new album out. We can go on the website and get it or stop you in the street and get it”
“Or you can ask me about it on facebook”
“Was there anything else you wanted to add?”
“Fabulous, another open-ended question! Ideal!”
“Its supposed to be good interview technique, because if you ask an open-ended question there’s always a risk that the person you’re interviewing will say yes or no. And my mum’s saying it wasn’t fish, it was a chicken. And she phoned her mother-in-law, not her mother, and was told to wash it in vinegar. I got most of the story right!”
*silly voice* “Ladies and gentleman, today in Cookery Tips from the wise and sensible. If you have an off chicken, be sure to douse it well in vinegar BEFORE giving yourself food poisoning.”
“I guess it depends on how off it is…let’s not even go there”
*continuing* “If its very, very off be sure to use strong vinegar, if its only a little bit off you can get away with Cider vinegar. Other vinegars are available!”
“Hahaha! Now we’ve got very silly”
“Have we? I’m only just getting going!”
“Right!”
“Right. Sorry…I suppose I should say sensible things about my album! Okay, please buy the album because its… Let me think… There are two completely unaccompanied vocal tracks with just wind in the background. I’d like to point out that’s the sort of wind you get whirling around in the trees or at the beach. Not the sort of baked bean-y wind you might be imagining. Am I allowed to say that?”
“Yes.”
“Yes, because that would be inappropriate wouldn’t it…”
“It is a very good album”
“Thanks. There are two tracks featuring Rosemary, who is the other half of Celandine. The final track as I mentioned earlier is a ten minute foray into prog, which includes on bass Rick Kemp formerly of Steeleye Span. To which people say “How did you get Rick to play on it?’ And I say ‘I rang him up and asked.’”
“Yes, its always surprising what you can do by ringing people up and asking”
“I’ve done several songwriting courses with Rick at Maddy Prior’s place, Stones Barn which is in Cumbria. Three or four of the tracks on there were written on his songwriting weekends and a couple more of them were refined. So there was one that was particularly inspired partly there, which was Apocalypse Dreams, part of that. So I said to him “Would you play bass on it” and he said “well I’ve retired you know.” and I said “Okay, that’s fine don’t worry .” And I very sneakily sent a copy of the half finished track and the lyrics and chords and said “thought you’d like to have a look at this.” and he said “I’ve retired you know” “Oh yes, I know, I just thought you’d like to hear it”
Then a couple of days later I got a message “I’ve found a studio to record in, will you send me the backing?” Yeah, I think I can manage that! So, very, very grateful to Rick for playing on it. And the other bass player is my stepdad Mike!”
“Brilliant. Well I think its a really excellent album, I enjoyed playing it”
“I’m rather pleased with how it turned out. Big thank you to David for producing it, playing on it and dealing with my meltdowns in the studio. We actually had to create a coloured card system for when I can’t express myself…”
“Well thank you very much for coming into the studio ridiculously early!”
“I shall now run off to the day job and hopefully get there on time!”