Luckily, we’d been sending out CVs to peripatetic teaching agencies and we both found work in Hertfordshire and Cambridgeshire – so we moved to the country! A beautiful market town in Essex called Saffron Walden… and we’re still here.

…and MOTHERHOOD
I taught singing and piano almost full-time in secondary schools until Drousha arrived, almost enjoying the novelty of mornings and salaries and staff meetings… I stress “almost”!

But if I thought that was tough, or cruise-ships were tough… boy did I not know the meaning of the word! The first three months of Drousha’s life were by far the hardest of my life! I can only thank god that I had so much sleep in my teens and twenties because I could console myself with the notion that I had some hours “in the bank”! And she was a good, healthy baby! I don’t know how people survive with twins or if their child’s ill.

It really tested Charlie and I to the limit and I’m so grateful we’d been together for nine years because we both needed a bit of “understanding”; sleep deprivation can really bring out your “inner-monster”! After six months of motherhood I felt like I was emerging from a haze, a kind of bubble where every thought is about the child. There is no “self”. It’s a bit like what I’m told about national service! Your spirit is broken, your notions of self-importance shattered – but you come out of it feeling like a more complete person. Proudly aware of your insignificance! But I also liken the feelings of new-parenthood to bereavement. It’s a right of passage, a very important, spiritual time…

I kept finding myself lingering around the beautiful parish church St Mary’s. I was drawn there. I hadn’t found Jesus. I wasn’t even looking for him. I just wanted to make contact with something bigger and older and greater than my immediate world; to say “thank you” and to marvel at the wonder of life (I was also drugged on sleep deprivation, sometimes hallucinating – pleasantly out of my box on an overdose of life!). Like grief, having a child; being “broken” also brings things into sharp focus. You immediately know what’s important and the trivial gets thrown out with the baby’s bathwater.

Paperwork, DIY, cleaning the car, physical appearance… all nice to keep on top of – but essentially trivial. These were replaced by family, new friends, sharing music (weeping to Cara Dillon while we bathed our baby for the first time; baby bath poised almost ceremonially on the dining room table, like a kind of baptism!), sleep starved walks in the night… and hour upon hour of feeding, giving, cleaning, loving, willing sleep, wonder, fear…

So – after six months – when this madness had become the norm. When we’d ceased to even hope for a lie-in; put that thought on hold for fifteen years or so. I wouldn’t go so far as to say it’d become easy, but it had become “life”. And I’d also become aware of just how much one human being can achieve in a day. The old saying goes – “if you want something doing, ask a busy person” and it’s true. Pre-Drousha I was proud of myself if I’d managed to be washed and dressed before noon! I literally didn’t know I was born! Now, I knew just what I was capable of and any moment that presented itself to me – however short – which was not “Drousha-time” was certainly not going to be wasted.

Coming back to the music
These stolen moments were becoming hours – she finally started sleeping through the night – and a couple of hours in the day. And what I now know to be my vocation – songwriting – started calling me. I’d find myself at the piano, playing songs I’d written pre-Drousha but always been “far too busy” (ha!) to do anything with! My new eyes told me that that was a big, fat, insecurity derived excuse – and you don’t have time for insecurities when you’ve just got a bit of “you” back.

When you’ve been changing nappies for a while you develop the ability to detect your own BS! It felt so straightforward. This is what I do. I have to enable myself to do it. I’ve got the songs and the motivation to write more. I’ve got more inspiration than I ever had. I’ve got experience, skill and talent. I don’t know if anyone will like it – but quite frankly I don’t care – this is just something I was put here to do. And this crazed state of mind is the reason “My Open Eye” came about.

Thank you Drousha, thank you life!

My Open Eye was born
And thank Charlie Price for not divorcing me or putting me in some mental institution when I even suggested the idea! As always he was unstintingly and naturally supportive, unlike competitive old me who – unchecked would begrudge him his well-deserved successes, he’s a fantastic natural and versatile drummer. Thank goodness, because the songs on My Open Eye came in so many different feels and grooves. He did me proud. I’m so glad I gave him an opportunity to rock out a bit on Broken Home (check out the fills!).

His old compadre and duelling partner Dan Boutwood (guitar) also found himself testing his range of styles and sounds – with great success. The gorgeous Alex Tsentides on bass completed the core band which was complimented most spectacularly by the very much living jazz guitar legend Jim Mullen and his regular collaborator double bassist Mick Hutton on Singing Out, I Can’t Get Anything Past Her and Bonnie Wee Thing (The guitar solo on Bonnie Wee thing still leaves me breathless! Thank you Jim!).

We recorded these first tracks at me old mate Nick Taylor’s Porcupine Studios in Nottingham. He recorded and co-produced A Little Bird Told Me and he just has a beautiful personality and energy that brings out the best in everyone and makes them forget nonsense like performance insecurities or traffic jams or phone bills and lose themselves in the music.

We finished recording and mixed a bit closer to home with new found collaborator Steve Stewart in a collection of sheds near Cambridge Services! Every time I go back there I find Steve’s built a new studio and furnished it from E-Bay. He’s the most technically able man I know who can actually communicate with human beings as well – an all too rare combination! Steve has an ability to make the voice stand out without turning anyone else down and that really appealed to my ego and sense of fairness!

Joanna's thoughts on each track

Singing Out
Don’t know where this one comes from. I’ve started thinking that maybe some of my songs are from former lives or something because they come to me with all the feelings attached to them, as if I experienced them. I even wrote one about a woman grieving her lost baby on what would have been his twenty-first birthday – and I felt the pain, even sensed it might be from a previous time in history…. Spooky! This one’s more contemporary and just talks about the feelings of someone regaining strength and starting on the road to future relationships after having been dumped for a younger model! Hope it’s not a premonition! I just love songs in 3/4 time and this one trips along beautifully. I love the groove set up by Charlie and gorgeous double-bassist Mick Hutton. And Jim Mullen’s solo is the business!

I Can’t Get Anything Past Her
This is quite simply about my wonderful yet infuriating mum. She’s the first person I want to call when things go wrong and the only person I want around when I’m poorly. But when there’s something I don’t want to share it’s really annoying that I can muster my most courageous and chirpy “Hi!” when she calls – and she still responds “What’s the matter?!” turning me back into a snivelling five-year-old! This has just the warmest, homeliest, steadiest, calmest groove. It feels like a lovely cuddle!

Nothing
This song’s about the emotional ecstasy of new love. (I promised I wouldn’t tell… but it’s about Charlie!) It’s other-worldly!

More Than This
I wrote this song ages ago with my old bandmate Ian Wilson but it just won’t leave me alone. It still feels relevant. There will always be days when – to use a Bondism – the world just isn’t enough! I added the third verse post 9/11 and really hope people get them. It amazes me when the connection isn’t made between the chipping away of a peoples’ autonomy, identity and dignity and a reduction in an individual’s regard for human life. What’s to lose, what’s to kill? I love the cheap guitar sound (sorry Dan for making your 64 strat and fender amp sound like pieces of shit) – but it seems to underline the lyric.

Here We Go Around Again
My daughter asked me “did you marry daddy because he’s nice?” and I said “yes” and thought wow, it’s childlike and unsophisticated but true – a bit like this song! It’s another I wrote in a former life with Ian Wilson who’s a master of the 3 chord wonder! I bet Dan never thought he’d be playing 3 notes through an entire song – but he did on one of the many layered guitar parts. I love them and Charlie’s doing interesting stuff at the beginning with the groove, clever chap!

Where Do You Turn To Now
The original title for this was ‘Psycho Bitch’ and I still call it that on set-lists but I bottled out on the CD cover! Dan named me Psycho Bitch when I was his bandleader on cruise ships and in hotels and would force him to do up his top button and get his long rock hair cut short…. And I was one! Dan and I are still duelling on this track – wish I’d got him to do a solo, maybe I hadn’t forgiven him! This one could be paraphrased “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned”.

Cape of Feeling
It took a lot of courage to put two solo tracks on the album but I’m glad I did. And Nick and Steve coped with my neuroses well and helped me do my best. All the songs in the world are about love and nature (don’t quote me on that!) and this combines both.

Broken Home
People talk a lot about anger and betrayal after a partner is unfaithful… but not so often about the child inside screaming “I want to go home, but my home isn’t my home, I have no refuge, the person I turn to has disappeared”. That child would definitely rather hear lies and platitudes. I did get angry on this one – which is not my musical territory but I had some great rock gods around me who led me in and let me loose!

Bonnie Wee Thing
Jim Mullen did an album called ‘Burns’ on my first record label Black Box which sadly just didn’t get the attention it should have. It’s a Scotsman’s labour of love, an instrumental journey through the amazing melodies of Robbie Burns which flow effortlessly through Jim’s guitar as if they were written for him. They sound so soulful, so bluesy, so anthemic and so Scottish and I must have some Celt in me because they make me cry from somewhere very deep! I went on-line and got the Burns lyrics to Bonnie Wee Thing because I was desperate to do the song and to have an excuse to record with Jim. Unfortunately I could only make the original lyrics sound ridiculous. So I wrote my own. This was when my mind was very much focussed on getting pregnant so Bonnie Wee Thing had to be about my unborn, yet to be conceived child. The thought of Drousha. The twinkle in my eye! And she lived up to every sentence!

My Open Eye
It’s quite an understandable part of human nature that we don’t talk or think about death too much – not on the surface anyway. Perhaps that’s why art exists – to do our dirty work for us! This songs about those times; usually right-of-passage times when someone dies, or someone is born when we do think about our mortality. Rummage around in the back of the drawer, find it, dust it off and have a look at it, then hurriedly put it back. Best put away! The band did me proud on this one and I particularly love the outro which Dan had a large hand in. Thanks mate! Hope we can carve up points and wrangle over money one day!

In The Night
The end of love. When you can only see the bad in someone.

I Cry
It’s a terrible admission to make, but I don’t think I really, actively cared that much about world politics until my daughter came along. As long as I could negotiate myself through life without being affected by it, the rest of the world could stay neatly in that little box in the corner of my living room. I saw injustice and poverty and, of course I wept but … by the time Eastenders came on, somehow those emotions were already tucked up in bed.

It’s not just that I now want to make the world a better place for my child – it’s that only when you see an infant, do you realise that we all come from innocence, we were all once children, just wanting to play and live and sleep safe and sound. And really, I think that’s what all adults want too! Freedom to express themselves, in a safe place. So why is the world supposedly populated by “the good” and “the evil”? Surely it’s not human beings that are so different, but our circumstances.

Way back in 1990 or 91 I went on my first (and until recently, my only) political march, I think it was about the poll tax but I really don’t know because my only reason for getting on the bus was for a day out shopping in London!

So going on the anti-war march; on my own with a million others – most of them more like my parents than activists! – was a big deal. It was so huge, so obviously the sentiment of the nation. I had no doubt when we walked up Piccadilly to Hyde Park Corner, looking back on the massive multi-coloured wave of defiance, that we’d made our point and it would be heeded! And this was a crowd that was unaware that there were no WMD, and still we knew the war would be wrong.

It’s wrong. We’ve all been involved in something wrong. My country is now like a dog with it’s ears and tail hanging down, knowing it’s been naughty. You can justify the events till the end of time but deep down in everyone’s belly we know it’s wrong.

This song is about guilt. I didn’t send the troops but I thought I’d done enough to stop it – one thrilling day out in London – what a gesture! And as part of a democracy we must all take some of the blame for casting our votes and putting our faith in people who took us as a nation to ‘sort out’ Iraq. And in a strange way, I feel proud of standing up and saying I feel guilt – I know that sounds contradictory – but it seems that admitting guilt is a dying art, nobody is big enough to stand up and say “I did it, it was me” and, more importantly “I’m sorry”.

The song is also about being English; part of a culture that sometimes I despair of for it’s need for mediocrity and loss of identity – and yet, I love it, it moves me. I would hate anything to threaten what I grew up with, it feels safe, it’s what I know, it’s home. Which, of course, brings home to me the arrogance of the idea of any nation presuming to ‘sort out’ another – especially by blowing it up and rebuilding it!

I persuaded flugal horn player Jonathan Radford to join me on I Cry – he came up with a soaring melody which sang musically from the same hymnsheet as the lyrics; very English, very melancholic and haunting – now I just need to find a brass band to complete this one!
Please check out the link to medical aid for Iraqi children (www.maic.org.uk)

One
After A Little Bird Told Me, I realised that songs about real experiences were the ones people related to most. My songs “Father’s Day” and “How Deep” about my dad and mum were getting great reactions from audiences. I was onto a winner! So I had the idea to write a song about my best friend since childhood, Carolyn. Except all I could come up with was “you’re great, thanks for being my friend, wasn’t it funny walking home from school, didn’t we eat a lot of chocolate!” Not really Ivor Novello territory! So I faked it! I made up the worst thing that could happen between two bezziemates. So pleased we did a latin feel on a track on this album – one day I’ll do an all-Brazilian album, beware!

<<BACK