Interview: Believe in Jess

1:18pm Friday 25th May 2007

WHAT has taken you so long, Jess?

Anyone who has heard Jess Gardham's soulful voice, especially at her Thursday night residency at The Living Room since the Bridge Street bar opened three years ago, will be surprised the York singer-songwriter is only now releasing her debut album. Beyond Belief would sum it up.

Jess was the subject of a profile on her life and music on Ian Clayton's My Yorkshire on Yorkshire Television as long ago as 2005, but Jess feels the timing is just right.

"There are a few songs on Beyond Belief that I wrote seven years ago, but I've developed much further in terms of lyrics and melody, and I've written over half the album over the past year, when the songs have become more funky, so if I'd brought it out two years ago I don't think it would have been so strong.

"I'm very proud of the record and it's all coming together very nicely for me," says the 24-year-old York musician with the distinctive electric blue hair extensions and a folk-blues voice in the Tracy Chapman mould.

"Because I've been on the scene for five years, people know me. Well, there aren't many black singer-songwriters in York, are there? But over the last year, interest seems to have grown, and now there's the part I've played in a film and the album's coming out, and I've just started my biggest ever tour."

Jess, who launched the album with two live sets at The Living Room on May 12, will be promoting Beyond Belief beyond York with gigs in Birmingham, Liverpool, Leeds (Cockpit, May 30), Manchester, London, Edinburgh and elsewhere. All the while too she has to complete her training as a dental nurse.

"Working full-time has been the hardest thing. It's a proper career. I worked before as a basketball coach at the Next Generation Club, in Hull Road - and I'd been a footballer for Leeds United Ladies, when I was 14, 15, playing striker or midfield, though I liked defending as well so I was all over the field! One day I was just serving cappuccino at Next Generation when Karen, my boss now, asked me what I was doing working there.

"I said, I get free gym membership, I keep fit, I enjoy sport', and she said, Well, I need a dental nurse; how would you feel about doing it?'. I thought, You don't get offered an education like that very often and I can always go back to the baseketball coaching'."

Jess now combines the best of both worlds, six months to a year away from full qualification after two years of dental nursing at the York Dental Implant Centre, while her music career continues to blossom.

"My parents have always been very practical, encouraging me to pursue my music but also saying, Think about how you will meet your bills'," she says.

Jess was born into a musical family: her father played in bands for years; her stepfather has toured the world with The Battlefield Band; and her godmother, singer-songwriter Patsy Matheson, is a member of folk quartet Waking The Witch.

"I started writing songs at 11, when I would just hum the tunes, and then my dad taught me to play guitar at 12. I loved performing right from the start - I performed one of my songs, See The Real Me, with two of my friends at school assembly - and I've always been more creative than academic."

From Milthorpe Secondary School, Jess went on to study theatre, English literature and communication studies at York Sixth Form College, and her acting skills are coming to the fore once more in Private Life, a short film funded by Screen Yorkshire.

"A friend of a friend needed a black singer for the role of a 1950s' jazz singer," recalls Jess. "We made the film in Bradford last year. It's 12 to 15 minutes long and the story isn't about the singer but two women who fall in love with each other and meet at this club where all the gays and black people gathered as it was a bit taboo."

Jess sang a couple of numbers, Get You Down and Twilight To Midnight, in her role as "the Jazz Singer", and Abbe Robinson's film already has won the Short Film Award at last autumn's Leeds International Film Festival and the Planet Out Award, "the biggest gay film awards", at the Sundance Festival in the United States.

Jess is branching out into composing music for films and television and has a couple of film engagements of her own coming up. "I'm going to shoot two music videos with Abbe for Caught Out and Followed You Home: proper film crew, high definition cameras," she says.

As Jess sings on Beyond Belief's most joyous song, Just Begun, "My life has just begun." You better believe it.

Jess Gardham plays York College Stage, Parliament Street, York, tomorrow afternoon, 1.30pm, and at Yorkshire Routes, The Junction, York, on Sunday, 9pm, at York Live Music Festival.

She has an 8.30pm residency at The Living Room, York, each Thursday. Her debut album, Beyond Belief, is on sale online at www.jessgardham.co.uk and at Virgin and Borders in York.