Preview: Odin Dragonfly, Fibbers, York, August 24

12:48pm Friday 24th August 2007

HOW do you choose a name for your musical group?

Take, for example, the York folk duo Odin Dragonfly, the "dressing-room project" that has taken on a life of its own for Mostly Autumn musicians Heather Findlay and Angela Gordon, culminating in the launch of their debut album tonight at Fibbers.

"We were asked to play for a charity event at Kennedy Café Bar, when a friend of ours, Anna Winstanley, was going to Africa to work with sick children and she decided to do a fundraiser, " Angela says.

"She knew of our little 'dressingroom project', as we called it, and so we had to decide on a name for our debut performance. We took Findlay and Gordon to find an anagram we liked and that's how we came up with Odin Dragonfly."

As chance would have it, the name tied in with Nordic myth.

"When we researched it, we found that Odin was a Norse god, whose daughter Freyr gave him a dragonfly when he lost his muse. So he got his muse back, and we felt that was apt for us."

The name Odin Dragonfly stuck, but Heather and Findlay's naming technique set other musicians thinking. "We went on tour with Fish, and each day his band and management came up with a new anagram that they pinned on our dressing room door, " says Heather.

"Some of them were very rude - too rude to print!"

Odin Dragonfly grew out of timefilling hours before a performance.

"I've been involved with Mostly Autumn for eight years, Heather for ten, and anyone who knows how soundchecks work will know how we would be stuck in our dressing room ready to play with our instruments beside us. So we would play our songs to each other while we waited, " says Angela.

Odin Dragonfly took wing in August 2005, as Heather and Angela shared lead vocals, sang harmonies and set their songs to piano, acoustic guitar, flute, penny whistle and percussion. Despite their years of performing with Mostly Autumn, however, initially they found performing as a duo a rather more unnerving experience.

"When it was broken down to the two of us, it was quite scary. You strip everything away and I knew it would unnerve me at first, so you just have to fine tune what you do, " says Heather. "When you take away five people"? "Five noisy, supportive people!"

interjects Angela? "Well, it's been a stepping stone for us to go out on our own. Lots of people may be doing that, but I think the Gina Dootsons of this world have balls of steel playing solo."

Heather picks up her line of thought again. "People will say 'how can you be nervous when Odin Dragonfly play to 200 people, when you play to 10,000 with Mostly Autumn?'.

"Mostly Autumn played Murrayfield a few weeks ago, opening for Bryan Adams, and I found that so easy! I don't remember getting nervous, just excited, and it was all over too quickly, " she says.

"But with Odin Dragonfly, for the first ten gigs, I couldn't wait to get off the stage. I felt like eyes were burning into me."

Those first ten gigs aside, Heather and Angela have enjoyed the experience of broadening their repertoire and honing their musical craft. "You can become complacent, so it's healthy to set these challenges. I've often found you need someone else to put an event into place to kick your backside!" says Heather.

After a handful of shows supporting Circulus, Focus and Fish both home and overseas and a headline British tour earlier this year, Odin Dragonfly now release their debut album, Offerings. The album showcases songs from Heather and Angela's solo and collaborative repertoires since 2000, a couple of re-worked Mostly Autumn numbers and two Seventies' covers, Ian Anderson's Witches Promise and Stevie Nicks's Forsaken Love.

Recorded by Chris Johnson at Nautical in York in January, the songs can be heard "in their most organic state, representing our live performances as closely as possible to give the listener a feeling they are part of something very new and special".

In keeping with the early days of Mostly Autumn, Offerings is being released independently, with 2,000 copies stored in the Gordon nursery at home. "I didn't realise how much space they would take up, but as long as they're cleared out by December, " says Angela, who is expecting a baby that month.

"We have to weigh up whether we should promote it ourselves through the Internet or go through a distributor, as we have five potential distributors interested, but for now we're enjoying it being our project, " says Heather.

"It's been a really 'family' effort, with lots of advice from Bryan Josh of Mostly Autumn and the right people in Chris Johnson and John Spence to produce and mix and master the album.

"The sleeve designer, Richard Nagy, is an old friend and he really got inside our heads for the artwork design, taking the idea that each song had its own look and yet there was a united theme, like rummaging in your grandma's attic."

Angela agrees: "I think he has really captured the idea on the front cover: the 'offerings' in the picture mean something individually but together they say who we are."

Mostly Autumn will remain Heather and Angela's first musical priority, their bread and butter, but Odin Dragonfly is flourishing too in the spaces in between the band's commitments. "It's been nice this summer to be able to sit back and put this album out. It's like putting a kid into school, " says Heather. Hence Odin Dragonfly are playing not only Fibbers tonight, but also The Fly, in New Oxford Street, London, tomorrow, and The Little Civic, Wolverhampton, on Sunday.

• Odin Dragonfly launch their debut album at Fibbers, York, this evening, supported by Aimie J Ryan and Sarah Dean. Tickets: £7 advance, £8 door. Mostly Autumn play Grand Opera House, York, on November 9 at 8pm; tickets £20 on 0870 606 3595.