Emiliana Torrini

Mon 16th Nov, 2009 in Features

On the line from the UK, Emiliana Torrini is softly spoken and chooses her words with care, but sometimes there’s a delightful flash of excitement in her voice, a hint of the sense of wonder which makes the elfin singer such a likable live performer.

She’s just returned from playing a major festival in Portugal, an experience she enjoyed precisely because she’d never been there before and didn’t know what to expect. For this Icelandic songstress, you see, spontaneity is everything.

Growing up in a small country where the winter sees long hours of darkness, she pored over her mother’s crate of classical records, sung in a choir, attended opera school and developed a crush on Canadian crooner Leonard Cohen. “I thought he was going to be my husband when I was little.”

It was perhaps no surprise that Torrini soon became “completely obsessive” as music had been something of a family affair. Her father, a restaurateur born in Italy, is an accomplished singer, and her great grandfather had instituted a family rule that everybody had to have their own piano.

After furthers detours through indie rock, hip-hop and thrash metal, Torrini appeared won a song contest with her cover of Gloria Gaynor’s I Will Survive, released a couple of records which were mostly covers and co-wrote the Kylie Minogue hit Slow.

The next stage of her unconventional journey to stardom began when her publisher pressured her to collaborate with England-based producer Dan Carey, but, as ever, Torrini was loathe to plan her musical endeavours and initially resisted efforts to bring the pair together. “We eventually hung out for a month talking, not making any music at all, and we became best friends, and it just developed from there,” she explains. When they finally began jamming, Torrini encouraged Carey to dust off his guitar, an instrument he hadn’t played for years. “It was this incredible process of discovery for us.”

For most recent record Me and Armini, the pair had writing sessions in both the UK and Iceland, producing material as strong and varied as the reggae-tinged title track, the sunshine pop of Big Jumps and the endlessly catchy Jungle Drum, a number 1 hit in her native Iceland.

The unusually agitated Gun, meanwhile, harks back to Torrini’s teenage days of writing poetry, where she would regularly experiment with writing from different perspectives. Again, it was a result of her and Carey’s spontaneous style of writing, where everything evolves from a loose jam.

“It came out in one go, in the night, but the tape recorder didn’t record it. Me and Dan just sat there and we were gutted because we had lost the song.” But just as the song had appeared out of nothing, it returned, unexpectedly and fully formed, to her memory six hours later and the pair quickly recorded it in demo form, which ended up being the version on the album.

Later this year, Torrini will make her third visit to Australia for a handful of festivals and club dates. There’ll possibly be some new material, though that is something of a daunting prospect for Torrini. “I’m always really scared when we’re playing new songs in a gig because we already have a bit of trouble with people who want to watch gigs through their phone.”

For a performer who loves nothing better than getting lost in the music, fans scrambling for footage to put on YouTube is difficult to understand. “It’s a really, really weird phenomena…They live their gig experience through their phones and it’s really disturbing because suddenly you’re seeing red stars everywhere. Sometimes I have to remind them, – œPut your phones down and let’s just be here’.”

Emiliana Torrini plays the following dates in December/January.

Wednesday 30 December – Falls Festival, Lorne
Thursday 31 December – Falls Festival, Marion Bay
Saturday 2 January – The Forum, Melbourne
Tuesday 5 January – Enmore Theatre, Sydney
Friday 8 January – Southbound Festival, Busselton