Gig - Gillian Glover

Listen to Gillian Glover’s music, and you realise why the list of her influences on her MySpace page includes over fifty artists, from Leonard Cohen to Ella Fitzgerald. It’s difficult to describe what she sounds like. A more pumped-up Suzanne Vega? A less raunchy Chrissie Hynde? Her voice is powerful, certainly; slightly poppy sometimes, at other times quite rock chick. There are virtuoso noises from various instruments which jump unexpectedly out of the tracks. It all sounds very… musicianly, actually. Which isn’t surprising, considering Gillian’s background and company. She’s the daughter of Deep Purple’s Roger Glover, and band members include a drummer who played with Bowie in his Ziggy stage, and a pianist who was in the Blockheads, and used to write songs with the late, great Ian Dury.

“The band is an eight piece,” says Gillian, down the phone, “but sometimes we reduce things and the sound gets quite sparse and acoustic. We go through a whole range of emotions and I want the music to reflect that. It’s all rooted in blues and folk, though.” I ask her what we might expect as an encore, but she won’t reveal that secret. “It might be a song off the album, or it might be a cover.” I ask which covers they do, and she tells me that ‘it reflects the drummer’s past career’. Time might take a cigarette, then, or we may be letting the children boogie in the strange setting of a marquee by the river at Barcombe Mills. AL