Gig - Katy Moffatt

Growing up as a teenager in Fort Worth, Texas, Katy Moffatt was so intent on catching the top 40 on the local radio that she would come home from school, go straight to bed and unbeknown to her parents, set her alarm for midnight so that she could spend the night listening to her favourite tunes. “It was the only time I could be completely undisturbed”, she tells me over the phone. “I would sit up doing my homework and calling in to the DJs until 3 or 4am.” Fuelled by her passion for show tunes, the Beatles and Leonard Cohen, the young Katy started learning guitar and turning her poetry into songs. Aged just sixteen she started performing. “Because I was underage I had to perform anywhere I could. I played in a coffee bar and a Neiman-Marcus fashion show with a ‘political’ theme. Most bizarrely I played at a rest home where I met Willy Nelson’s grandmother.”

Aged 18 Moffatt moved to Colorado where she was snapped up by a major label. But she soon felt stifled by their attempts to push her as pop music and it was later, once released from the deal and now living in LA that she started to perfect her cross-over blend of ‘Country/Blues/Folk rock with a bit of jazz thrown in’. Aside from winning the 1985 best folk newcomer award, she cites one of her career highlights as having had a song covered by Hoyt Axton. “If ever I have a mentor, it is him”, she says. “It was just such an honour to have him cut one of my tracks.” ER