Gothic Theatre
Polly Paulusma
Polly Paulusma: Biography
01 January 2004
“When I was eight, I built a raft at the bottom of the garden from a bit of old fence,” Polly recalls. “I nagged my mum to take it down to the river. She eventually gave in but she insisted it had to be attached to a rope and she would hold on to it. So I hid a pair of scissors in my pocket. I was planning to cut the rope and sail off to London. I didn’t get very far. But I had the same feeling towards making this record. It was about defiance and taking your life in your own hands. I was a real handful, I can tell you.”
Which perhaps explains why soon after the raft incident, Polly was packed off to an all-girl’s convent school. But if the sisters entertained hopes of taming her maverick spirit, their ministrations had a different effect. “They taught me how to be self-contained, how to stand on my own two feet. I also had a pretty wild time,” she recalls.
She also began to find her musical voice. Polly rebelled against formal piano lessons at an early age and wrote her first song at ten (actually a re-write of a Paul McCartney track—“I liked the tune but I decided he’d written the wrong words, so I wrote my own. Something about swans. Much better than his”).
The onset of her teens coincided with the rise of ‘baggy’ — the musical scene that grew out of the clubs in Manchester, England. She loved everything about it, learned guitar and was soon “entertaining everyone at school and showing off,” as she puts it. Baggy didn’t last long. But it was the starting point of a musical journey. “I began to work my way back through the annals and I came upon people like Joni Mitchell and Nick Drake. That moment of discovery is amazing. It’s something you can never recapture,” she recalls.
It inspired her own songwriting, although when she left school and went up to Cambridge she joined a ten-piece soul-funk covers band, “a bit like the Commitments,” and suffered regular bouts of laryngitis shouting herself hoarse doing Janis Joplin impressions.
After graduating, she moved to London and formed a new band doing original material. But music was still only a hobby. “I convinced myself I had to have a proper grown-up respectable career,” she remembers. She considered becoming an academic and began a PhD, only to abandon it after a term. She could have been a journalist, and briefly took a job at the BBC World Service as a researcher. She also considered a career as a novelist, and even got as far as placing her manuscript with a literary agent.
By the time she was asked to sing backing vocals on Ben & Jason’s 2001 album ‘Ten Songs About You’, she had quit the band. “It was meant to be one last hurrah in my musical career before I got a proper job,” she recalls. “Instead singing with them it became blindingly obvious I had to do music,” she recalls. “Everything else felt wrong. I realized I wasn’t facing up to the truth. I was like a moth going round a flame and I had to plunge in.”
The novel was cast aside and she began playing solo gigs at acoustic venues such as the late-lamented Kashmir Klub. Two years of gigging and selling hand-made recordings from the stage meant that when she came to record her first album, she had 40 songs to draw upon.
Oli Hayhurst on double bass and Rastko Rasic on drums came in “to color in all the black and white parts”. And thanks to some tolerant neighbours, organ, dulcimer, trumpet and a variety of other textures were added in the garden shed during the summer of 2003. The basic philosophy was no click tracks, as few edits as possible and as much playing live as was feasible. On several tracks, Polly, who produced the album herself, went back to her original demos. Dark Side, the album’s captivating opener, is the original recording of the song from her first demo three years ago, produced by Ben Parker (Ben & Jason). One Day and Over The Hill are also the original demos. “There was such a vibe to them that it seemed ridiculous to try and redo them,” she explains.
Where do these enchanting, insightful, beautiful songs come from? She really isn’t sure. “I’m mystified by it. I’ve no idea how it works. You have to make a window of time every day and hope something comes and not allow life to get in the way.”
