| Her school didn't get Gabriella, wouldn't even let her have a part in their
musical. So she teamed up with some boys from another school in the
Melbourne
neighbourhood and practised in the drummer's garage. They
played Jet covers, Led
Zeppelin and Kings Of Leon songs, but it was
when she got up to sing at a local
festival that things started to
happen. "I sang Jumping Jack Flash at this
Italian festa, the kind of
place where the old people sell their wines. They
usually have opera
singers. I got on the stage and they were like, WHAT?!"
A year on, and she's making her UK debut in a London club. Between songs she
smiles, seems a little nervous, but when she sings Sweet About
Me, she's an
explosion. Looking and singing like she knows
life inside out, like she's truly
seen everything there is to see.
"My dad liked Blondie. My mum absolutely loved Sweet. And my uncles used to
play in a garage band so there was always music going on around me. I
grew up in
the same kind of area of Melbourne as AC/DC - they used to
practise around the
corner from where I went to school."
Now the girl who had danced around her front room to Shaggy's Oh
Carolina
when she was three, and bought her first record -
Silverchair - when she was
seven, had inadvertently got herself
noticed. Someone from Mushroom happened to
be at the Italian bash and
was very impressed indeed. Pretty soon she was signed
to Island in the
UK and landed herself with peerless eccentric pop collaborator
Brian
Higgins.
Her voice is equal parts animal snarl, vocal might and jazz slyness, and she
has looks to melt. At his idyllic studio in Kent, in a house where
Alice
Liddell- the real life Alice In Wonderland - lived, Gabriella
wrote the songs
for Lessons To Be Learned. "Einstein
is about stuff that I don't understand,
like how they can send people
into space yet there are so many sick children in
hospital."
Sanctuary was personal, too. "We filmed me singing it and
put it up on
youtube and a friend was like 'is that about me? It's
about me!' and I'm like,
NO!" Teen traumas, unpolished thoughts,
lessons learnt. One of her earliest
songs was called Teenage
Outrage and that pretty much adds up. Days were spent
in the
studio, as final touches were layered onto the single Sweet About
Me
–“from the start I was saying this track needs harmonica –
and it’s there”. In
the evening she listened to Cat Stevens
("Tuesday's Dead is my favourite song
right now"),
watched Pocahontas over and over, and cried everytime.
Gabriella misses her friends, misses decent coffee, but otherwise reckons
"London's cool. I saw Queens Of The Stone Age last week. I liked going
to the
Big Day Out every year – the best was in 2006, with the Stooges
-but there's a
lot more going on here. The weather's even worse than
Melbourne, though." With
the breezy confidence that only a teenage girl
with the world at her feet can
possess, she already has plans beyond
pop. "I fancy myself as a bit of a
photographer…..but I haven’t won any
prizes yet…maybe one day…pffft…!"
So she doesn't regret the move? Doesn't think she should have stayed home and
written that book her Nonno tried to convince her to write about his
winemaking?
"Err, no. My Nonno’s always forcing me to drink his
wine! 'It's good for
you' he says. He won't drink anything else. But
you know what? It tastes like
nail polish remover."
Nonno's loss is our gain. She's a star. You'll be gobsmacked.
|
Austin Wilde - UK A&R
