Interview: KTB (Katy Bennett)

Northern Sky caught up with Katy Bennett, relaxing on her sofa after a morning with a bunch of school kids and asked her about her new album Indelible Ink, whether she still has sad shoes or not and all about her little sisters...

 

KTB (Photograph: KTB Website) 

AW: I now have with me singer songwriter Katy Bennett how are you doing?

KTB: I'm alright, a little bit tired I've been singing with small children this morning in a performance for a music project I've been doing, but I'm alright, I'm recovered now

AW: So that's what you do in the day is it?

KTB: I'm a community musician leading music workshops, usually primary school children but sometimes older and sometimes adults as well, which is always good fun

AW: Well you're based in Birmingham?

KTB: Birmingham I am yeah, for the time being anyway. I'm thinking of moving into the countryside once again soon, so for the moment I'm in the city

AW: A native of Birmingham?

KTB: I'm from Oxford. I was born in a very nice Oxfordshire home but I've been in Birmingham for seven years

AW: Do you find the city conducive to song writing or do you prefer the country?

KTB: I think I prefer the sea, as a good influence when song writing, but you can't always be by the sea. I've written songs in Birmingham, I can't say I haven't but I prefer to write in a quieter space I think

AW: I think most writers do, whether it's novelists, poets, journalists or song writers, I think you just need that space sometimes

KTB: Yeah it's partly just the actual physical quiet but also just lack of interruption and to have a space to focus, but then sometimes a song will just come to you when you're on the bus going to work, so you've got to have your notebook ready for then

AW: Now Katy, apart from your Sunday name, you have adopted a sort of three letter brand name of KTB, I'm assuming that's pronounced Katy B?

KTB: Katy B yes indeed and people get confused sometimes, they think my middle name must begin with T

AW: Right, I think that's because it's in capitals

KTB: People often think it's a dance act or a hip hop kind of name. It's very much a folky name I suppose.. in a way

AW: Well you have three albums out under that name

KTB: I do, I think I'll stick with it, once you make a brand name then you stick with it for a bit

AW: Well we'll come back to the albums in a short while but first of all you've also been busy over the past few years in a number of projects most notably the all female band Little Sister, how did that start?

KTB: Well all the girls Sam, Laura, Hannah and me, we were all at university together in slightly different years but we all played music at university not in a folk group or anything but in orchestras and various other ensembles. After we all finished university, we were all based in Birmingham and we just thought let's play some music together. Laura had been in a couple of folk bands before and we all just got together and started playing. We started playing pubs mostly, we played a few Gillian Welch songs, a couple of which we still do and we do an Elvis song now, we do "Little Sister", well it's not by Elvis but it was made famous by him

AW: Well yeah, if you were to google Little Sister you're more than likely to get Ry Cooder or something coming up like that rather than your band at the moment, they probably pay more

KTB: Yeah definitely. We just played a few gigs and we played a lot around Birmingham really, so for a couple of years we were gigging regularly, playing quite a few festivals. We do quite a lot of instrumental stuff, but we also do a lot of four part harmony and we've got a big range of influences in the group as well and it sometimes it leads to arguments (laughs) about where a song is going. My thought about it is that it's much better to have too many ideas than to have one person leading it

AW: I noticed that you do Gillian Welch and David Rawlings kind of material, which is very much in the Americana field, are you comfortable with that?

KTB: We've got various facets in the band I think, we've got the American rootsy sound with the Gillian Welch David Rawlings kind of thing and the Oh Brother Where Art Thou to it, then we've got the traditional Irish stuff which Laura knows and then Sam who plays the harp and sings, she's Welsh so we do some quite a lot of traditional Welsh stuff

AW: Ah, that's why you've got some tunes in the Welsh language

KTB: Yes, and then Hannah has just come back from India, she's been away in India for six months..

AW: So it all goes in the mix

KTB: Yeah

AW: Did Little Sister come out of the KTB Collective or is it the other way round?

KTB: The KTB Collective doesn't really exist; it occasionally does, mostly as KTB I play with Phill Ward who's a guitarist and producer, he's the man behind the desk on the last album and we play together a lot and then occasionally before that I played solo and with three or four other musicians. Little Sister is very much separate from that, although occasionally some of them do play with me but mostly we keep it separate just for ease of other people's understanding of it

AW: Right, because that operation can vary in size and you can have up to sixteen or seventeen people involved?

KTB: Yeah, back in 2003 I had a friend of mine orchestrate quite a lot of songs from my first album for a jazz ensemble really, it had all sorts of horns and double bass and drums and everything, for a performance on stage at the Truck Festival back in 2003 so that's been the biggest group. I was actually terrified because we hadn't had a lot of time to rehearse but it was great in the end, it was really fun

AW: Well you're obviously a busy musician who finds it easy to work with other musicians, would you describe yourself as a multi-tasker or do you easily fall into a sort of tunnel vision once you're involved in a particular project?

KTB: I'm usually juggling several things at the same time and sometimes I have too many things going on at the same time and you have to drop at least one. In terms of financially surviving and living, I've never been able to focus on just the one thing for a long period of time, there's always lots of things going on, whether it's recording KTB stuff or Little Sister stuff or working and doing community music work, teaching choirs or whatever. Because you have to live, obviously, and pay your rent and bills, it hasn't got to the stage where I can focus on one thing. If I was just performing and writing my own songs then I think I'd get very lonely, although maybe I'd be playing with my friends or whatever, that'd be great, I'd lose that connection I get when I work with people in workshops which I love doing, but we'll see, you never know what's going to happen

AW: Well you have a lovely new album out, your third solo album Indelible Ink. You tend to work in fractions I notice; on Bluebird for instance we had eleven and a half songs and on the new one we appear to have twelve and a quarter?

KTB: Yes, I think it's twelve and a quarter

AW: What's the thinking behind opening with a fragment of a song?

KTB: The idea with that is that first song and the last song on the album are a pair of songs that sit together and often when I play them live I'll play them together. In order for the album to start in the mode in which most of the album continues, we thought it sat better having that at the very beginning

AW: It leads into "Ampersand" very well though, which I like

KTB: Do you? (laughs) some people say why have you got the loud one after the very very quiet one..

AW: It just sort of builds steadily and goes straight into a good opening song, which I like..

KTB: Okay, as long as you do. If "Ampersand" was the first song on the album it's not similar to anything else on the album; all of the other songs on the album have corresponding pairs almost, that they sit with well, but that song particularly doesn't and in order to sandwich it into the album so that it felt part of it, we just wanted to keep it happy as a song

AW: You obviously take a lot of care when thinking about the running order

KTB: Well yeah, there are various groups of songs which kind of fit together and it's very deliberately done. We were thinking about the keys that the songs were in and whether they worked well musically shifting from certain keys to another. I think it works

AW: It seems to. Well the album contains possibly my most played song recently, "Girl with the Sad Shoes", I really can't stop playing it; how much of KTB is in that song? I mean I'm not suggesting for a minute that you lack 'sophistication and wit'

KTC: (Laughs) I used to actually, I don't think I've quite got there yet. I mean the actual influence of that song, the title idea of the song came from a friend of mine, Julia, who's actually a song writer herself, and she used to sing with the KTB Collective. She used to play the violin and when we were at university together she said 'when I was at school I used to have sad shoes' or something along those lines. We were talking about footwear and shoes and she was talking about the shoes she wore at school, which were big and clumpy and not sort of cool, and that gave me the impetuous for the song. I wanted to turn it into an Edward Monkton kind of story book, I thought that would've been good, but I haven't been in touch with him, we'll see. So that's the kind of inspiration behind it. I mean, yeah, of course it's autobiographical, everything is really, it's quite hard to not be sometimes. Not everything in the world is but..

AW: It's all based there though isn't it, it all has something to do with your own experiences and your past?

KTB: Yeah, I had quite a bad few years while I was at university, suffering quite a lot from depression, which I'm very open to talk about to be honest, I think it's important to

AW: It certainly is, because a lot of people don't understand it

KTB: Definitely and I mean, the second album I recorded, Bluebird, a lot of the songs on there were very influenced by and came out of being in a depressed space. So this new one is very much kind of looking forward having had that experience, but also recovering and moving on to a new kind of state, if that's not too pretentious to say. To be honest it's about depression but it's also about changing the way you want to look at yourself and the way you deal with things, that's something I was working on at the time probably

AW: I think Spike Milligan used to say that he had to explain depression to people who were unaware that he was in pain because there was no blood

KTB: Yeah (laughs), my Granny, when I was ill one time, she's now sadly passed away but she said to me when I'd been ill, she said 'you look absolutely fine now, are you better now?' She did understand, she just wanted me to be better, but because I looked alright, she thought I must be alright. But yeah, it's still very much stigmatised in all forms of media and all forms of mental illness still is and there's a lot of work to be done in this supposedly liberal and open minded society. There's still a lot of prejudices in mental illness around and at some point I'd like to do something about that, maybe not right now but at some point in the next few years I think


KTB (Photograph: KTB Website)

AW: Well it kind of leads us on to the next one which is, I'm not going to go through each song individually, but the main outstanding songs for me are such like "Girl with the Sad Shoes" and also the title song "Indelible Ink", which is achingly personal stuff. I suppose there is some criticism aimed at singer songwriters, particularly from the folk community, but I think there's got to be a distinction between self discovery and self indulgence. Do you find soul searching in song writing a burden or rather a cathartic process?

KTB: For me, I used to do it as a cathartic thing but what I'd find is that a song that was very personal and very specific for me and about the feelings I was having, I'd play it at a gig and it would make someone cry for a completely different reason, like their uncle had just died or they had just broken up with their boyfriend or whatever. I think if you can communicate a universal feeling to another person through a very specific feeling within you, which connects with another person, then that's just as valid as singing the same song together. Some people who hear my songs have said 'it really helped me', 'my husband had just died' for instance and having these songs, from my second album particularly was stuffed with sad songs on there and a lot of people really loved that, because when they were sad they'd listen to it, which is what people do (laughs) listen to sad music when they're feeling sad, if you know what I mean

AW: I do

KTB: But you're right, I always get a bit of flack from certain circles of people for being, I mean anyone who says they are a singer songwriter, generally people go oh not another one, soul bearing. Some people write about other people's experiences, but you have to look at it from a personal viewpoint, you can't just be generic about it and say oh I'm not going to write about myself because that's self indulgent; you can be very self aware without being self indulgent, it's a balance you've got to find, there is a line definitely

AW: Well we wouldn't have Joni Mitchell's Blue if it weren't for a bit of self probing every now and again

KTB: Exactly, having said that one of my favourite song writers at the moment is Karine Polwart for instance who has her very personal songs as well as her incredible story songs and because she gets inside the characters in the song it feels that they're coming from her as well, so it's still very personal stuff even though the characters are elsewhere

AW: And she's got a way of making them all sound so uplifting

KTB: Yeah she does, well most of them, there's a few quite dark ones. In terms of song writing, I try to write songs about other things sometimes but often they just don't work and people always seem to like the ones which are about my own experiences if you like. The song "Back from the Deep" for instance was an attempt at writing a different song. I was on my way to New York about three years ago, to visit my brother, and on the plane I read an article in the Guardian about this Australian mining disaster and that became the impetus for that whole song. I had a note pad with me and I was in a scribbling mood so I wrote down lots of quotes from the article, about what people had said and what people had done. there's a bit in there about Dave Grohl in the song because he sent a message down to these miners stuck down the mine

AW: That's right, yeah I remember reading about that

KTB: Yeah, saying he'd buy them a beer each

AW: I think one of them had said that they were a Foo Fighters fan and so they were sending down an iPod with some of their music on and I think a message went down from Dave

KTB: Yeah, that sounds about right and I just thought I felt like writing a song about this and so I did on the plane and I wrote practically all of it then. That's got a more universal soap feeling to it, I don't know, what do you think?

AW: Yeah, I was just going to say as far as folk music goes, you couldn't pick a better subject than a mining disaster for tugging at the heart strings

KTB: Well exactly, yeah

AW: I mean it's recent really, I think it was about 2006 when this happened and it was a gold mine of course, but yes certainly a good subject to pick and it's in the middle of the album and it brings us all back into the kind of folk music sensibility if you know what I mean

KTB: Yeah, that and "Willow Tree" are similar in lots of ways and they're kind of paired on the album, which is why they're not too near each other and that is definitely from the more folky side of things. One of my favourite songs on the album, I mean I like all of them for different reasons, but one of my favourite songs is the very last song "Cavalry Parade", which I actually wrote quite separately to most of the songs on the album

AW: Well it displays some pretty tangible emotional outpouring towards the end on those last few lines 'someone then will make your daddy proud' and such like

KTB: I guess so, I mean, yeah I suppose it does

AW: It's a good place to put it, right at the end, although you do have a bit of a hidden track after that, where I think you're mucking about there aren't you?

KTB: That was Hannah who is in Little Sister, she and I were singing, I think it's from one of the Scottish islands, a traditional Gaelic lullaby which we found, that Phil had recorded without us knowing about

AW: It's not Unst is it?

KTB: I think it is yes

AW: I know Rachel Unthank and the Winterset do a similar song called the "Unst Boat Song", which has a sort of Nordic feel

KTB: Okay, I'm not sure. The "Calvary Parade" song, that was influenced a bit by feeling that I was stuck in the world but also I think I'd been watching Pride and Prejudice or something and there's a moment when all the Bennett sisters are out and they wave their handkerchiefs at the passing cavalry parade, I'd either been reading it or watching it, probably watching it I'm not such a reader, but it was that kind of image of searching for something

AW: Well we'll mention one more song "I Like You Like Me", which is one of those timeless songs that seems to shift emphasis in the second verse, where did that one come from?

KTB: That was kind of from my early teens, well I didn't write it as a teenager but it was a fairly teenage moment of thinking I'd fallen for someone, I hadn't really it's just someone who is not really available, but which makes them more desirable in a way. I think I wrote that by the sea actually, down in Cornwall one year, hence the lyrics relating to fish in the sea. I had also been working for the Royal Shakespeare Company at that time and had a lot of Shakespeare going on in my head, because we were singing for Romeo and Juliet, not quite off by heart, but bits off by heart, and so bits of the language got thrown in there as well

AW: Was there ever a decision you had to make whether you wanted to continue with music or go into theatre?

KTB: No I wasn't acting, I really can't act

AW: I see, so it was just providing music..

KTB: Well I was actually on stage pretending to act, I used to think I was quite good but I realised that I'm.. although I'm good at pantomime

AW: Well you do have some good facial expressions, I just noticed the other day that you've uploaded a video performance of that song "I Like You Like Me" and towards the end a telephone starts ringing and you have a classic comic expression on your face right there..

KTB: Oh I wasn't going to record that again just 'cause the phone rang, it was actually quite funny that

AW: It was

KTB: I was hoping that the song might've been a single in fact, had I had the money or the energy to make it into one, but I don't really think singles exist anymore.

AW: They don't sadly, I mean that's what I grew up on, so I have a soft spot for them

KTB: I had lots of them, I had lots of Ocean Colour Scene on cassette and various others. I think I had a Shaggy single once, when I was about eleven. "Boombastic", that was it..

AW: Erm, anyway..

KTB: (Laughs) There's so many people trying to get a bite of the pie if you know what I mean, I was going to continue a bad analogy but I won't

AW: Well the thing is when you're talking about singles is that if you'd released "Girl with the Sad Shoes" in the early Seventies, or if someone like Helen Reddy or Dory Previn had released it, it would have been a hit, it's got that kind of feel. I'm not saying it's out of sync with the time or anything..

KTB: I know what you mean, you mention there Dory Previn, I've actually listened to her a lot in the last five years or so, I think she's brilliant and not many people really know about her

AW: I grew up on Mythical Kings and Iguanas

KTB: Oh wow, what a great album

AW: Absolutely. Well you mention on your sleeve notes to your second album Bluebird that you've got a soft spot for the Priddy Festival, did you manage to get there last week?

KTB: No I haven't been for a few years now, the man who used to run it is a very dear friend of mine now and he's retired from that and he's retired down in Devon. I did go for four or five years in a row and it's a lovely festival, really lovely

AW: Well I was talking to Jez Lowe last Sunday who had just come up from it that very day and he said it was a bit of a wash out and he was still wet

KTB: Oh really, oh dear I didn't know that, yeah I imagine they get rained out

AW: Well most of them do here, but I notice on your gig list that it's criminally sparse at the moment; are you planning to do any touring for this album

KTB: Well I mean I did, ah, no I didn't do very many did I? I was hoping to, I tried to get in touch with various agents and things and.. anyway, to cut a long story short, I'm not doing that much over the Summer. I'm playing at the Truck Festival in a week's time, a week on Sunday down in Oxfordshire, which is organised by my family actually and I've played it every year since I was about fourteen or something, been going for about twelve years now, so I'm playing there. I'm hoping to play occasionally here and there but I'm actually going to be starting a masters degree in September in music therapy, which will take up quite a lot of my time. But I'm going to hopefully be playing a few gigs around November time, I'm going to be doing a few gigs with Ember from Wales, and maybe do some double bills around the place including Priddy I think

AW: Well Katy it's been a pleasure talking to you, good luck with the masters degree, good luck with the Truck Festival and most of all good luck with this delightful album

KTB: Well thank you, it's on iTunes and you can vaguely order copies of it from my website as well, but I'm just kind of letting it grow and see what happens, I'm not pushing it too hard

AW: Well thanks for talking to me

KTB: Thank you very much, I hope I haven't rambled

AW: (Laughs) Not at all


The new album Indelible Ink by KTB is available on iTunes

www.ktb.org.uk

Buy from Amazon:

	Ktb Indelible Ink Tatinga 2009-05-06