In an East London café, 6 Day Riot’s
Glaswegian singer/songwriter Tamara Schlesinger decidesthat her hot chocolate
isn’t quite sweet enough. As she empties out a sachet of sugar into it, she
confides, “If I’m to be honest, the prognosis wasn’t too good this time last
year.”She has a point. When you’ve written songs with the same person for
several years and you form a band together, only for them to leave on the eve
of your biggest tour (and take the bassist too) it’s hard to stay positive.
But, as John Lydon famously put it, anger is an energy. “More out of
bloodymindedness than anything else,” 6 Day Riot regrouped and boarded a plane
to Toronto where they were booked to play a music festival. Whilst 15,000ft
over the Atlantic, Tamara even wrote a song in the wake of it all, Go! Canada.
Performed on their arrival to a rapturous response, its presence on 6 Day
Riot’s new album tells you that Tamara is made of stronger stuff than most
immaculately-dressed, thriftstore-frequenting, ukelele-plucking frontwomen.
But then, she has had to be. As a teenager, Tamara was on course to be an
internationally successful gymnast. Between the ages of 14 and 18, she
performed all over the world as part of the Scottish gymnastics team. A
fractured ankle, exacerbated on recovery by “a rubbish mat” in a Polish
tournament put paid to her Olympian dream. “That was the end of my world,” she
says, in a manner that suggests the puddles left by any attendant emotional
downpour evaporated a long time ago. Fashion design briefly seemed like her
calling. She was accepted at Central St Martin’s School of Design, but when
she got there, Tamara realised that her approach to fashion didn’t quite fit
in with what was happening around her. “Perhaps it was naďve of me to design
shirts with two arms when people around me were designing them with five,” she
recalls.
It was at this juncture that Tamara's occasional song-writing developed into
something more serious. Various musical collaborations followed before she
released a debut solo album, the charming "From Home To Home' in 2004. A
strong musical alliance with the guitarist on this project led them to forming
a new band together and '6 Day Riot' was born...Through this collaboration
they quickly developed a distinctive musical identity, incorporating aspects
of klezmer and bluegrass into Tamara's catchy folk pop to create a new sound
perfectly captured on "Folie ŕ Deux', the band's debut L.P. National radio
airplay and excellent reviews followed before internal divisions within the
band led to the founder members going their different ways.
2008 saw the band reborn; recording the outstanding 'Bring On The Waves' E.P.
with the ensuing year seeing no shortage of new songs lovingly brought to
life. And ceaseless gigging – in environs ranging from the Cambridge Folk
Festival to, on one occasion, a childrens’ birthday party, and “a million
indie support slots” in between – has made
them the toast of the blogosphere. Drummer Daniel Deavin from the original
line-up has been crucial in fleshing out the arrangements of Tamara’s latest
batch of songs with tom-drum heavy tribal rhythms and they have been joined by
bassist Edd Harwood, guitarist Caspar Riis and Sophie Loyer on violin. Asked
to attach a handle to what 6 Day Riot do, Tamara says, “I never had a problem
with the word pop. It’s just that our sort of pop music happens to be played
with the help of melodicas, accordions, cello, violin, trumpet and whatever
else we have hanging around.”
In the light of the recent success enjoyed by the new wave of UK folk acts
perhaps it really isn’t so fanciful to refer to 6 Day Riot's
do-the-show-right-here approach as that of a great pop group. Certainly on
their second album '6 Day Riot Have A Plan', they have effortlessly
transcended the sum of their parts, creating an elegant carnivalesque fusion
of elements of folk, afrobeat, calypso, mariachi, Eastern European and gypsy
swing into a 'melting pop' that reflects our multicultural existence and
completely defies physical resistance. Imminent Glastonbury and Green Man
appearances should place the band in their absolute element.
“On this album,” explains Tamara, “I decided to explore some lyrical ideas
beyond just your straight-ahead love song. It’s not a big deal, but you do
notice a difference in the reactions people have when a man writes a love song
and when a woman writes one. With men there’s a tendency to applaud their
‘bravery’ for showing their feelings – whereas with women, it’s seen as more
of a sentimental thing.”
Besides, it’s not like there’s a shortage of decent material to draw on Out
There. Inspired by John Darwin – the “missing” canoeist who turned up in
Panama with his wife, who had told their children he was dead – O Those Kids
casts a no less bewildered eye over the things that people do for money. “I
think it’s incredible, that story, on a number of levels,” smiles Tamara. “I
mean, you’ve not only got the fact that they did it, but then that they
squandered it all by agreeing to have their picture put up on the web.”
For all of that, however, Tamara’s lyrics seem to exist primarily as a means
by which to help make sense of a life in which senseless things sometimes
happen. Breakdown sees her coming to terms with a series of panic attacks
which afflicted her between the first album and this one. No less affectingly,
Be With Me was the result of nights spent beside herself with worry after her
boyfriend had been rushed to hospital – the desolation of its first half
redeemed magnificently by the cascading harmonic uplift of its rousing finale.
Even as she lays herself bare lyrically through the writing of this album, her
dual role as music industry mini-mogul allows no such room for weakness.
Releasing the album under her own Tantrum Records label, Tamara has generated
the funding, designed the album artwork and hand-picked her collaborators from
producer to PR team while maintaining absolute creative control. It's a
remarkable cottage industry a million miles away from the bloated excesses of
major labels struggling to adjust to the fundamental changes in the
consumption of music.
The album's opening track, first single and mission statement is Run For Your
Life– a 'state of the nation' summary which gazes on at a Britain in the
throes of a collective panic attack, with much the same expression Tim from
The Office might have reserved for one of David Brent’s more exceptional shows
of buffoonery. “It’s really just about the perpetual state of media-inflamed
panic we all seem to be in – be it because of the recession or this post-Big
Brother habit of treating everything that happens, no matter how tragic or
trivial, like a soap opera.” Lyrical allusions to the media's obsession with
Princess Diana and/or Madeline McCann could just as aptly apply to the recent
death of Jade Goody and demonstrate the skills of a writer capable of
capturing the zeitgeist. The fact that these ideas and more are contained
within a ridiculously catchy two and a half minute folk-pop song that makes
you want to dance around whichever room you
happen to be in only serves to underline what an intriguing proposition 6 Day
Riot present.
It seems fair to say that 6 Day Riot really do have a plan...
