Nine Songs: Thea Gilmore

BEST FIT: This track is from Ani’s sixth album, Not a Pretty Girl, which came out in 1995, when you were 15. Was that when you connected with it?

THEA GILMORE: I was a bit older, 17 I think, because I seem to remember that the album was released a bit later in the UK. There was a great little record shop where I lived at the time, in Banbury, called Record Savings, and they would do the classic record story thing of having little handwritten notes from the staff members recommending their favourites, and I fucking loved that.

I remember going in one day, having just about saved up enough money for a CD, which were not cheap at the time, and saw Not a Pretty Girl there on the racks. On the little note that someone had written I saw that it was released on the Cooking Vinyl label. Now, I knew shit about shit, frankly, when I was 17, but I did know the name Cooking Vinyl because I knew it was associated with Billy Bragg, who I loved, so that was enough for me. Like, these dudes at Record Savings, who I thought were impossibly cool, thought it was good, it was on Cooking Vinyl, and the cover art looked really cool. That was a bit tick for me, so I bought it.

At that age, buying a CD like that, of an artist I hadn’t heard, really felt like a big investment and a big risk, because it was my money. When I got home and put it on, it was really another one of those extraordinary moments, a real revelation. And, again, it was really about the lyrics, as it usually is with me. I was so struck by that sort of in-your-face directness that Ani DiFranco does so well, without losing the poetry in her writing.

It made such a huge impression on me, as a young woman who was sort of learning to write songs and trying to figure out who I was and where I stood. So, hearing a woman do all that without sounding flowery was amazing. Not a Pretty Girl is an incredibly feminine album but not feminine in a Tori Amos way. It was aggressively feminine. There was no floweriness involved, and I love that because it was sort of how I felt but could never put words to.

I hadn’t yet heard PJ Harvey or anyone like that. I had grown up with Alanis Morissette, but that was a bit different, and I wasn’t sure I really related to her. It’s weird, because all these women that I was listening to at the time, although I loved them, I didn’t feel like they spoke in the same way I felt that I spoke. And then all of a sudden Ani DiFranco came along. Now, I didn’t speak like that, don’t get me wrong, but I fucking wanted to.

Hearing “Shy” for the first time, I was totally grabbed by the bassline – this beautiful, singing bassline – and I’ve been kind of chasing that bassline ever since but I don’t think I’ve ever found it. It was incredible to hear a song where the bass itself really had something to say, and I was hooked on Ani’s music from that point onwards. I begged my dad for more money and went back and bought all of the back catalogue that Cooking Vinyl had brought out at the time, which I think was only three albums at the time, and I was a passionate Ani DiFranco fan from that point onwards.

I went to see her at Shepherds Bush Empire soon after, which was the first big London gig that I’d ever seen, and she was amazing. I remember she did the most incredible rendition of Prince’s “When Doves Cry” and the whole crowd was singing along. She had Andy Stochansky on drums and Sara Lee on bass, and I remember thinking how much I wanted to be her. Again, she’s not somebody I think I could meet though. I think I’d be very, very scared to.

You did take on her role as Persephone in Hadestown though, at London’s Union Chapel in 2011. How was that for you?

It was a hell of an ask. Anaïs Mitchell called me up and said, ‘Hey, could you be Ani DiFranco for a night?’ and I was like, ‘Well, I can try…’. Hell of an ask, but fabulous.