It's almost fitting that Wailing Miserere is the Spotlight Artist for the month of March since Lucy Hague, the female member of the duo, will be celebrating a birthday on March 2nd! Originally from the small, windswept island cluster of Orkney, Lucy currently lives in Edinburgh, Scotland, where she is studying Music Technology at the University of Edinburgh. Though the big city atmosphere of Edinburgh is appealing, she never lost the beauty of her homeland and it runs throughout her music.
Her mother was a classically trained soprano and Lucy was exposed to music from an early age. She began to learn the piano at age 7 and got her first guitar at age 12. Her mother encouraged her musical talents and she joined many choirs as a young girl. At 16, she was given a four-track tape recorder and, she say, her song writing began in earnest. Lucy admits that song writing became a sort of therapy for her as she was suffering a deep depression. Using the four-track got her interested in recording and music technology and, eventually, led her to pursue those interests at the university. Her dear friend, Tom Pickles, also from Orkney, is a talented flautist who plays live with her and lives in Edinburgh as well. She says she even "dragged" him into the studio to play on a couple of her songs like "Counting the Colours" and "Glitterland".
In 2003, just before leaving Orkney for Edinburgh, Lucy came to DMusic. Thinking it would be easier to let strangers hear her music than to have friends hear it, she began uploading some of her songs here. She was struck by the by the kind and welcoming nature of everyone on this site, and the advice, encouragement and constructive criticism she received definitely helped her work up the courage to let other people hear her songs, and, eventually, to start playing live.
The future holds more live gigs around Edinburgh which, Lucy says, will be tricky because both and Tom are very busy with their studies. They are also hoping to write and record an EP and hope that it will be finished by summer.
You have a unique vocal style, do you have any major influences in your singing and if so, who are they and why?
When I began seriously writing and recording songs, at the age of 16, the one thing that mattered to me most was trying to develop my own unique voice. I consciously tried to avoid imitating other singers as far as possible. There were of course singers I loved and admired, like Billie Holiday and Jeff Buckley and Anja Garbarek and many others, but I tried not to let them influence my voice in any way.
Then about two or three years ago, I heard Cocteau Twins for the first time and Elizabeth Fraser’s voice just absolutely blew me away. Particularly the way she sings on their early albums. It’s almost hard to believe it’s a human singing, she sounds so unnatural, almost feral, just completely untamed. She has a particularly unique way of pronouncing words and I found it was something I sort of understood, without being able to explain how I understood. She gets inside the most incredibly subtle nuances of every word she sings, reshaping it and effectively mangling the pronunciation but creating some amazing effects and with such unbelievable emotional power. She makes the lyrics incomprehensible but at the same time imbues them with so much more meaning.
Anyway, whilst I never consciously tried to copy her style, my voice did begin to gradually change in a lot of ways, most obviously taking on this weird ornamental vibrato which is not completely unlike Elizabeth Fraser’s on the early Cocteau Twins albums. So she is probably my major influence as far as singing goes.
As the female half of the duo, are there other female artists who have inspired you? Why?
Well, in addition to Elizabeth Fraser, I absolutely love Anja Garbarek. She’s a solo artist from Norway. Her music varies from trip-hop to jazz to extremely experimental to more mainstream, but always with great style and an obvious sense of humour. I also love Kate Bush, for being a female solo artist who is completely unafraid to experiment and freak people out a bit now and then, and Alison Goldfrapp too, for the same reasons.
In a business that is still, unfortunately, pretty well "male driven", what obstacles have you faced as a female artist and also what doors have been opened to you because you are a female artist?
To be honest, I’ve never been aware of any great advantages or disadvantages of being a female songwriter. I think perhaps sometimes I surprise people a bit, because my music is often pretty far removed from the stereotypical idea of what a female singer-songwriter should sound like.
I’ve played quite a few open mic nights in my time, and they’re almost always entirely populated by male musicians, for some reason, so when I get up on stage I’m sometimes conscious of the fact that perhaps slightly more attention is being paid to me, just because I’m the only woman on stage, but that varies. More often than not, I don’t think anyone really notices.
Where do you find your inspiration to write? Is it from life experience or are there other outside influences that inspire you as well?
As far as my lyrics go, they are entirely inspired by my own inner emotional world. I would genuinely love to be one of those songwriters who can write fluently about big external things like politics and war and so on, but it just isn’t my style.
I think what it comes down to is repression versus expression. For whatever reason, I often find myself carrying around secrets which I feel unable to talk to anyone about. Writing and singing are my ways of expressing these secrets, albeit in quite a coded form.
Over the course of the last few years, my lyrical style has definitely shifted from being quite literal to becoming more stylised and harder for others to understand. I have my own internal set of metaphors and symbols, mainly derived from my dreams, that make sense to me but confuse everyone else. It’s largely image based. When I write a song, I’ll take a specific experience or situation and see it as a series of symbolic images and then translate it into these heavily stylised, dramatised terms. It’s a way of expressing emotion but also a way of distancing myself from it, I think. Framing the situation on my own little stage and then stepping back from it to observe.
What are your favorite films, books or CDs?
Probably my favourite film of all time is ‘Withnail & I.’ The first time you see it, you think it’s a comedy and roar with laughter, but then as you watch it more times, you slowly realise it is in fact a tragedy brilliantly disguised as a comedy.
As for books, there are many. I love Iain Banks, he’s a Scottish author. I think my favourite novel of his would have to be ‘A Song of Stone,’ it reads like a poem from beginning to end. Beautiful and disturbing. ‘The Wasp Factory,’ also by Banks, is good too, one I re-read a lot, to the point of knowing bits of it off by heart.
What else… Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey translated by Robert Fagles, The Gormenghast Trilogy by Mervyn Peake, the Dark Materials series by Phillip Pullman, ‘Antarctic Navigation,’ by Elizabeth Arthur… I could go on and on.
The last novel I read that really knocked me sideways was ‘Lanark’ by Alasdair Gray. Usually I don’t form a solid opinion of a novel until I’ve read it at least twice, but I’m waiting a while to read that one again, as I haven’t quite recovered from it yet.
What genres of music do you listen to?
Everything under the sun. I’m constantly discovering new things. I like all kinds of rock, metal, folk music from all around the world, jazz, funk, hip-hop, progressive rock, trip-hop, some dance music, experimental stuff, classical… If it’s emotional or interesting or complex or just very weird, then I’ll probably like it.
I seem to be going through a major prog phase at the moment, mainly listening to bands from the sixties and seventies like Jethro Tull, Genesis, King Crimson and Van Der Graaf Generator.
Do you create in any other medium other than music? For example, do you write poetry, prose, or maybe even paint or draw?
Yes, before I seriously started writing songs, I wrote short stories and I do regard my lyrics as a continuation of that. I see them as poetry or prose poetry set to music rather than conventional song lyrics, because I always write them first and make sure they function completely as pieces of writing in themselves before committing them to music. Since I started writing songs I haven’t written very much prose at all but I want to get back into it. I’m trying to write a novel at the moment.
I’m not particularly artistic (my sister is, I think she got all the artistic genes and I got all the musical ones!). I do knit though, and sew, and I design and make my own clothes.
Tell us a little bit about how you record?
I’m extremely lucky in the sense that I’m studying Music Technology at a really good university, and that means I get 24 hour access to the recording studios, which are equipped with Pro Tools and G5 Macs and incredibly expensive mics and other lovely things, so whenever I get the chance, I record stuff there (although I’m in my fourth year now, and nearly finished at university, so I’ll have to make the most of the studio access while it lasts!).
When I’m in the process of writing a song or if I’m at home in Orkney, I tend to record on my old four-track tape recorder, a Yamaha MT-400, with a very cheap microphone. It’s about as basic a set-up as you can get, but it’s served me well for many years.
Tell us a little bit about any live performing you have done and what was that experience like for you?
I’ve been performing live, mainly at open mic nights, ever since I first came to Edinburgh nearly four years ago. The first few performances were quite scary and often a bit soul-destroying because people would just talk loudly all the way through my set, but then I remember one early gig in particular, in a fantastic venue (Cabaret Voltaire, an underground bar/club in Edinburgh) where I had a brilliant audience who just sat completely silent and appreciative throughout my entire set. The feeling you get from an experience like that, being able to enchant an entire audience, is completely addictive and it makes everything else worthwhile.
I love performing live with Tom. He’s a very experienced and talented musician and I can throw anything at him, like suddenly insist on playing a song we haven’t practised in years, and he doesn’t bat an eyelid! We did ‘She Loved A King’ live together recently, for the first time and without any rehearsal, and it was great fun. He’s absolutely brilliant at improvising. I think he did the solo for the recorded version of ‘Glittertind’ in two takes.
What instruments do you play? How long have you played them?
My first instrument was the piano, which I studied from the age of seven. I began playing guitar at the age of twelve and taught myself. I’ve always considered myself a pianist, not a guitarist, even though pretty much all of my songs are written and performed on the guitar. Unfortunately I don’t really have access to a piano or keyboard here in Edinburgh, so that’s why I tend to use guitar more. It’s easier for live performance, too. Because I’m completely self-taught, my finger-picking style is a bit unusual, probably completely incorrect but it works for me so I’ll stick with it!
In the past year or so, I’ve also started playing mandolin. I played violin and viola for a few years as a child, so the tuning makes sense to me. I’m trying to work it into some of my new songs, so far the only recorded song of mine that features me playing mandolin is ‘Glittertind.’
You are from Orkney. Many people have expressed questions about where that is and what is like there. Tell us a little something about where you are from?
Orkney is a small island group just off the north coast of Scotland. It’s quite an isolated place with a fairly low population, the main town Kirkwall only has about 9000 inhabitants.
Growing up there I think I took a lot for granted. I didn’t fully appreciate just how staggeringly beautiful and special a place it is until I moved down to Edinburgh and was confronted with all the noise and distractions of a major city. Of course, being in a city is much more exciting for the nightlife and all the opportunities and so on, but every now and then it gets a bit much for me and I have to go home to Orkney to recharge my batteries. I grew up in a place full of silence, being able to see the horizon on every side of me and the stars at night. I really miss those things living in a big city.
The history of Orkney is absolutely fascinating too. There are houses, whole villages in fact, that have been survived from the Neolithic, about five thousand years ago. For several centuries Orkney was ruled by Norway and it still feels very separate from the rest of Scotland, I think. Going back there is like travelling to a different country.
How has your experience been at DMusic? Why did you choose to join?
When I began writing songs, I kept them very much to myself for quite a long time. I think this is a situation most songwriters find themselves in at first. It’s a bit of a paradox. Naturally, the subject matter of your songs is going to be highly personal and you’re going to feel nervous about the reactions of other people, especially people close to you (who may in fact be the subject of some of your songs!). But then, what’s the point of writing songs if no one else is ever going to hear them?
The internet offers a handy way out of this paradox, or it did for me, at any rate. The very first people to hear my songs were users on DMusic. I remember at the time not really putting much thought into which site to host my mp3s on, but I was very lucky to hit upon DMusic. The comments I received really encouraged me to keep going, at a time when I had absolutely no confidence in any of my abilities, let alone those of a creative nature. That led me to start playing live and to continue writing and recording. The fact that I knew there were people out there, actually enjoying my music, made all the difference. So thank you, people of DMusic!
How did you choose the name Wailing Miserere?
Aha, now that’s an interesting question! I’ve always enjoyed the writings of the late Orcadian poet George Mackay Brown, and I’m sure I came across the phrase ‘wailing miserere’ in one of his poems. I remember reading it somewhere a long time ago, and jotting it down as a possible band name. The problem is, I can’t remember which poem it was and I’ve never been able to find it, despite much searching! GMB was a very prolific writer and there are several published volumes of his poetry. I intend to keep searching though, it would be a truly ‘Eureka!’ moment to find the actual poem after all this time.
As I remember it (although this could be wrong), the poem described a ship at sea in stormy weather. The sailors were ‘wailing miserere’ to God, to be saved. Miserere nobis is Latin and it means something like ‘Have mercy on us.’ So, ‘wailing miserere,’ crying out for mercy. There was something about the sound of the phrase, as much as its actual meaning, that stuck in my mind.
What is in the future for Wailing Miserere?
At the moment, we are trying to get back into playing live more often, after a year of not doing very much. It’s a bit tricky, because Tom is in lots of other bands (he’s in very high demand!) and I’m busy with my final year of university, but we’ve managed to play a few gigs in the past couple of months and they all went very well. The main goal is to get a proper EP written and recorded, it’s something I’ve been meaning to do for a while so I’ve decided now is the time. That should be done by the summer, fingers crossed, and the people of DMusic will be the first to hear about it, as always!
If you haven't heard the beautiful lyrics, haunting vocals and musical imagery of Wailing Miserere yet, do yourself a favor and listen here:
http://wailingmiserere.dmusic.com/
Mary
ShadowMom
FraDonaghy
ebarbarella
very cool interview 
i 
Wailing Miserere 
this is 
BOWILLIE
LiQuidMetamo...
to you and Tom!
