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Emiliana Torrini.
 Telephone interviews can be difficult things. Sometimes the connection is bad and sometimes you can't even read your own scribbled questions. Sometimes there's food simmering on the stove and you're scrambling to have a proper listen to the interviewee's record. Sometimes the interviewee speaks softly or not much at all. Sometimes they get shirty. Rare is it when you're met with all of the above.
Emiliana Torrini's at home in Brighton, England. Daughter to an Italian restaurateur and an Icelandic mother from a long fishing tradition, Torrini originally learned to sing opera. Years later she would try hard to rid her voice of the physical conventions associated with opera and start afresh. "I'm not very good on the phone," she says to greet me.
Despite her softly-spoken tone and less-than-clear phone connection, Torrini rattles off a brief family history, saying she spent her summers with her grandparents in the east of Iceland. She spent one teenage summer working at a fish factory but she insists that's not got much at all to do with 'Fisherman's Woman', her second album and first for UK label Rough Trade. Here I was thinking that maybe she was out on the wharf wrestling fish in the black morning, dressed in sea-soaked dresses, at night drinking local spirits with local spirits, waitin' for her man to come home from a month at sea angling sharks, spying manatees. I was going to ask about the fishing industry, about farming and marketplace life, about men and women and the gender division, the traditions, the seasons, the highs, the lows, the smell of different types of fish... But y'see Torrini only had that one summer at the fish factory, probably packing fish into boxes, hair hidden in a net, pining for her smoke-o. She wasn't really a part of the fishing trade.
I don't believe it. I won't. With a bit of a prod she says her brother worked on a trawler, her grandfather was heavily involved in fishing, and her great grandfather was a shark fisherman. But that's it. She goes no further with the fish talk. Instead we talk about her record and touring and Rough Trade. She's glad she has a label to care of the business side of things because all she wants to do is make music and travel the world. She couldn't bring herself to trudge through the independent record-making process.
"Y'know what? It's just too hard! I can't be bothered really. I'm not a businesswoman. Those things bore the crap out of me. So I'd rather be doing, y'know... the fun side of it." For her first trip to Australia she brings a band different to the one that backed her on 'Fisherman's Woman'. She sings personal love songs. The mix is naked; her voice is right out at the front. You can hear every word she says. Behind her is a melancholy guitar also big in the mix. She sounds more Icelandic than Italian. The songs are flecked with references to the sea. Torrini's love affair with sea, with its mythology, its mystery, its dual nature, has a strong hold on her. "I think the sea is the most beautiful metaphor for tragic things. You can call the sea your own. I think when I lived away from it I was a completely different person. And so I have to have it."
In Iceland she could take herself to a place and be alone in the world. It's not so easy in Brighton. That same special place is at the same time special to 500 others. Sometimes all she wants to say is "Shush! Away with you!" I tell her most frankly she should become a wayfaring nautical explorer then she can have the sea all to herself. She giggles. I wish now, hunched over the tape machine, I could make out what she said though. Again, it's the tape hiss. It's her delivery. But I think if you listen closely you'll find the answer in 'Fisherman's Woman'.
Lenin Simos
 | Emiliana Torrini plays at Fowler's Live on Thurs 1 Dec, and performs a special set at Big Star Records (Rundle Street) at 1.15pm that afternoon. |
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