Anna Calvi - Demons, Blood and Passion

Like a red flash: with the same radiance, the same blazing clarity. The voice and the face of Anna Calvi – singularly alike, almost complementary in their stern grace – carved out a space in the imagination of countless fans who, in January 2011, seemed to be waiting for nothing else but her, inaugurating a devoted cult that has only kept growing since. In just a few years, the diminutive Anna has managed to carve out an entirely personal space within the contemporary music landscape, a sumptuous "kingdom" steeped in decadent elegance and pure cinematic suggestion, lit by often sophisticated nods to the grandeur of a bygone Europe, straddling French chanson and Italian opera, by way of classical music loved and studied with anything but amateurish rigor.

All of this is rooted in an intimate, primordial blues foundation, which has found its necessary expression through the symbiotic, at times almost demonic, relationship with her inseparable Fender Telecaster. The combination of these disparate elements has allowed the young artist to forge an original, instantly recognizable identity, one that promises to unleash, in years to come, a creative potential still very much on the rise. In the meantime, the work she has produced so far has already risen to the status of a contemporary classic.

Born on 24 September 1980 in Twickenham to an English mother and an Italian father, both therapists specializing in healing hypnosis, Anna started strumming at a very young age, first the violin and then the guitar, which would become her guiding instrument, after being struck by the path blazed by Django Reinhardt and the rural forefathers of the blues. A music graduate with honours from the University of Southampton, in 2003 she was making ends meet giving guitar lessons, while at the same time gaining her first experience as a guitarist in short-lived musical projects, among which it's worth mentioning Cheap Hotel, a band that went as far as releasing a single as a free download.

At the time Anna wasn't singing yet, and in fact considered her voice terrible; only with time did she come to understand that her own vocal cords would be the key to unlocking success. She was spotted by chance in Manchester by Coral guitarist Bill Rider-Jones, while performing as the opening act for Johnny Flynn, for whom she would go on to play guitar on "The Prizefighter And The Heiress". Rider-Jones immediately tipped off the talent scouts at Domino Records, and from that point on the game was practically won.

In France, at Black Box Studio, the young woman was finally able to sculpt her own sound, making use of analogue equipment steeped in Sixties dust. Brian Eno, someone who rarely gets it wrong, invited her to lunch to explain to her that invisible thread of purest emotion that (in his view) bound her inextricably to the early Patti Smith. Rob Ellis arrived to co-produce her first recordings, and it was perhaps from here that the nagging comparison to PJ Harvey arose, one that no one ever fails to point out, not always fairly.

But the lovely Anna had already made a name for herself earlier thanks to the Attic Sessions, five video clips in which, filmed with a Telecaster slung over her shoulder and minimal supporting instrumentation, she performed in a domestic setting David Bowie's "Sound And Vision", Tv On The Radio's "Wolf Like Me", Elvis Presley's "Surrender", an instrumental solo-guitar version of Leonard Cohen's "Joan Of Arc", and Edith Piaf's "Jezebel", all of them shared via YouTube. Many of these pieces would later be revisited for subsequent singles, and would remain mainstays of her live shows for years. Her heartfelt rendition of the Piaf classic in particular drew attention, and prompted yet another cumbersome comparison. And it was indeed "Jezebel" that became her prized debut single, with "Moulinette" chosen as the b-side, recorded by Rob Ellis and released on 11 October 2010. From that moment on, Anna Calvi became a tangible phenomenon, truly real to everyone, and that same year she had the chance to share major stages with Interpol, Arctic Monkeys, and Nick Cave's Grinderman, Cave being another great admirer and supporter of hers. At that point, the media buzz had made the time more than ripe for the release of the English artist's debut album, widely regarded by many as the hottest next big thing in the world, at least among female artists.

Anna Calvi, released on 17 January 2011 and immediately named Album of the Month by OndaRock, is a work that's hard not to consider flawless. Across its ten songs, the musician pours out the virtuous disarray of her idiosyncratic predilections, without ever losing control of it. With a voice as taut as a sheet of ice wrapped around a clot of boiling blood, Anna Calvi draws and twirls the romantic sword of an endless flamenco, staking out the ground for an erotic duel that admits no pulled punches. Swordswoman and odalisque at once, she defies the devil, invoked more than once, in "The Devil", a kind of tumultuous scat, a rosary intoned with closed eyes over the stinging flames of a guitar writhing in the penitential dance of sin. The same happens in "Morning Light", where what unfolds is the wild rose of an operatic vocal line stretched between Callas and Edith Piaf, suspended over the abyss of temptation and already brushed by the limpid light of the sublime.

If the opening instrumental “Rider To The Sea” polishes the blue velvet and metaphysical damasks of certain Lynchian desolations, it's through songs as finely crafted as “Blackout”, “I'll Be Your Man”, “Desire” and “Suzanne And I” that Calvi ties the modernist flair of composers she loves and has studied with genuine passion (Debussy, Ravel and Messiaen) to the elusive shapes of a solemn, liturgical blues-rock, redolent both of Nick Cave and of certain sirens' songs transcribed in starlit ink by that Ulysses-like figure, Tim Buckley. And she pulls it all together with a crack of the whip of that amorous demon which Lorca, speaking of bullfights and poetry, or of the poetry of bullfights, called duende. The closing “Love Won't Be Leaving” is the whim of a demonic burlesque that opens wide onto the adventurous song of a knight already slipping toward the call of new wars and new loves. Following in the wake of a noir vein that, in various forms, has marked the finest female expressions of a certain oblique contemporary pop (Zola Jesus, Soap&Skin, at times Florence + The Machine), Anna Calvi's debut stands out as one of the brightest stars in an expanding new sonic firmament.

The first single taken from the album is “Blackout”, with as its b-side a smoldering cover of “Surrender”, the English version made famous by Elvis Presley of the classic “Torna a Surriento”: a tribute to her Italian roots? “Desire” will follow, paired with an elegiac instrumental cover of Leonard Cohen's “Joan Of Arc”, and “Suzanne And I”, released alongside the slow “Baby It's You”, for voice and guitar alone. To keep the market engaged, Domino Records will release in 2012 the French version of “Jezebel”, yet another tribute to Edith Piaf, backed on the B-side by a cover of “Wolf Like Me” by Tv On The Radio.

Meanwhile Anna Calvi's debut album garners major recognition, including, worth mentioning at least, nominations for the Mercury Prize (though that year's winner was P.J. Harvey) and the Brit Awards.

In the meantime, collaboration requests keep coming in, and Anna decides to lend her voice to “Heart Of Nowhere”, a track released in 2013 by Noah And The Whale.

During the promotional tour Calvi appears dressed in red, the colour of passion, the colour of blood. The artwork chosen for the cover of her debut album is replicated on stage, building an imagery steeped in Spain, flamenco and bullfighting. Everywhere it's a triumph, one sold-out show after another, proof of just how much the Italian-English artist has captured attention — not only for her physical beauty, but above all for her flawless qualities as a singer and guitarist, which come across even more strikingly in a live setting.

To hold the second album in our hands we'll have to wait two and a half years, until Domino Records releases One Breath on 7 October 2013. We find ourselves facing a more mature, self-aware artist, now in full command of her expressive means, but still far from satisfied. Creative restlessness and curiosity remain her guiding lines, carried by music that has never been so passionate, visceral and intense. Different colours enrich the texture of the arrangements: alongside her long-time collaborators (Daniel Maiden-Wood on drums and Mally Harpaz on harmonium, percussion and vibraphone) we find strings arranged by Fiona Brice, and keyboards and synthetic sounds handled by John Baggot, a past collaborator of Portishead. But it's Anna's angelic silhouette that dominates the scene: her singing — epic, nostalgic, fragile and unbowed — can explode one moment and the next remain nothing but a faint echo in an empty theatre. The direction of producer John Congleton (who has worked in the past with Joanna Newsom, Bill Callahan, Antony & The Johnsons) guided the songwriter toward uncharted territory without ever losing the way: like a David Lynch or a Tim Burton behind the camera, he drew the best out of his leading lady, and in just five weeks of recording — where the first album had taken two and a half years — One Breath was born amid the green of the French countryside.

The new elements emerge gradually, deliberately doled out sparingly. The first two songs, “Suddenly” and “Eliza”, are almost a coda to the previous record in mood, as if Anna wanted to let us settle into that old, comfortable armchair before exploring darker, less illuminated recesses: a martial, emphatic pace, drums and electric guitar, vocalizations filling choruses deliberately left sparse of words. By the third track, “Piece By Piece”, the register begins to shift: a long verse held up by a fixed drum pattern, gushing synthetic sounds, noises and keyboard openings, now unsettling, now idyllic — an approach that might appeal to Thom Yorke, or to an eccentric like St. Vincent. The electrically tense “Cry”, charged with “noise-quiet” dynamics, effectively closes the first part of the album, the part best suited to satisfy fans of the previous record.

From “Sing To Me” onward the register shifts further: an intensely moving love ballad, with a cold, lunar warmth, suspended over placid guitar and bass notes, onto which the piano grafts itself, and for a few magnificent instants we soar upward, in a crescendo of strings that picks up the chorus's melodic line, rising in intensity before fading away on the shoreline of a secret, deserted, subterranean beach. The string arrangements also lend density to the second half of the intimate, disorienting title track. Against such an emotionally charged atmosphere stand the psychedelic undertones of “Tristan” and the electric fury of “Love Of My Life” — finally a wild rock, bordering on noise, that for the first time truly aligns Anna with the PJ Harvey of her glory days. The surprising instrumental coda of “Carry Me Over”, with the vocals regaining the upper hand before the close, perfectly sums up the new stylistic course charted and embodied by Anna Calvi: keyboards and vibraphone, strings and electric guitar, and then a voice — her voice — capable of scaling and descending incredible emotional peaks. The final two tracks mark a further descent into Anna's tormented psyche: the enveloping “Bleed Into Me”, a love letter and secular prayer at once, miraculously recovers the buried Grace of Jeff Buckley; “The Bridge” dries this and every other tear, rising up in a funereal procession. Left on stage are only the choir and Anna's voice, never so bare and vulnerable.

The imagery chosen for this second work has changed radically: gone is the matador-flamenco concept, replaced by an aesthetic leaning decidedly toward noir shades.

The first single taken from One Breath is “Eliza”, with “A Kiss To Your Brain” as its b-side. “Suddenly” will follow, paired with a cover of Bruce Springsteen's “Fire”. A special edition of the album will also include a mini bonus CD featuring the tracks “Endless World” and “1970s Wind”.

One Breath failed to earn the same praise as its predecessor (even though it matched it with another nomination for the prestigious Mercury Prize); after all, it's less immediate and demands greater commitment. All things considered, the English musician achieved her goal of diversifying her sound while also raising her profile. Proof of this lies in the string of sold-out shows scattered everywhere during the promotional tour, which also touched down in Italy for four dates, between 21 and 25 February 2014, in Turin, Bologna, Rome and Brescia. Anna appears dressed in black — trousers, blouse, heels, hair falling in curls over her shoulders — abandoning the flamenco-dancer look that had defined her debut tour. Now Calvi has two solid albums under her belt, and she can draw the best from both, offering a set in which every song holds up. The setlist thus takes on the shape of a genuine best-of of everything recorded so far, leaving aside the more soporific moments to make room for the most urgent, direct material.

Her stage presence is magnetic: a tiny frame that seems like it could collapse at any moment under the weight of her Telecaster, yet one that manages to draw the full attention of the crowd, rapt in a near-liturgical, respectful silence. Visibly shy, she seems on the verge of imploding into herself, but suddenly launches into brief sonic hurricanes that strike like whip-cracks, only to retreat just as abruptly. Constantly straddling the line between electric songwriting and a desert-flavoured noir western, Anna — captivating and seductive — holds her own even against her now well-honed and demanding covers, among which “Surrender”, “Fire” and “Jezebel” almost always make an appearance.

Just a few months later, in July 2014, came Strange Weather, an EP featuring five covers, two of them elevated by the presence of David Byrne. Calvi's style is by now a firmly established trademark, and the beautiful English singer-songwriter/guitarist knows how to cast a spell through intense noir ballads, the kind that set the soul and heart ablaze. The title track, played almost entirely on piano, sees Anna's and Byrne's voices sketching out a highly melodramatic scene — a great second chance given to a fine song by Israeli singer Karen Ann. The other track shared with the former Talking Heads member is “I'm The Man, That Will Find You”, and here too the pair unearthed a hidden gem, aiming to dust off a deserving song and shine a light on New Zealand psych-pop musician Connan Mockasin. “Papi Pacify” is her personal take on a recent (dating back to just 2013) mid-tempo r&b track by FKA Twigs, while “Ghost Rider” is the track with which Suicide opened their first self-titled album in 1977: it's the most nervy moment of the set, where Anna's guitar emerges in full force.

Closing out the sequence is a tribute to David Bowie: a reinterpretation of “Lady Grinning Soul”, the ballad that closed “Aladdin Sane” in 1973. Strange Weather offers wonderful confirmation of a superlative artist, one who knows how to pick other people's songs with taste and elegance and reinterpret them with class and personality, filtered through her own aesthetic — so much so that in the end they don't even seem stylistically that far removed from the songs that came from her own pen. Aside from Bowie, who certainly doesn't need patrons or promotional campaigns, the other songwriters will be deeply grateful for the opportunity given to them: it's not every day you see your own song artfully repackaged by a musician of this calibre.

On 20 February 2017, the wait for a new record is filled by the release of the live EP Live For Burberry, a document of the show Anna Calvi performed during the Burberry show held at London Fashion Week a few days earlier. For the occasion, the artist was accompanied by a choir and a string section. The setlist comprises five tracks: the previously unreleased “Whip The Night” and “Nathaniel”, the classics “Eliza” and “Desire”, and a cover of “iT”, a track by French singer-songwriter Christine And The Queens.

The third album arrives on 31 August 2018, titled Hunter, through which Anna strengthens her queer message, at a historical moment when part of society is mobilising for the recognition of gender identity, the so-called “gender” issue. The lyrics of Hunter return again and again to the theme of the body, of desire, of a sexual aesthetic that isn't necessarily fixed, a hyper-sensual aesthetic also underlined by the videos accompanying the singles taken from it. The record moves on from the end of a long relationship and draws new life from the birth of a new love-story, an event that drives the writing, steeping it in a kind of “pursuit of pleasure”, of mutual and personal physical discovery, placing at its centre the figure of a woman (though as we said, gender here is a detail that's been overcome) as huntress (“Hunter”, precisely), a woman who shows off her masculine side without fear. Anna wields her guitar like a phallic object, pouring electricity into the stripped-back blues of “Alpha” and into the declaration “Don’t Beat The Girl Out Of My Boy”, where she uses her voice to climb scales that take her close to the Pink Floyd-esque “The Great Gig In The Sky”. As on “One Breath”, Anna arranges the tracklist starting with songs that stylistically connect to her past, almost as if to put the listener at ease, before offering up the new elements that characterise the album and mark its departures from the main road.

Anna is petite and captivating, slight and sexy, proof of extraordinary strength and a trendy attitude too — yes, because you might find her strumming on stage with the raw manner of a latter-day Hendrix, and then right after soundtracking the catwalk shows that are most hyped, if not walking the runway herself in designer clothes. A songwriter so effective that she manages to make her message visible to the listener, as in the “waves of desire” narrated in the ecstatic “Swimming Pool”, among bodies swimming and seeking each other out. The titles themselves outline the scenario, from the programmatic opener “As A Man” to the single-word titles that occupy the second half of the record: “Alpha”, like the dominant figures who divide and conquer; “Chain”, like the chain that can keep you bound in vicious games; “Wish”, like the most hidden, unconscious desires; “Away”, like the urge to flee reality, expressed in a chilling minimalism for voice and guitar, one of the most intense songs ever to come from her pen; “Eden”, the heavenly farewell, the description of a night spent in the garden of delights.

Hunter is a carnal, lustful, unmistakably queer concept album. Musically, the songwriter matches the lyrics with undeniably fitting atmospheres, but we witness a simplification of the song structures, the consequence of a less combative attitude, the result of an artist at peace with herself who wants to be a serene (though determined) spokeswoman for the LGBTQ+ universe, without managing to renew the sense of wonder stirred by her previous work.

To round off the “Hunter” project, Anna selects seven tracks from her LGBTQ+ manifesto to offer alternative versions, stripped of everything except her unmistakable guitars (electric, often layered), her voice (which in the celestial “Eden” climbs to daring heights), and the voices of four guests invited to make the event even more unique. The idea is to recreate the demo situation, the moment a song is born, with Anna piecing together lyrics and chords in craftsman-like fashion. The first takes of these songs were probably not far removed from what we hear on Hunted, released in March 2020. The first part of the record has a more “solemn”, almost spiritual, slant, starting with the chamber-music touches and church-choir harmonies shared with Julia Holter on “Swimming Pool”, moving through the drops of class and tenderness that Charlotte Gainsbourg instils into “Eden”. But the track that takes your breath away is the moving “Away”, an ascent towards Paradise through a “nakedness” that is almost uncomfortable to witness, with the ambient noises left in to “dirty” the performance and make it feel even more real, as if Calvi were rehearsing right here, beside us, in her living room.

Anna searches for intimacy, but after the watershed moment of the gender fluid anthem “Don’t Be The Girl Out Of My Boy” (performed together with slacker icon Courtney Barnett) near the finish line, in order not to completely lose the “rock” urgency, she decides to turn things up a notch. A first dose of adrenaline comes courtesy of the very dark “Wish”, performed together with Joe Talbot of Idles, the only male presence in this selection, perfect for giving the track that punk-blues bite that has always been part of Calvi's rawest side. Equally raw is the closing “Indie Or Paradise”, performed in perfect solitude, sealing a project — let's call it “Hunter”/“Hunted” — that, as the months have passed, has revealed itself to be even more on point than it initially seemed. Whether because of the themes it tackles, hugely topical ones, or the quality of the musical material, or the performances, flawless as ever.

Anna thus wins a new challenge with herself, confirming her status as a first-rate female composer and performer (no offence intended…), the product of a rare combination of beauty and talent. There's no more devil, no more despair, no more blood; instead it's seduction, in all its facets, that takes centre stage — at times with real glamour.

Having successfully crossed the ten-year career mark, the next challenge was to put herself at the service of television, composing the soundtrack for the last two seasons (the fifth and sixth) of the hit Netflix series “Peaky Blinders”. Here too the operation is a complete success, allowing Calvi to further raise her profile and win over new pockets of audience.

The icing on the cake of this collaboration is the EP Tommy (named after the Peaky Blinders protagonist, Tommy Shelby), released in May 2022, which contains four new songs intimately tied to the series. “Ain’t No Grave”, the track with unmistakable rock-blues cadences that opens the record, is her own highly personal version of a 1930s gospel standard that also once inspired Johnny Cash, reinterpreted here in Anna Calvi's classic style, complete with a characteristically incendiary solo. To counterbalance this electrically charged moment, a more sinuous track arrives straight after, still delivered with her usual dramatic flair: this is the self-penned “Burning Down”, which highlights the performer's extraordinary vocal qualities.

Two covers follow, the first of which is “Red Right Hand” by Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, which can be considered the driving theme of “Peaky Blinders”, already reinterpreted for the series by other major musicians, with the standout versions being those by P.J. Harvey and Arctic Monkeys. Closing the EP is a cover of “All The Tired Horses”, originally written and recorded by Bob Dylan in 1970 to open one of his most debated albums of the period, “Self Portrait”.

The score Peaky Blinders: Seasons 5 & 6 is released in January 2024 and contains 37 tracks. Those included in the fifth season were entirely written and almost entirely performed by Calvi, who besides the vocal parts took care of guitars, violin, piano, percussion and harmonium; for those relating to the sixth season, she instead brought in Nick Launay to assist her.

Alone with her electric guitar, or with the help of just a few other instruments, Anna Calvi leaves some instrumental ideas in a semi-embryonic state, barely over a minute long; in other cases she enriches the tracks with descriptive content, bringing them up to full song length. This is the case with the nocturnal post-rock of “Arthur”, which recalls Massimo Volume quite strongly, with the heavily evocative blues rock of “Esme’s Dream”, with the industrial-noise crescendo of “Ruby Has A Fever”, which stops just short of the less uncompromising side of Swans, and with the western-film mood of “Michael’s Plan”.

For the tracks that aren't fully instrumental, Calvi sometimes chooses to grace the space with her own vocalising (as in “I Don’t Like The Life”, “Grace”, “We Don’t Like The Life”, “Under The Maple Tree”, “Where Will You Go”, “Legacy”), or with simple sighs (“Reckoning”); other times she raises the stakes by adding short verses, giving rise to fully-fledged songs (“You’re Not God”, “Tommy’s Plan”, “There Ain’t No Grave”, and the shorter “Gina”). She sketches out situations and character profiles, alternating tenderness and drama, occasionally smudging things with a touch of electronics (“Pledge Your Allegiance”, “The Execution”), but above all playing — as is her habit — with guitar effects.

Away from the spotlight for a few years, partly to devote herself to her son, born in November 2011 from her relationship with her partner Adelaide, in 2026 Anna Calvi launches a project involving the release of three EPs, of which Is This All There Is? (released in March) represents the first chapter, featuring four duets: two new songs and two covers. On the energetic “God’s Lonely Man”, Anna Calvi and Iggy Pop chase each other across two different vocal registers. A completely different scenario unfolds on the nocturnal “I See A Darkness” (a cover of Bonnie “Prince” Billy), a delight that Calvi chooses to share with the fragile falsetto of Perfume Genius.

Laurie Anderson co-stars in the transfiguration of Kraftwerk's “Computer Love”, while Matt Berninger graces “Is This All There Is?”, the title track, which at times evokes David Bowie's “Heroes” quite clearly. Tracks dense with sensual tension, torn open by Calvi's guitar, amid controlled distortion and dynamic contrasts. A new noir-rock piece in the puzzle for understanding the compositional maturity the English musician has achieved, who had appeared a few weeks earlier on the charity compilation “Help(2)” on another collaborative track, “Sunday Light”, alongside Ellie Rowsell, Nilüfer Yanya and Dove Ellis.

Contributions by Ariel Bertoldo (“One Breath”)

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