Typical McCluskey. Her friends, like her music, are eclectic, gathered in from her eccentric rovings, but seldom discarded and never forgotten. Her first solo album, The Things We Do, with its mix of blues, jazz and chilled rock framing her extraordinary voice, is making ripples everywhere. Radio 2 is playing her single, It’s Been Done, while France and Ireland have fallen in love with her. In America, she is already a cult artist. Not bad for a former film PR who took up music by accident.
At 37, McCluskey is on the mature side to be starting a solo career. She doesn’t care. “Age is a phone number. I’m older than Britney and younger than Madonna,” she laughs, a raucous Scot untouched by a decade in America. “Are people really going to say, ‘I can’t listen to that voice, it’s way too old for me’? I have never relied on my looks. I am not doing songs that are selling sex. Life is what I am singing about. I’ve had good sex, bad sex, mediocre sex and can-we-finish-this-another-time? sex. In the end, that’s what it’s all about — love and f***ing death.”
McCluskey is dressed in her usual eccentric and contrasting layers: a khaki combat jacket over a floaty, Hare Krishna-orange top and candy-striped pedal pushers. She wears her hair in trademark exploding bird’s nest style, pinned into gravity defiance by ribbons, butterfly clips and giant artificial flowers. She leans back in her chair and brandishes her legs, displaying a series of bruises from where she fell, she says, “arse over tit” on stage in Toronto. Her performances are something else.
It is impossible not to enjoy McCluskey’s company as she unleashes expletive-ridden snapshots of her odyssey from the Glasgow tenements to a Manhattan loft, via London, Paris and LA. She was the eldest of four, and was often hauled out of bed to sing Summertime. Her father, Gerry, was a carpenter from an Irish family who loved Perry, Dean and Frank. He had a beautiful singing voice and a sharp sense of humour, but was also a morose weekend drunk. Her mother, Mary, was a country beauty who played accordion in a Scottish band and could never hide her dis- appointment in her daughter, although she was a champion runner who loved to paint and sing.
At 18, McCluskey was heading back to drama school in Glasgow when she was offered a job in London. She stayed, and stumbled into PR jobs with Channel 4, EMI (now her record company) and Limelight films. She sang at parties when she drank too much, but it wasn’t serious — until she went to dinner with Hugh Grant at the Star of India, on the Old Brompton Road, where a blond man in a white suit was playing the piano. “It was my George Sand moment,” she says. “
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When she heard Chopin for the first time, she just went and lay under the piano.” In her version, he played Satie, and she was so drunk that she started scat-singing odd words in French. The owner suggested the two of them do a gig together.
They both said yes, with McCluskey’s enthusiasm overcoming her trepidation. She and Paul Cantelon fell in love and, a dozen years and two continents later, are still married. “Paul was from another planet, the opposite of me. I’m a Scottish maniac. He is an American classical pianist who trained at Juilliard, speaks four languages and cooks in all of them. He said to me, ‘You have an incredibly unique voice. You must sing.’”
He moved to London. Three months later, McCluskey went to LA to promote the movie Hear My Song and never came home.
She blagged a job as an interior designer, then decided to reinvent herself as a singer. She set up a Tuesday-evening free-form cabaret gig at Café Largo, based on Vic Reeves Big Night Out. Within weeks, it was mobbed. Winona Ryder took the tickets at the door, while Keanu Reeves and Stephen Rea were regulars. McCluskey sang Jim Reeves duets with a stoned Harry Dean Stanton, who accused her of forgetting the words. Her first band, Wild Colonials, just happened. “I knew a guy who played sax, another who played bass, one who played rock guitar. I asked Paul, ‘Do you play anything else?’ He pulled a violin from under the bed. It was a train smash for three weeks, then it clicked into one of the best bands you’ve ever heard in your life. Suddenly, I was writing songs, sitting on the sidewalk, playing guitar.”
Six months later, a man dressed head to toe in black leather and wearing a helmet turned up on her doorstep. It was Chad Smith, drummer with the Red Hot Chili Peppers. He was on tour, it was his three-month anniversary, and all his wife, Maria, would talk about was Wild Colonials. The band did a surprise gig for her at his Benedict Canyon house, which ended with the police threatening a fine for noise. With true rock-star insouciance, Smith threw himself into the swimming pool, shouting “Thousand-dollar jam”, while the band played Fire.
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A week later, Smith told McCluskey to go to Studio 56, “the home of Phil Spector and the Wall of Sound”. He had turned the studio into Café Largo, complete with tables, candles, her friends and a full bar. He made them all watch This Is Spinal Tap. After three days’ recording, he handed her a CD and said: “Go fly.”
Wild Colonials signed a $1m deal with David Geffen. Their first album was recorded at Real World Studios, near Bath, but McCluskey was so nervous that she lost her voice for a week. Over two albums and steady touring, the band built up a cult following in America, until Geffen was taken over by Seagram, which wanted nothing but pop acts. McCluskey fled the label with tapes of an unreleased third album and moved to New York, where Cantelon set about establishing a career as a movie-soundtrack composer. She had intended to take a year off, but then she got a call from Télépopmusik, a French techno band. Their song Breathe was a European hit, and Mitsubishi used it for an American television commercial. “It was my Massive Attack,” says McCluskey.
“Commercials are the most daring musical developers of the moment. They will put an unknown act on a multimillion-dollar ad campaign.” She recently recorded Bobby Darin’s Beautiful Things with a 40-piece big band for American Express.
The genesis of The Things We Do was equally unlikely. Nathan Larson, once guitarist in the post-punk act Shudder to Think and married to the Cardigans’ Nina Persson, suggested she record with him in Sweden. “We got up at nine in the morning and went to bed at two. We wrote and we sang all day, and I went home with a CD that cost four grand. I didn’t have a manager, so I gave it to Nathan’s manager, Danny Heaps. He took it to a few record labels and suddenly it was a feeding frenzy. At the end of the day, nobody knows what is going to be big — and it might just be me,” she adds.
McCluskey is too canny — and too experienced — to believe she is going to be the next Norah Jones, even though they share a label. She would rather emulate Lucinda Williams or Sarah McLachlan. “All I want to do is make some more records and play some gigs. If I could do my own theatre tour, it would be amazing. I am,” she announces, as if this might be a surprise, “very theatrical.”
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It’s Been Done is released on September 6; The Things We Do follows on September 20
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www.angelamccluskey.com
Visually slick, but a little sparse