Rachel Taylor-Beales

Rachel takes the stage, shuts her eyes and sings. Soulful and resonant like some fallen chorister, hers is a voice thick enough to stand a spoon in. The blend of the acoustic and the jazz, the soft and the skeptical, the old and the new, are punctuated by an instinct to examine life and sift out little pieces of truth. In essence she is a storyteller re-counting her observations with humour, anger, sweetness and all of them dressed in her mesmeric, dancing voice. These are songs to celebrate our extra-ordinary ordinariness, the dignity in the mundane and the good in the sad.

By the age of 12 Rachel had notched up 13 different houses, 7 schools and 5 relocations between Australia and the UK. Surrounded by a family of musicians she picked up a spare guitar and 2 years later began by writing a song about the death of her best friend's granddad. She remembers hearing Tori Amos on the radio, late during one sleepless night, already on a borrowed diet of Joni Mitchell, Suzanne Vega, and the Beach Boys, music soon became as natural as breathing.

She began performing regularly on the Nottingham scene; met Bill (a visual artist) got hitched and left for Australia. They spent the next 4 years travelling round on variety of modes of transport from push bikes to station wagons held together with string, and after playing and painting in all kinds of places, they formed a performing arts company, 3 Chord Trick (Now Collective AM). Along the way they picked up other singer-songwriters, dancers and a rainmaker and decided firmly never to get proper jobs. Since then they have composed and performed their way through theatres, schools, prisons, pubs, clubs, festivals and even an audio book and played an extensive tour of the UK and America.

Now based in Cardiff, Wales, Rachel has established herself as a solo artist, self-releasing her debut album Brilliant Blue and subsequently being signed to Martyn Joseph's own label, Pipe Records. Her tastes range from Jasper Fforde to Camus, Green and Blacks to Haribo fixes, G 'n' T to communion wine. And her CD player these days is stocked with Waits, Orton, Dylan, Cave as well as Iron and Wine, Di Franco, Sufjan Stevens and much more.

Rachel has a searing soul filled voice that wraps itself around her seamless blend of acoustic folk and jazz arrangements. The songs are full of quirky melodies and rich harmonies with beautifully observed narratives of the human condition. The Brilliant Blue songs are a collection of stories about waking up in the middle of a storm and asking yourself ?how the **** am I going to get through today?? Rachel is keen to point out, however, that this album is still, at its heart, about hope. ?I love the idea that the eye of the storm is actually a very still place- it's just getting in there and getting out again that might cause you to break your neck!?