Angie Palmer

Angie Palmer: Biography Angie's life, it is fair to say, has been a bit different. At seventeen she left England, deciding to do a bit of travelling before taking up a place at art college. In fact she ended up living there for seven years, mainly in Paris and Geneva, busking, playing bars, clubs and small festivals. Angie's time in Europe was also spent writing songs, some of which appear on her first CD: ?A Certain Kind of Distance? which she recorded on her return to England and took around the country's blues and folk circuit...

Angie's life, it is fair to say, has been a bit different. At seventeen she left England, deciding to do a bit of travelling before taking up a place at art college. In fact she ended up living there for seven years, mainly in Paris and Geneva, busking, playing bars, clubs and small festivals.

Angie's time in Europe was also spent writing songs, some of which appear on her first CD: ?A Certain Kind of Distance? which she recorded on her return to England and took around the country's blues and folk circuit, including two years appearing on the acoustic stage at Glastonbury. After a chance meeting in Paris Angie struck up a songwriting partnership with Paul Mason (a lecturer in European philosophy from Manchester Metropolitan University) and together they wrote her next album ?romantica obscura?.

Her next CD ?Road? was released in 2003 and featured songs that have strong European influenced narratives (philosophy, literature, cinema). From Mojo to Maverick the music press received ?Road? with 4 and 5 star reviews and she has been compared by many with Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell thanks to lyrics described by reviewers as ?intelligent? and ?literate?. For others her potent mix of country, blues, and folk served up with equal measures of aggression and tenderness has led her to be called the ?British Lucinda Williams?.

Angie's music is now being championed by Bob Harris who recently chose her as one of only two female singer-songwriters on his recent ?Best of British? show calling her ?one of the greatest British songwriters?.

Her new CD "Tales of Light and Darkness", which like "Road" made the long-cut for the Mercury Music Prize, is a more musically diverse record, with longer storytelling songs rubbing shoulders with shorter simpler songs about ?love, loss, and redemption?, again drawing heavily on literature: Steinbeck's dispossessed (Rose of Sharon), Edgar Allen Poe's dark visions (Ravens), and the symbolic landscapes of Mikhail Bulgakov (Fool's Gold) as well as the confessional: the death of a close friend (Columbus for a Day) and starting up alone (Letters from Home). These new songs, she says, continue where Road left off, mixing strong narrative songs with the personal but ?a personal' that connects with ?the universal' and which all reflect the idea of the age-old metaphysical struggle of good and evil, life and death, light and dark. This is to be expected from an artist of whom HMV Choice said when choosing ?Road? as one of their Top Ten, ?not since Bob Dylan's mid-60's output has a singer jammed songs with so many high-culture reference points?.