Camden New Journal - Preview: Simone White

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The Review - MUSIC - grooves with CHARLOTTE CHAMBERS
Published: 17 April 2008

Sweet daydreams are made of this

PREVIEW - SIMONE WHITE
Camden Crawl

IF you’re looking for the sweetest voice you’re likely to hear all year – or at least in Camden on Friday and Wednesday next – search no further than Simone White.
She may seem your archetypal Californian girl, but White has come out of nowhere with a lot more to offer than a suntan.
While songs like Sweetest Love Song (“you are the sweetest love song in the world”) may be a bit sickly to some tastes, it would take someone tanked up on 10 cans of Coke not to have room for a little bit of Miss White’s daydreamy warblings.
While she lists her influences as Sonic Youth, Nina Simone and Bonnie Prince Billy, her Eva Cassidy thing seems likely to push her towards a more grown-up fan base.
Other tracks from her recent album, I Am The Man, released last year, show a nostalgic softness with a modern edge. Politicised tracks like American War match her tripping-along melody, evocative of the 1970s flower-power era, with deceptively modern lyrics. “Did you ever think this was the greatest country in the world? Freedom and democracy and SUVs called liberty for every boy and girl,” she sings sweetly, before darkly warning: “The oyster chokes on its own pearl. We know you can’t help where you come from. It’s not your fault it’s what you stand for.”
Crikey, it must be hard to be a Yank these days.
Nevertheless, her sentiments are likely to go down well with the hippy fraternity of Camden. And her booking at Womad festival, that bastion of tree huggers, seems to confirm your mum would probably like her too.
Her exotic past puts her work into context. “I was born in Hawaii. I didn’t wear no shoes. We moved to California. My grandma was a showgirl, a singer and a dancer on the stage. My auntie wrote pop songs in the 1950s. My mother was a folk singer and an artist. My dad’s a sculptor. I grew up moving town constantly. I played in the dirt, was always the new kid,” White says of her early years. Expect a cool songbird on stage.

• Camden Crawl on Friday April 18 and The Enterprise April 23

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