The big interview: Clare Teal

Indeed she was. A big, rich voice, an ebullient delivery, a winning way with the lyrics of others and a witty confidence about the words of her own songs. There was something else, too, which all too few singers are blessed with – a warmth that lit up all the performances. This was a voice with a ray of sunshine in it.

It still is, and a decade on from the debut that set her on the path from unknown to crowd-puller, radio presenter and singer of choice for the likes of Sir Michael Parkinson and Michael Bublé, Clare is finding that 2011 is developing into a milestone.

Neatly enough, her 10th year on record brings her 10th album, Hey Ho. Not only that, but it’s the first on her own label, Mud, another development of note.

And the new label has brought with it a new direction – a CD devoted entirely to songs written by Britons, spanning almost 120 years from an 1889 WB Yeats poem set to music, Down By the Sally Gardens, to the pop group Snow Patrol’s 2005 Chasing Cars, along the way taking in an eclectic mix of material ranging from Ivor Novello’s We’ll Gather Lilacs, It’s Not Unusual and Noel Coward’s If Love Were All, the lyric of which contains the album’s title.

It’s a highly individual album, and the result of a great deal of work by Clare, 38, who hails from Kildwick, near Skipton, and her musical director, the Australian pianist Grant Windsor.

She said: “Somebody suggested I should do the Great British Songbook, and it seemed like a really good idea, a totally different approach, because normally when I’m choosing songs I choose them on their own merits. Normally my records are a mish-mash of songs that I’ve written, or just like.

“To an anorak like me, the research part of that was great fun. I also had this massive trunk of music that somebody gave me, which was one woman’s collection of sheet music from the time she was a little girl all the way through. I like to think I know a bit about popular song, that’s my area of expertise if you like, but some of these songs I’ve never heard of in my life, so there’s a still a lot to do on this project, and it might be something that I return to.”

She was slightly nervous about approaching some of the songs that are closely associated with contemporary artists, like Annie Lennox’s Why.

“If you’re a jazz, or jazz-inflected singer, I’m always a little bit scared of trying things that are too modern because they can sound really naff, if you’re not careful, but these songs work, because they’re crafted in a similar way to the older songs, they’re built to withstand interpretation.

“I know pretty much instantly if I’m going to be able to sing a song or not, whether I can make this mine, make this a little bit different, and Grant approaches things very similarly, and then it’s a matter of making things sit side-by-side on the record.

“We put into the pot about 1,000 songs, and worked very closely. Grant has been pushing me for the last two years to try new things, and I’ve said, ‘I make a perfectly reasonable living singing the songs of dead people’.”

The songs of dead people, otherwise known as the Great American Songbook, taking in standards by the likes of the Gershwins, Irving Berlin, Cole Porter and Harold Arlen, have made Clare into one of Britain’s best-loved singers, along with her friend, Jamie Cullum, who also came to prominence at around the same time, thanks to a similar repertoire.

She lives in Bath, but will be back in Yorkshire for the Harrogate International Festival in July, sharing a stage with one of her great boosters, Sir Michael Parkinson, who said of her: “Wonderful. Worth raving about.”

The road to a buoyant recording career, a packed list of engagements, house-full signs and two shows a week on BBC Radio 2 began in Kildwick, growing up with parents John and Mary, who still live near Skipton, and a fascination with her grandmother’s collection of old 78rpm records.

Singers of the 30s, 40s and 50s, along with the big band swing of the era, exerted an appeal that she found lacking in the pop music her friends were listening to. Clare played piano and clarinet, and a music degree followed, as did work selling advertisements. Singing, though, was her first love and after a tough apprenticeship of making demo records and gigging with bands, she finally broke through with a recording deal.

A bigger break was yet to come. In 2004, she landed the biggest recording contract ever awarded to a British jazz artist, when industry giant Sony signed her up. The resulting album, Don’t Talk, cracked the UK top 20 album chart, selling 60,000 copies and gaining her a lot of radio play.

Clare had really arrived, and would later move to another of the giant labels, Universal, for her 2008 album, Get Happy.

Being under contract to the big industry players, though, brought its own challenges that Clare wasn’t comfortable with. Having her own label is more to her taste.

“There’s always a pressure if you’re working for a label, because they’ve invested a lot of money and they want a return, and you’re a product, so how do you make the product better? If the product lost a bit of weight, or the product wore a different make-up, or the product did a different sort of interview for a magazine, and when you’re the product, it’s really hard. I’m not that kind of person, I like to keep myself to myself. This is better for me, there’s no pressure, and I’m really enjoying it.

“It felt like the right time to do it, to be in control of my own destiny, and having been under contract to labels, hopefully you learn something along the way, so we decided to give it a go and put a record out.”

She’s enjoying the live performance, too. The past decade has given her a loyal following, the warmth that comes through on record manifesting itself on stage in a chatty, cheerful, sometimes cheeky, presence. She’s the most inclusive of performers, and a lot of work goes into getting concerts exactly right.

“All my set lists are shapes, and it’s something I’ve worked really hard to get good at. You want the show to feel slightly too short, anything over that, you’ve done too much. Building the pace, bringing it down, building it back up again, taking the audience along with you.

“Even when you do two or three shows where the songs are the same, they’re never the same, that’s the nice thing about working with jazz musicians, the tempo might change slightly, the feeling might change, we try to keep it fresh all the time.”

Songs are invariably tried out in concert before being recorded, and Clare has been featuring the Hey Ho material for many months now. She’s been pleased at the response.

“We have such a mixed audience. We have a lot of older people who like the 30s and 40s stuff, which are the songs of their lives, but what I love is that a lady in her 80s got in touch to say the Snow Patrol song was marvellous, and at the other end you’ve got a girl in her 20s who’s in tears because she’s never heard We’ll Gather Lilacs before.

“I’m so glad that we’ve arrived at a time where people just listen, they’re bothering to label or pigeonhole, they’re just open.”

Clare’s been pigeonholed in the past as a jazz singer, but she’s not sure that’s the right description.

“I sit in a very difficult place, because that four-letter word ‘jazz’ sometimes does a lot of damage because people have so many pre-conceived ideas. It’s about the phrasing, I’m trying to make it as clean as I can, I’m trying to make it beautiful and strong and elegant.

“Am I a jazz singer? I don’t know, basically I’m a singer of popular music, so if that’s pop songs from the last century, then so be it. I just like singing songs that I like. It always has a jazz influence because that’s what I came up with. I just do what I do.”

It’s plain that others like the songs she sings, and the way she sings them, too. One of them was an American billionaire who saw Clare in Monaco last year and asked if she was available for a private concert at his home on the West Coast in January. She was, and it gave her and her partner, Amanda, the chance to take 10 days’ holiday afterwards.

Songs come her way not only from her own knowledge of the classic repertoire and the work of more contemporary artists, but also from her radio shows, on Sunday nights at 10pm, and Big Band Special on Mondays at 11pm. She’s a natural fit for both shows, which nod affectionately to the music that has claimed her affections since childhood. The audience for the shows is the same as turns out to see her perform.

“I love that music and I enjoy and respect the fact that people listen to that, and it’s the music of their lives, or the music they married to, or that their mothers and fathers loved. There’s a respect for all that goes with that job.”

Clare Teal appears at Harrogate Royal Hall on July 30 in a concert compered by Sir Michael Parkinson. Box office: 01423 502116. Her website is www.clareteal.co.uk