The Puppini Sisters return with the Birthday Tour coming to Leeds Glee Club

The band’s leader Marcella Puppini never dreamed of this life growing up – she longed for Paris, preferably in a bygone age.

But she was born in 1970s Bologna, northern Italy, where she started playing piano at about five and then opera singing at the age of 12 – inspired by the Italian pop singer Renato Zero, who in his song Baratto had quoted the Amami, Alfredo aria from Giuseppe Verdi's La Traviata.

Marcella says: "Then I watched the opera and went absolutely crazy over it. I learned the whole of La Traviata off by heart and I was just always very, very flamboyantly singing around the house and around school as well – my poor friends – and I was convinced that I was going to be an opera singer.”

Her family were not so convinced and wanted her to pursue more academic subjects. Then her life changed in the late 1990s as she graduated from school and her father gifted her a trip to London for doing well in her exams.

“I had no interest in London because my dream was to go to Paris and be La Traviata in some attic. But I ended up in London and I was mesmerised by it – it was the most vibrant place I'd ever been to,” she says. “I was in the West End and I saw these kids come out of a building and it looked like Fame, the movie. I thought, I have no idea what's going on in there but that's where I'm going to study. I had enrolled back in Italy, I had enrolled to do Latin and Greek in university. I said: ‘No, not doing that’. Instead, I found out what it was that they did there – it was Cetral Saint Martins school of art – so I went to art school instead and then ended up studying fashion, having displayed no interest in fashion beforehand. I just wandered into this treasure trove of coolness. So that started my journey in London and I ended up working for Vivienne Westwood.”

A breathless sequence of events, but soon enough she confided in her best friend, a jewellery designer who still works for that company, that she had no interest in fashion.

"He said: ‘Well, if you want to be a singer, what on earth are you doing here? Just quit and go and pursue your dreams’. So on the same day that we had that conversation, I went and gave my resignation, and then I went blind into the world again, thinking I will be a singer, somehow, but not having a clue how to do it.”

Alongside waitressing, she got a place studying jazz at London’s Trinity College of Music and in 2004, and by then already in her 30s, formed the Puppini Sisters trio with a look and sound inspired by the French animated film Belleville Rendez-vous. By the following year, they were signed.

“We started doing lots of weird cabaret gigs all over London, like in gay clubs and we opened for a heavy metal band. We used to perform at Café de Paris all the time. Lots of really varied and wonderful things because at the same time I'd become a musical director for large scale variety shows in east London. And then we got signed.”

A new school of British jazz, at that time, had become popular, spearheaded by the likes of Jamie Cullum, so major labels were keen to pursue these acts.

Around that time, she also worked with one Paloma Faith, who compered burlesque shows for which Marcella was musical director, and on artist Marisa Carnesky's Ghost Train ride/theatre show.

Now, in celebration of 2026 marking 20 years since their debut album, Betcha Bottom Dollar the group have just released a new, seventh record, The Birthday Party, and will head on a UK tour in May, stopping in Yorkshire.

Marcella and original member Kate Mullins have reunited with Rosanna Schura, a very early Puppini Sister who returned briefly in 2016.

They will also tour with the same line-up featured on the album: Martin Kolarides on guitar, Henrik Jensen on double bass, and Peter Ibbetson on drums.

Among the jazz standards they sing are Take The A Train, Honeysuckle Rose and Take Five. On the modern side, there is Bonnie Tyler’s Total Eclipse of the Heart.

It is a style which can be traced back to their debut, for which they rearranged songs from numerous eras to fit the swing genre – but Mr Sandman and Jeepers Creepers sat alongside Blondie’s Heart of Glass, Kate Bush’s Wuthering Heights and Panic by The Smiths.

It went into the top 20 in Britain, spent almost a year on the Billboard chart and the Puppini Sisters have toured the world ever since, helping to spawn a new scene and watching as mainstream pop embraced their burlesque-inspired aesthetic – one since used by the likes of Taylor Swift.

“It was a certain world of a certain kind of performance artist that was very London and all of a sudden, then Christina Aguilera was doing it,” says Marcella. “It was quite incredible.”

In 2007, they took part in the Royal Variety Performance and met King Charles, who was then of course still the Prince of Wales.

Marcella says: "He was the royal in attendance and afterwards we were in the line-up and he's walking through, ‘Hello, hello Sir Elton John’, and obviously with us, he had no clue who we were, so he just went, ‘hello, hello, hello’ and went by quite quickly.

"But then he came back. And he said: ‘Oh, it's you’. And he said that somebody had given him our CD for his birthday and he thought it was splendid. Then he stayed for a really lovely chat. We have this photo of the three of us talking to him with grins that went all the way around our faces, we were so elated.”

They have rubbed shoulders with musical royalty too, joining Michael Bublé to record their 2011 rendition of Jingle Bells.

“We arrived in LA, tottered into the studio and said hello, and then he said: ‘Oh, thank God, you're nice’. He said he'd been absolutely terrified of us because during the negotiations you'd expect, you get this nice little group from the UK, (that) they would bend to your will and say ‘we'll do anything you want.’ But we went to him with myriad demands.”

That included doing their own vocal arrangement, as was customary for them, and “also we're not going to be called girls, because in the Jingle Bells with Bing Crosby and the Andrews Sisters, he says ‘Merry Christmas, girls’ and they say, ‘Merry Christmas, Mr Crosby’. We said: ‘You're not going to call us girls. We're not girls, especially I wasn't. We want to be called ladies. So we made him say that, and he said he thought we were the biggest divas in the world!”

The Birthday Tour 2026 comes to Leeds Glee Club on Thursday, May 14 and The Glasshouse, Gateshead, on Friday, May 15. The Birthday Party album is out now.