Keeley Forsyth: ‘It’s only now that I’m feeling the benefit of those 20 years where I felt quite lost’

Keeley Forsyth is in Dusseldorf, home city of Kraftwerk and Neu!, when we speak. The actor turned singer-songwriter is preparing for what in autumn 2020 is a rare gig with her musician boyfriend.
Keeley Forsyth. Picture: Maria AlzamoraKeeley Forsyth. Picture: Maria Alzamora
Keeley Forsyth. Picture: Maria Alzamora

“Believe me, my life is never this glamorous,” she says in friendly northern tones. “I’m usually stuck at home with the kids.”

Having already released one of this year’s outstanding debut albums, Debris, the Harrogate-based singer, 41, is about to release an equally haunting EP, Photograph. “It was probably a direct response to lockdown,” she says of a project that led on from an experimental collaboration, From Isolation, that she did with electronic musician Ross Downes and James Johnston of Gallon Drunk.

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For Photograph, Forsyth and Downes were joined by pianist, composer and arranger Matthew Bourne, who also worked on Debris. “Like anything, I suppose I have to use my environment as inspiration because that’s all I’ve got,” she says of the new EP. “Being on my own and a mum you have to take what you have and make it into something. It took me a long time to understand that who I am, what I do and where I live is the art, whereas when I was in my 20s I had to go out and find it. But then, as you get a bit older, you become more still and you get a little bit empowered by your own existence.”

The EP is “a lot simpler” than the new album she’s currently working on, she says. “It’s just two or three tracks of voice and instruments. It’s more about stuff going round in our heads.”

The title track is a reflection on the sense of isolation that many of us have felt in the past seven months. “It did feel that you were reading about life, death, people looking for photographs or looking within their own minds for memories of people.”

Forsyth drew on her theatre background for the stark video that accompanies the track. “I was reading a lot about the Theatre of Cruelty over lockdown,” she says. “I see songs in my head as scenes in a bigger film so they have to have some kind of narrative. Especially this one, the table felt like it could be on a stage. The black and white or the saturated colours reminded me of (Samuel) Beckett’s stuff or film noir and just making it about people’s lives.

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“At the centre of it is a woman who’s trying to make sense of her life even in the domestic table, the grave, this kind of shape that we live around and end up inside. Ross Downes, who directed it, loves Beckett and Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, so it’s that – the rough northern poetry that isn’t trying to be poetic, it is poetic because it’s truthful.”

Keeley Forsyth. Picture: Maria AlzamoraKeeley Forsyth. Picture: Maria Alzamora
Keeley Forsyth. Picture: Maria Alzamora

Behind Forsyth is a 25-year acting career, appearing in shows such as Heartbeat, Coronation Street and Happy Valley, that she decided to put aside for music. She admits she’d been a “frustrated performer” for a number of years. “Music was the thing that inspired me more than anything,” she says. “I definitely took the long road but now I’ve got here I use all the things that I’ve learnt and I can put them to use, with the theatre, the acting, the movement. On the performance side I do a lot of dance movements, so they’re all coming together but it’s only now that I’m feeling the benefit of those 20 years where I felt quite lost.”

The gothic songs on Debris, which have echoes of late-period Scott Walker, Dead Can Dance and Antony and The Johnsons, emerged from an unsettling period in Forsyth’s life. “I don’t believe in using suffering to produce anything at all; I am always working towards happiness and wellbeing, and that for me is being a full artist,” she says, “but for whatever reason the cracks appeared and that was when things started to shift. It was definitely made from a very challenging time, and it was just about the human condition, about the darkness we feel.

“One of the songs, which is called Lost, is about observing yourself, feeling that you’ve been consumed by something else. It was interesting for me to experience, even though I was going through it as well. The more you read about people the more you find actually you’re not so special, life can be difficult. But I definitely feel grateful that I had something in it that I can now enjoy. Making the album was very different but I love the album now.”

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Before lockdown curtailed touring, Forsyth was developing her gigs into a form of theatrical show.

“We’re trying to keep things going as much as we can in the making of the music,” she says. “The research and development fund that I got from the Arts Council just came to an end as lockdown started but I just have to rethink things, where it’s more film-based. The music is only the skeleton of the thing; I’m always working towards the live performance of it with choreographers and designers. I’m not so interested in just doing some music; there’s a production to every album that’s out. I don’t know how that’s going to go but I’m just doing every residency that’s available, trying to capture them on audio or film and hopefully at some point things will open up again.”

Keeley Forsyth is due to support Ben Watt at The Crescent, York on May 4, 2021, and Social in Hull on May 8. Photograph is out on The Leaf Label on November 20. www.keeleyforsyth.com

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