Chantel McGregor Comes to Town
VICTORIA KINGHAM in conversation with a musical prodigy
Chantel McGregor is genuine, unpretentious, and supremely talented. She is from Bradford – an important characteristic in my opinion, but probably only because I was born in Leeds.
Chantel McGregor
She’s a phenomenon – read anything about her on the internet (her self-publicity isn’t excessive, unrealistic, or exaggerated) and you’ll note that she went to Leeds Music College and gained one hundred per cent in her final exams, not just for one segment or another but for the whole course. “It sounds a bit geeky,” she told me. It does, but there’s nothing wrong with being her kind of geek.
Her music is her own – she has recorded a couple of albums of other people’s songs, many of which she covers so well that they sound better than the original. There’s a reason for that, and it may be the concentration and the isolation of the lockdown period, or it may simply be the detailed attention paid. During lockdown, she published (on YouTube) a weekly video session: her audience told her she should record whatever song she felt like singing at the time. So she recorded, for instance, Bonnie Raitt’s Love Has No Pride – just her and a perfectly tuned acoustic guitar – and I’m sure that if Bonnie Raitt has heard it, she might acknowledge not only the deference to, but the improvement on, the original.
AUTHENTICITY AND DEDICATION
Chantel has written many songs, some of which she will perform when she is here headlining at The Carlisle, normally a venue for substantial metal rock. She plays fabulous electric guitar too, with an authenticity that’s born (incredibly in one so young) of more than thirty years’ experience. She plays Voodoo Child with great skill and aplomb, and she loves 70s and 80s rock groups – Neil Young, Fleetwood Mac, Jeff Beck. She’s also a big country fan – Miranda Lambert, Laney Wilson, Brad Paisley. Her taste is eclectic but excellent, her guitar work impeccable. Not, as has been said about her musicianship, how a girl ought to play. But she is one of a generation of girls and young women who care more about the music they love than any general preconceptions about what their gender ‘should’ be doing.
The more contemplative songs she carefully recorded on Shed Sessions 1 and 2, are beautifully done. Did she, I wonder, have much input into the production of those two solo albums, released during lockdown and just after? Well, she says, I passed the weekly streams over to Wayne (Proctor) and he had the equipment to make them sound good.
You recorded them yourself? Turns out the vocals were initially done in a wardrobe in her home. “We’ve got a wardrobe with a trouser rail,” she says. “So we covered it with a massive whiteboard and a blanket, and parted the clothes. We put a mike stand and a mike on top, and it made it completely soundproof”. She had substantial input into the production: “there was a lot of sending things backwards and forwards and I was like, this is a bit ess-y, the sibilance is too high, and can we take out the string bit there. I’m quite obsessive … but I don’t know that it’s detrimental.”
It isn’t. Her approach to songwriting is meticulous, techy, as she said, geeky, but in a good way. For lyrics she uses techniques to generate ideas: mind-mapping, diagrams, word association, that kind of thing. Of course, her own experiences as well. Sometimes a phrase just occurs to her and she works with it. Her song Walk on Land, for instance, was to do with revisiting a pub where she and her dad used to play a jam night. “It was absolutely terrible” she goes on. “Nobody was listening. I just said to my dad look, nowt changes, does it? Later I sat with it and found a rhyming line, and Walk on Land was developed, but I don’t quite know what it’s about!” That’s OK, I think, Leonard Cohen was never sure what his songs were about either. It’s the best song on the album, faultlessly produced, with a heartfelt, wailing guitar break.
IMPROVISATION
A substantial part of her music is improvised, so I ask her about jazz. Not that much, she says, “but I’ll put something on in the van while we’re touring, and it will really stick with me and I’ll say OK, I want to play like that tonight. There’s this band called Snarky Puppy …”
Here I start to jump up and down. Snarky Puppy is one of my own favourite bands. I obsessed about them during lockdown and bored everyone I knew by making them listen. So she decided that on that particular night she would like to play guitar in the style of lead guitarist Mike Lettieri. Wanting to do that is one thing. Being able to do it is quite another. Starting out with a guitar at four years old, as she did, she has enabled her infinite versatility of style.
What will your set be when you’re here? I wonder. “It’ll be a mix – a bit of everything. I do a little bit on my own in the middle of the set acoustically. It’s just really a mishmash of different styles, and also what we fancy playing on the night and how the audience respond – if they like the heavy stuff we’ll play more of that. You just read it. I always refer to the list as a menu, rather than a set list, so we choose while we’re on stage, depending on the audience. A lot of what we do is improvised, so a song could be 10 or 15 minutes depending on how we feel.”
ALWAYS ON THE ROAD
She is constantly on tour. It’s the thing she likes best, and probably why she hasn’t made more albums over fourteen years. She acknowledges, too, that since everyone now streams everything, albums don’t make the money they used to. (Spotify is great for listeners – who wouldn’t want access to a hundred million tracks? – but unless you’re Taylor Swift or some other singer with 32 million plays – it’s terrible for many many good musicians). On her recent tour of Ibiza she was accompanied by her boyfriend, keyboard player Jamie Brooks, but she doesn’t quite know yet who she will be bringing to Hastings. She makes a choice from a couple of people whom she regularly plays with, depending on availability. The gig will be all her own work, unless the audience has special requests for other songs. She’ll go down a storm at The Carlisle. Whoever they are on the night, the band will shine. Tickets will sell out soon; get yours before it’s too late.
Chantel McGregor headlines at The Carlisle, Pelham Street, Hastings, on 5 July 2024. Music starts at 7.30 p.m.
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