Viva Lewes Issue #152 May 2019

ON THIS MONTH: MUSIC
Nick Pynn and Kate Daisy Grant
Each other’s backing band
“It was genuine love at first
sight.”
In February 2011, ‘toy-folkpop’
singer Kate Daisy Grant
was looking for a multiinstrumentalist
musician to
work on her second album.
A friend asked her: ‘have you
thought of Nick Pynn?’
“I checked him out on
YouTube, and I immediately
knew: he’s the one for me.”
It took Nick, an ‘avant-folk’ musician, a little, but
not much, longer. “I went to see Kate’s next gig,
we met, and within two hours we were in love.”
Nick got the job, of course, and the couple
started working together, both in the studio
and live. They got married in August 2012, in
Edinburgh, on their day off from their run at the
Fringe.
Sitting outside a pub near their Brighton home,
I ask them why they feel they complement one
another so well (musically speaking).
“Kate’s songs, voice and musicality blew me
away,” says Nick. “I realised we were both
crafting the music we each want to hear,
regardless of whether it’s ‘commercial’ or not.
And the instruments she plays so fabulously are
ones that I don’t play, like the piano, the cello
and the auto-harp.”
“Nick is brilliant with anything with strings,”
says Kate. “Among many other instruments
he plays the five-string fiddle, the Appalachian
dulcimer and bass pedals. He’s also an expert in
live looping – he was one of the first people to
use it – which is like laying down tracks in the
studio: there might only be one or two of us on
stage, but it can sound like ten or twenty.”
The gig in Lewes is, in part,
a launch for Nick’s latest
album, Buffalo Orbison,
and, like all their gigs, will
comprise two sets, with both
artists playing their own
music, with support from
the other: “we’re each other’s
backing band”.
Nick will demonstrate his
ability to play a succession of
different instruments, often
at the same time, a skill for which he has been
dubbed (by comedian Stewart Lee, no less) ‘the
octopus of sound’. “He will also use some ‘found’
instruments: for example, his backing singers, the
Crystal Sisters, are five wine glasses,” says Kate.
Nick describes Kate’s music as ‘experipop’:
“there are classical influences, and
folk influences, overlaid by a poppy feel.
It’s playful but dark.” Her voice has been
likened to Tori Amos, Kate Bush and ‘a less
aggressive Amanda Palmer’ and she’s flattered
by those comparisons, though she says her
major influences, have been just as much “Jeff
Buckley, Nick Cave and Leonard Cohen.” Part
of her set will be from her forthcoming album,
Lullaby, “a dreamy harmonising of lullabies
from around the world, exploring our ability as
humans to co-exist.”
As a parting shot, I ask the couple what
problems arise from their co-existence, both at
home and at work. I mean, it hardly worked for
Sonny and Cher.
“Problems?”, says Nick, and there is a slightly
puzzled silence as they both have a long and
fruitless think. Alex Leith
All Saints, 24th May, £12
Photo by Lieve Boussauw
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