Laura Marling article

There's some pretty good articles on Laura Marling this week, since her debut album Alas, I Cannot Swim came out on Monday. I took the picture to the left during the ICA show and it captures her on-stage demeanor pretty well.

Here's the article in full or you can read it at the London Paper here.

"I can't stand being compared to these people because the only thing we have in common is we're female and we're young."

So says 18-year-old Berkshire singer Laura Marling of her contemporaries, the likes of Lily, Amy, Duffy and Adele. "I hope people don't only want to hear my music because I'm a female songwriter, that's just lame," she snipes.

With an obsession for female singers not seen in the UK since a toothsome Vera Lynn won the nation's heart, there's a chance the subtle charms of Marling may be lost in the bluster of competitive foghornery from Adele etc, or the tabloid tribulations of Misses Allen and Winehouse. This would be a shame. What Marling is offering is something less obvious but equally satisfying.

Alas I Cannot Swim is a gently rocking boat of melancholy folk and dreamlike pop with an uplifting jangle.

For such a young talent, she has a voice of grave character and the gentle storytelling ability of Suzanne Vega, layered with lyrical morsels such as, "He wants to die in a lake in Geneva, where the mountains cover the shape of his nose" on the entrancing My Manic And I.

"It's meant to be one continuous sound – it's very much a sad sound in a way, although there are some happier songs on there," she says.

A far cry from the confident high-kicking stage school brigade, Marling is on the shy side. She wishes she'd chosen a "nom de chant" like Bat For Lashes ("It gives you much more freedom and it's a better way of keeping anonymous.")

She doesn't like giving interviews, either: "I'm not really very talky and I've got this huge paranoia that I'm the least funny person ever."

She also seems a bit paranoid when I bring up her age. "I'm not a knobhead teenager," she assures me, as if I were about to chastise her for alcopop consumption.

I merely mean to enquire whether her job, at her age, increases certain anxieties and as it happens, I hit the nail on the head: "I'm quite an anxious person and I suffer quite badly from panic attacks. When I'm on stage, I'm pretty much concentrating that my heart doesn't fall out of my chest."

She has another surprising confession. "I don't really go out. Sad as that must sound and – this is bad –I don't like being the focus of attention. I don't wear make-up when I do gigs, I don't want to be the pretty little girl. Because my music is not clean-cut and perfect so why should I be?"

"Because it sells records," I want to counter, but she knows that and at 18, she's got time to change her mind.