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- The Observer, Sunday August 12 2007
Asking Liz Green to talk about her music makes her writhe and twitch, like a butterfly caught on a pin. The 24-year-old chanteuse is at the Pelirocco, a 'rock'n'roll boutique' hotel tucked into one of Brighton's shabbily elegant seafront squares, where later she will play an intimate gig in the shadowy front room-cum-bar. She's unassuming, pale-faced and improbably shy, except when it comes to singing. Accompanied by a gently plucked guitar, her voice has a timeless quality, in turn mournful and comforting, crystal-clear and gutsy. Her delicate songs are a perfect knot of grassroots jazz, muddy blues and homespun folk, and recall the kiss of a needle on a brittle 78.
Her voice is as unlikely as it is mesmerising, since Green grew up in the small seaside town of West Kirby on the Wirral. At home, her dad played the Beatles and Motown but her musical tastes veered towards artists of a certain vintage: the likes of Son House, Edith Piaf and Bessie Smith.
Green is comically vague about her early years. She does reveal, though, that in the past three years she's only written nine songs, and that her first gig was a couple of years ago at the Fuel bar in the Manchester suburb of Withington.
'I can't remember anything, I have to write it down,' she confesses, clutching a tawny hardback notebook, its creamy pages lined with stacks of spidery words. 'I can't remember my own words, can't remember the chords. If you write the words out over and over again they finally stick.'
Green studied English at university but dropped out. 'I was never any good at turning up ... or doing any work, which is essential for passing the course,' she says, drily. But it explains the tart couplets and vivid, narrative twists of her songs. 'They're just stories in my head, apart from "Louis", which is about a man from Brazil who's been to every funeral in his home village for 20 years. I found that in the Metro newspaper!'
For now, Green works as a teaching assistant in a Manchester comprehensive, but things are gathering pace. She played Glastonbury's Pyramid Stage after winning the festival's Emerging Talent competition, and 'Bad Medicine', her infectiously bittersweet first single, is released on Manchester indie Humble Soul this month. Green is impatient to lay down her album ('I've calculated that it will be a substantial 29 minutes long, so it will be a short read in fiction terms'), but confesses that the prospect of being a famous singer makes her want to 'do a JD Salinger and disappear'. And therein lies the rub: you sense that once the world gets wind of her elegant, spooky songs there will be nowhere for Green to hide.
· Bad Medicine is out on 20 August on Humble Soul
· See Liz perform her new single for the Observer music blog
