I'd never thought of the guitar as particularly phallic, I say. "And, 'What's it like playing such a phallic instrument?'" "Sometimes interviewers ask, 'What's it like being a woman playing guitar?' I get asked that sooo much," she says. Her mastery of the guitar (an instrument she studied alongside the violin as part of a music degree at Southampton University) has led to mild astonishment among male music journalists that she can actually play so well.Ĭalvi rolls her eyes. The power of Calvi's live performances, often delivered in the guise of a male flamenco dancer with slicked-back hair and androgynous tailored shirts, has been much commented upon. She speaks as though constantly on the verge of a quiet giggle.īut her slightness is even more striking because of her strong, physical presence on stage. The only other chairs in the room are positioned at a higher level than the sofa and perhaps it's this that makes Calvi seem so tiny: a hunched little figure with a shock of curly hair in black cropped trousers and a cobalt blue shirt who looks like she might always be a bit too cold. We are speaking in a glass-partitioned box dotted with corporate furniture. "I guess I realised that since it's my name, I should change it from my general signature I used for other things like credit cards." Does she feel famous enough to have developed an autograph yet? We are meeting here because she is in the midst of signing 800 copies of her new CD. She is sitting on a low sofa in the offices of her record label, her small hands wrapped around a mug of tea that seems too big for her. "I think the danger is if you put something out and you don't really like it yourself, then you're completely fucked really." "The idea of trying to please people is dangerous because you're constantly trying to chase something that's elusive, that you'll never find," she says. Calvi tries not to dwell too much on what other people might think of her. "What she has more of now is subtlety," wrote one critic after a recent live gig.
Her signature sound is still there but there is, this time round, more light and shade at play in her songs. It marked the arrival of an extraordinary and uncompromising talent: with her swelling guitar chords, passionate lyrics and a voice that sounds like it comes from within an echoing cave of emotion, Calvi garnered rave reviews and was compared to Patti Smith by none other than Brian Eno (who is such an admirer that he sang backing vocals on two of the tracks).Īt the age of 33, Calvi is about to release her second album, One Breath. In fact, Anna Calvi's eponymous debut shifted more than 170,000 copies worldwide and was shortlisted for the Mercury prize. "Obviously, it sold quite a lot more than that." "I thought, if I do that, I'll be OK." She pauses and a smile creeps across her face. "My ambition was to sell 5,000 records," she says.
In fact, she wasn't even sure that her first album, released in 2011, was going to do particularly well. Anna Calvi never expected her music to be popular.