Once upon a time writing under a masculine nom de plume was the only way for a female author to be published.
But these days a pseudonym doesn’t just operate to disguise an artist’s identity, an alias can free you up to be whoever the fuck you want. Sasha Fierce lets Beyoncé channel her bad self and Emily D is jazz wunderkind Esperanza Spalding’s way of letting her inner brat run riot. In the same vein, Celia Pavey’s new identity Vera Blue has let her metamorphose from folkie to festival favourite.
Pavey initially conceived of Vera Blue as a creative project, but once she started operating under that name it took her a million miles from her days as a contestant on The Voice. Recently, she shared a stage with Flume and Illy at Splendour in the Grass and, if you have a look at the comments on Flume’s Facebook page, by all accounts, Pavey slayed.
“It’s definitely freed me up,” says Pavey of the Vera Blue project. “I feel like I’m still the same person. I’m still Celia, but with the new music, when I perform I can really unleash. I can open up and be whoever I want. It allows me to perform in a different way than I would usually, and that’s fun. There are different flavours and colours in the music, which I’m very passionate about. The reason why I gave the project the new name was because the songs were so different from what I’d been writing. They were so fresh and so new I felt that the project deserved its own name and Vera Blue is what came out.”
When starting work under the moniker, Pavey teamed up with Melbourne’s pop powerhouse Helen Croome, better known as Gossling, and songwriting/producing duo Thom Macken and Andy Mak to record her EP, Fingertips, released in May this year. Record label Native Tongue played matchmaker in bringing them together at a band camp.
“We got together and kind of exploded,” Pavey says. Indeed, before they started writing, Pavey had but the bones of the song – it was folky and stripped back. “It was a bit Angus and Julia Stone-y and I didn’t really know where I wanted it to go. I said to Andy that I’d been listening to a lot of alt-J and FKA Twigs and stuff like that. I’d definitely been gravitating towards electronic music, but still music that was emotionally driven, but had some grit. I wanted to keep the acoustic-ness, where my roots are, and blend the two, and that’s what ‘Fingertips’ is.” It’s a fair call. Pavey always had the voice of an angel, but Vera Blue lays it over ambient electronica – think less ‘Scarborough Fair’ and more Sui Zhen or The Acid.
Pavey had grown up listing to and playing folk, but the interest in electronica was a long time coming. “In high school I liked heavy and gangsta beats, bass driven stuff, but I never thought I’d make music like that, so I just kept writing the folky stuff, which I really loved as well,” she explains. “But I started listening really closely to alt-J and artists like that and thought, ‘Oh, one day I could make something like this.’ I just had to say the word.”
Since Vera Blue’s debut, Pavey has been crazy busy. She had her first solo tour, which did so goddamn well that she’s about to embark on another one of a bigger scale, as well as touring with artists like Broods and Matt Corby. “I do get tired, but I just have to push on because this is exactly what I want to do,” Pavey says. “And what I’m doing may be nothing compared to what I might be doing in the future, so right now I’m having fun. It’s not just the schedule though. At times the music can be emotionally draining for artists when they get up and perform their own songs, because they’re pouring every inch of themselves out when they perform. So yes it’s tiring, but the best feeling in the world.”
Pavey’s call about being drained by her tunes makes sense – every song on Fingertips is an emotionally-charged nugget. Pavey always sings about what she knows, and this time around it’s relationships, love and self-discovery. “It’s nerve-racking – for some songs it’s easier than others though,” she notes. “Everyone can relate through music and that’s all I want: for people to relate. But then, there’s a couple of songs that I’m working on that are even more personal and I’m nervous about them. I’m saying things about someone out there and it could affect them, but at the same time, it’s just music.”
It’s an understatement to say that Pavey is chuffed about what’s unfolded in the last year or so: new highlights kept superseding the old. So, what’s the latest? “Definitely performing on stage with Flume,” she says, sounding still slightly giddy from the experience. “The whole festival was a highlight. It was the first time I’d ever gone to Splendour and I was able to hang backstage and chill and then get onstage with the best people, like Illy, Slumberjack and Flume. It was like it was a dream. It’s definitely the highlight of my life so far. It just keeps getting better. It’s crazy.”
Fingertipsout now through Universal Music and Vera Blue playsOxford Art Factory on Saturday September 24.
