"What I want is to bring a little class back to music," says Holly Rose. "And I'm going to do it, too. Just you watch."
Only a fool, ladies and gentlemen, would bet against her because the wonderfully forthright Holly Rose has class running right through her. The 25-year-old's imminent debut album, Vulnerable To Touch, is at once soulful and bluesy, while her voice also establishes her as a siren of pop and folk, too. Imagine Karen Carpenter with the sensual disposition of, say, Nina Simone, or perhaps Joni Mitchell with the bedroom eyes of Alicia Keys. In a voice dripping with honey, Holly sings mostly, she says, about sex and sensuality. And, no, she doesn't blush easily.
"I guess I'm very confident in that way. I'm very expressive, very touchy-feely. I like the thought of people wanting me, of looking up at me in, I guess, admiration, adoration." She smiles, and her pale blue eyes smoulder. "But in a tasteful way, naturally."
This could well be the word to define her: naturally.
Holly Rose always wanted to be a singer. At the age of five she was charging two pence a time to friends and family for each Madonna song she would perform in front of them. Two years later, she was writing fluent poetry, and by 11 she was hard at work on the piano. But Holly was already confident about her nascent talent: within the space of a few months, she had dispensed with no fewer than three piano teachers. "I ended up teaching myself," she grins. "I didn't have the patience for it to be any other way."
Born to Welsh parents, Holly grew up in Hertfordshire aware not only of her valley roots but also of her grandmother's Swedish genes (and if you want evidence of them today, look at that hair, those cheekbones). Back when she was a young woman herself, her mother was a similarly gifted singer. Jimmy Savile wanted to manage her but, Holly says, "it never quite worked out. For my mum, family always came first."
But her daughter was to prove more unswervingly focused. Call it tunnel vision. Bullied at school, she increasingly withdrew into herself and found expression through creativity. She joined a local music and drama group and excelled in it, and by the time she had finished with her GCSEs, she had enrolled in the Academy of Contemporary Music, where, alongside Newton Faulkner and Sugababes' Amelle Berrabah , she spent a year studying vocal technique, making what was already naturally great greater still. After graduation, she decamped to America where, for one summer, she taught music to teenagers. At night, meanwhile, she would work on her own songs which she would promptly put up on her website, hoping they would go out into the world and get her noticed. Almost overnight, they did.
"I got a call one morning from this bloke in South Africa," she recalls. "He was in a band called Semisane who were looking for a new singer. They had come across my website, and loved my voice. They flew me out on the next plane."
The two years that followed would be the most educational of her life, if not always the most satisfying. Barely 20 years old, Holly was suddenly at the forefront of South Africa's biggest emergent act. They sang the theme tune to their country's version of Big Brother, had successive hit singles, and Holly's voice and looks made them a big hit in the media, her face adorning the cover of Seventeen, FHM and Heat. She would get recognized in the street, and was the recipient of a lot of fanmail. But her fellow band members were an acrimonious lot, constantly bickering. Within months, they were in separate dressing rooms, Holly caught between the warring factions.
"It wasn't pleasant," she notes. "I remember waking up one morning and thinking, You know what? My time here is done. I want to go home."
She had had enough of being in a band, and wanted now to go solo. She packed her bags, and bought a one-way plane ticket. This decision, as it transpired, would be the making of her.
Back on home soil, she quickly came to the attentions of music producer Jeff Calvert. Back in the 70s, Jeff had been big news, writing a string of hit singles for Sarah Brightman amongst others. Jeff was looking at a comfortable early retirement when Holly came into his life, but he was so blown away by her voice, her looks and what was clearly a burgeoning talent, that he promptly set up a record label, Whisky, especially for her. They've been in partnership ever since.
"Jeff has his own home studio, so we worked all hours of the day and night over what would become the next several years," she says. "It's been a lot of hard work, but then I love it. I can't help it, music is my life, I'm obsessive about it. It's all I ever wanted to do."
The resulting Vulnerable To Touch is indeed a very classy album, Holly’s voice a thing of impeccable wonder imbued with a languor Madonna would have appreciated back when she belched her way through Erotica. If it were possible for a record to have bedroom eyes, then this is it.
"I particularly wanted this record to be both sexual and sensual because that, I guess, is a big part of my life." A wide smile. "I'm talking about profound emotion here," she clarifies. "I love being in love, I love the feeling it generates, and writing songs about it gives me much the same sensation."
You have to envy her boyfriend of two years, the recipient of several tracks here. From the catchy dance- pop single – ‘Down To One Kiss’ to the lilting reggae of I Don't Care to the exquisite gospel overtones of Minnie Ripperton's Inside My Love, this is emotive stuff indeed. As is Say You Believe, a lyrical declaration of love in which she exhorts her boyfriend to "unbutton my bra."
"I simply don't believe that music about sex has to be tacky at all. I think, done right, it can be unbelievably romantic, and that's what I'm setting out to prove here, and in a very seductive way."
It is certainly that: eight of the album’s songs feature the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in accompaniment, which ramps up the record's sense of grandeur wonderfully, and should safely ensure that Valuable To Touch will find what it so clearly deserves: the widest audience possible.
"I want my music to mean something to people, to really get under their skin," Holly says.
And that, surely, is precisely what will happen - naturally. Just listen to her music. How could it not?
New Album Coming Soon!
New Single Coming Soon!
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