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Signed to label: Animal Noise

From: Wolverhampton, West Midlands

"My first memories are of when I would put on ‘Hard Rain’s A Gonna Fall’ and hide inside the curtains to be alone. I was too young for the lyrics to really register, so I used to just make up my own: ‘we have the bees flying through wide suns’... and so on".

Carina was born an Anglo-Italian in the stark surroundings of Wolverhampton's Low Hill area in 1979 (where she and her mother were later burgled five times in one month and had their car burnt out) and brought up in Heath Town. With little interest in her outside surroundings, she found nourishment in her mother's record collection - Led Zeppelin, Nina Simone and Roxy Music - amongst other things.

"My grandfather would sing ALL the time. I’d follow him round just to hear him. He would inspire these daydreams in me about music and poetry, which I would be in trouble for nearly every day at school. Later on, I would hide in the wardrobe on school days until my mother went to work and then spend all day listening to records alone. I¹d just crank it and scream at the top of my voice and wreck the house. We’d get letters of complaint from the school and neighbours. It was like a real sense of purpose, because school never gave me that. I felt like ‘physical graffiti’ was teaching me more of what I needed to know."

In the summer of ‘96, following a gig in a basement acoustic club in the town, Carina was given a three-night support at Ronnie Scott¹s club in Birmingham. One thing led to another and over the next couple of years she played solo in many of the city¹s acoustic clubs. By 1999 she was playing up and down the country with the likes of David Gray, Miles Hunt, Ben Christophers, Mark Eitzel, Cousteau, Elbow, I am Kloot, Turin Brakes, Ed Harcourt and Ryan Adams, who after she supported him in Birmingham, invited her to be his guest at his London shows. At these shows, they again performed their co-written song 'Idiots Dance' and 'Come Pick Me Up' as the encore.

The following months saw Carina joined by Simon Smith on double-bass and Marcus Galley on drums. Their first gig together was a special one-off supporting Coldplay at the Birmingham Songwriters Festival. Then it was straight into the studio with producer and friend Gavin Monaghan. The album was recorded and mixed in ten days. The raw, live feel of the recordings express Carina in her element, on stage.

Entitled ‘THE FIRST BLOOD MYSTERY’, the album contains seven spellbinding songs.

It is an enticing and challenging record, full of intimate musings to raw outpourings bearing all their hungers, energies, tensions and presence. The album finishes with a maelstrom of elemental spirits in the track On Leaving. "We are spit from the earth's mouth and find something that can truly take us out of our skins. If we're reaching that stage, then it must be special, no matter how much doubt may come. Extremes excite me. I discovered that when you're at the point of being moved you can lose the feeling of being in awe and feel the affiinity and that there are no rules".