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“I was just messing around with an old piano while we were in the studio but the producers eyes just lit up and we got it down. People were saying it was outta key but I think that adds something extra special to it,” Carina then pauses for a second as if she’s not sure whether to carry on, but a little grin flicks into her cheeks.. “I’ve never actually been taught how to play piano or guitar either. I can only really use 3 fingers on guitar.” But she doesn’t seem embarrassed and from listening to her songs it doesn’t seem to matter one iota. “I like the quote from from Tom Waits where he talks about writing on instruments he doesn’t know how to play.”
”Some people work tom much to structures and it seems to get lose real emotion amongst all the technical stuff. Whereas, I know I’ve heard of some people working in colours and shades. I say things to the band like ‘make it sound like we’re falling off a cliff’ but that’s how I work.” And it works. And follows suit with what is special about Carina’s outpourings. “I’m mad on lyricism and images. It’s like Patti Smith, she has this moment where she’s in the middle of a poem but can’t quite work out what she’s saying because she’s so caught up in the emotion of it. It’s that communication where the words aren’t needed that drives me.”
“I grew up with one of those small kids record players. I remember when I was about six and I kept playing my mums’ Dylan and Nina Simoné..” which 15 years later - at the show following this interview at the Spitz- are two influences which clearly sit at the foot of her body as she strums’n’sings, gently keeping time as she rocking backwards and forwards.
However, Carina “didn’t quite get what was so special about them. I probably just jumped about to the fast ones back then. I think when I matured enough to appreciate it as art, the true beauty of it really stood out, but it still had the same special ‘thing’ which made me jump around.”
”For me, my music is kinda like my diary but melodies are how I express the mood of things which can’t be expressed in literature when they’re written down. I guess a lot of what I’ve written, even from a young age, either to music or just as poetry, has all been things I can’t project any other way. I’m really striving to make something full of passion with no indifference or sounding half-hearted that needs to get out of me. There is enough of that is around at the moment,” which doesn’t sound like an attack on the Nu-Acoustic Kidz that she could easily be one of herself, although, that is only if you go in for all that classifying and neat filing of people malarkey.
It’s lines like “falling with the dust of a butterflies wings” that make the line of controlled musing hard to fathom, much like the difference between genius and insanity. Carina explains, “I don’t know how to explain how that came about. I was finishing the song off in the studio and it kinda flew out. It wasn’t a conscious thing at all. Sorry this sounds pretentious doesn’t it?” Few folks I’ve interviewed would even pause to think to ask that question.
There are two ways of hearing Carina. One the one side of the divide it sounds like a painful, heart-broken reality, which has been cracked around the edges. To which Carina agree’s “Pain is quite important but it’s not meant to sound like that. It’s much more happy sounding and positively outlooking. My music’s more a sense of elation,” something brings a whole new lease of life to the mini-album ‘The First Blood Mystery’ with tales of desire, contemplation and a true story of a father Carina never knew. The song about her father ’Let it Fall’ is introduced at the gig following this interrogation, the kinda mid-song honesty that most support acts would have ignored to mention in their haste to impress. It’s that honesty which comes across the clearest. Needless to say her following “har har har” and her couple of minutes of laughter takes away the edge of pain and we’re, as they say, putty in her hands.
“I am so clumbsy though,” admits Carina. Not as clumbsy as me, who ran out of batteries at this point and can only say the conversation over coffee involved a discussion about God (or rather the idea of their being a creative force driving us like the chemistry of lovers) and hip-hop. A few minutes were spent talking about the word “[blood drip from the black] cunt [of venus]” found in ‘message to apollo’ which her Gran thought was contravenes. Bless. There was talk about her upbringing in New Cross in Wolverhampton, one of the most deprived parts of the UK, where she feels, it’s like the rule of 'the worse off being the most creative' and it only takes one listen to her live set to believe the rule as universal causal law.
Carina is on tour at the moment click here for a full list of dates beneath her profile.
