"THE HUMAN voice is the most beautiful instrument of all, the most moving...even the greatest virtuoso will never be able to give you even a fraction of the emotion a beautiful voice can...That is our share of the divine.”
So wrote French novelist Anna Gavalda, and when voices blend in harmony, it can be something sublime - music and human communication at its purest and most direct.
It is a quality English trio The Staves - sisters Emily, Jessica, and Camilla Staveley-Taylor - possess when their voices join together in song. There is possibly nothing they could sing that would not warm and please the ear.
Galway will hear these three marvellous voices in action when The Staves play the Black Box Theatre on Saturday March 26 at 7.30pm. “We can't wait to play music in front of people again! We hope to see all your lovely faces there,” the band said in a statement.
‘Music got in the way’
The Staveley-Taylor sisters are from Watford and not surprisingly, grew up in a house where good music was always being played, where parents and neighbours loved a sing-song. Despite this, the sisters in their younger years originally had ambitions to be the next Monty Python.
“We loved Monty Python and lots of weird comedy,” Camilla told me when I interviewed the band in 2017. “We wrote and performed our own sketches. I think we had three volumes of it, we used to make our parents and friends sit down and watch us perform. It was like our own secret language, even mum and dad didn’t understand it.”
Comedy’s loss was, thankfully, music’s gain, or as Camilla put, “music got in the way”. Indeed, Camilia admitted there was never a moment when she and her sisters were “not singing together”.
“I think I started singing close to when I started talking,” she said. “On our road we lived close to a family very influenced by music, we were always going around to theirs, meeting up, and having a song - that was always the making of a good party. Having that community shaped us and let us know about what’s important in music is connectivity and having fun.”
Working with Bon Iver
Eventually the sisters joined forces and began gigging in their hometown of Watford. Their break came in 2010 when no less a singer than Tom Jones asked them to provide backing vocals on his 2010 album Praise & Blame. This brought them to the attention of producer Glyn Johns (producer for The Who and the Rolling Stones ) and his producer son Ethan. With that father-son duo, the sister recorded their 2012 debut album Dead & Born & Grown.
Since then they have hardly looked back. In 2015 came the album, If I Was, produced by Justin Vernon (aka Bon Iver ) - hinting at the kind of respect among their peers the sisters command.
“It was a very special experience,” said Camilla of the recording. “It’s a very special producer who will give you that confidence to try new things. Many producers will often have an idea how they want things to sound and how to put their stamp on it, but Justin was interested in what sound we wanted to have and in giving that to us. Ideas we had before, maybe we were too tentative or shy to execute them, but Justin gave us the confidence to believe. It was life changing.”
Good women
Last year saw the band’s most recent album, Good Woman, which won enormous critical praise. The Times hailed its "pop-rock sophistication", while Uncut said the sisters’ “three-part blood harmonies form the shimmering centre of an elaborate, album-long soundscape". The Guardian said the album’s “melodic sweetness is bolstered by a sense of urgency and stylistic cool”.
It was a wonderful showcase for the band’s stylistic versatility, covering folk/singer-songwriter, AOR, indie-rock, roots, even electronica - with perhaps the stripped down, just voices and guitar of 'Nothing's Gonna Happen' and the closing track, 'Waiting On Me To Change', where solo and harmony vocals weave powerfully across a series of beautiful piano motifs, that were the highlights.
Camilia describes The Staves as “a harmony band” and it is a quality key to their singing and their relationships with each other. “I feel lucky I can tour with my sisters and maintain that relationship,” Camilia said, “as the most important relationship to me is my relationship with my sisters. It’s lucky we’re a three-headed monster!”
This is a ‘Róisín Dubh presents…’ concert. Support is from singer-songwriter Samantha Crain. Tickets are available via www.roisindubh.net
