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INTERVIEW: Polly Scattergood
Is Polly Scattergood the most prolific songwriter in England?
By the time she left the Brit School she already had more than 800 songs to her name.
Now, aged 22, she continues to write at a rate that would shame most musicians – perhaps it's something it's something to do with her upbringing.
At 16 Polly moved from her home Colchester to a bedsit in London where she supplemented her way through the Brit School – alma mater of Amy Winehouse, Adele Adkins, Katie Melua and Luke Pritchard from The Kooks – by grafting on a market stall.
It was, she says, an important life lesson. "It taught me hard work, really (and] how to sell things – I can sell anything. And to get out of bed early in the morning, as well."
The popular image of the Brit School, in Croydon, south London, is of a gritty Fame-style breeding ground for singers, actors and performers. But, according to Polly, the atmosphere is more relaxed.
"It was fun," she says. "It was just like a school, really. It's the only place in the country that you can go to study music without being able to read it."
Unlike the aforementioned Brit School graduates, Polly's tastes are less mainstream. Her musical heroes include "people like Portishead, Joni Mitchell. I'm into so many different people, ranging fom Leonard Cohen to Milo."
She's drawn "a bit more to lyrics" than tunes. "Words are what I'm really into."
Her self-titled debut album, released last month, has been compared to Kate Bush and Bjork. The style is confessional, dwelling heavily on relationships and insecurity. But you'd be wrong to assume all the songs are directly drawn from Polly's own experiences. Her debut single Nitrogen Pink, for instance, told the tale of a friend of a friend whose life was stricken by cancer.
"All the songs that I wrote are personal to me," she explains, "but they are not all autobiographical."
How did it feel, then, to share such personal songs with a producer such as Simon Fisher Turner, a former actor, teen prodigy of Jonathan King and 'toy boy' of Britt Ekland who's now known as a composer of film soundtracks?
"Simon's incredible," Polly enthuses. "It was weird letting someone else into my little world – weird in a great way."
"Unintentionally" Turner helped give Polly's songs, such as I Hate The Way and Other Too Endless, added musical depth, Polly says.
"He likes what he likes and I like what I like. We come from different ends of the spectrum but we met in the middle. We tried things out. We just had a lot of fun in the studio. We would mess around and see how we could get things sounding weird and wonderful and fun."
Besides her prolific songwriting habit, Polly also has another string to her bow – as an amateur film-maker.
"I went out with my friend Tom with a handicam and we put what we'd filmed up on YouTube," she says. "People started watching it so we made another one. It's a nice way of letting people see see a little of my world without being too literal."
Her "absolute dream", she says, is one day to marry her love of cinema and music by composing a soundtrack for a movie.
"I think of myself more as a writer than anything," she says. "I would love the challenge of being given a script and told to write something that fits with it."
Is there a director she'd particularly like to work with? "Shane Meadows. I think he's absolutely incredible."
Polly's 5pm performance at The Faversham will be her first ever gig in Leeds.
Performing live is exhilarating, she says.
"I love it. I get very nervous, I get stage fright. But because my stage fright is so bad I get an adrenaline rush which actually helps."
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