Green In All The Right Places
Meet Liz Green, the former teacher who has a voice like Billie Holiday fronting Antony and the Johnsons. Not bad for an artist who’s childhood dream was to the world’s firest female snooker champ.
Ed Power, 30 Jan 2012
The most important day of Liz Green’s life began with the Manchester singer lying on her best mate’s sofa, too hungover to remember her own name. “I was due to perform at a Nico tribute concert at the Royal Festival Hall in London,” remembers the much-blogged-about folkie. “The line-up was amazing. John Cale was going to be there, along with Mark Lanegan, James Dean Bradfield from the Manic Street Preachers and Mark Linkous from Sparklehourse. I was really nervous about it, so the night before, my friend says, ‘Come have a beer’. I drank all the beer, then all the wine, then all the rum.”
A dentist’s drill migraine did little to take the shimmer off Green’s performance, which reduced Cale to speechlessness and convinced Dean Bradfield he’d witnessed the future of UK acoustic pop. Then again, it wasn’t the first time Green, matey and unassuming in that distinctive north of England way, had performed in surreal circumstances. In 2007, when she was working as a special needs teaching assistant, another pal entered her for a songwriting competition. The top prize was a slot on the headline stage at Glastonbury.
“I didn’t even know she’d put my name down for it,” says the singer. “The first I heard was when I got a phone call saying I had to go down to play for [Glasto supremo] Michael Eavis. Nobody in my school could believe I was involved in singing. Then they saw my picture in the papers. After that, all they ever asked was if I knew Simon Cowell!”
Pre-Glastonbury, her experience of live performance had been confined to open mic nights around greater Manchester. So she was understandably knock-kneed about singing to several thousand punters – in the blinding glare of the British media at that. That was until she discovered she would have her own dressing-room, outfitted with a towel (handy for mopping down the post concert sweat) and – sing hallelujah – a bottle of rum.
“It was early in the morning but I had some of the rum to calm my nerves,” she laughs. “Actually I might have had a lot of rum. All of it, in fact. So I wasn’t jittery – at all.”
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