Quick Look

Pina was 16 when she found it. Up until then she had concentrated on developing her skills as a classical guitarist, studying the medium at the Vienna Conservatorium and, later, teaching it to make ends meet. (She briefly studied law, and then medicine at university, before being pulled back to music again). But when she started writing her own songs, her reference points were contemporary ones – the Doors, U2, David Bowie, Edie Brickell and the Rolling Stones among them – but her voice, of course, was like no other. “It was always the songs, rather than the artists, which made the biggest impression on me,” she says now. “And I’ve never been sentimental with my own material, which is probably why I’ve lost so much of my early stuff. I just see each song as a brick towards the next.”

Pina’s unusual upbringing has always provided fodder for her finely crafted, literate vignettes. “My mother met my father when she was 13, and she was 16 when she had me. Because she was still going to school, I was brought up by my grandparents and mother and uncles and aunts. It gave my life a bigger dimension; I was like the sixth child and was spoilt rotten. My grandfather had a big belly and a quiff like Elvis, worked in a fairground and was very eccentric, but he made me strong. He only ever wanted me to do music and supported me the whole way through.” The track ‘Josephine’ on Quick Look, she adds, is dedicated to him. “He died a few years ago,” she says with a nostalgic sigh. “Just before he passed away I sang an old war song ‘Lilli Marlene’ into his ear, and he smiled.”

First hand experience is intrinsic to Pina’s songwriting, which goes some way towards explaining her unaffected, self-contained style. It has been said that Pina seems to be singing to herself, although each listener might also argue that she is singing to them and them alone. “I need to have lived something myself to be able to sing it to an audience or a person,” she says. “And I have to really love and stand behind the lyrics.” Written over the last two years, the ten songs on Quick Look traverse such themes as heartbreak, motherhood, debt, love, loss, life and, er, heartbreak. Pina, it seems, doesn’t just wear her heart on her sleeve. She lays it, bleeding, on the table. The pain of the split with her ex-husband is palpable. “I was unable to accept it for about one and a half years,” she admits. “I was fighting to keep my family together.”

So, naturally enough, she wrote about it. In no uncertain terms. But forget folk’s maudlin wallowings; the details of Pina’s break up are fired by a bittersweet fury that gives each track an alternative, adrenaline-fuelled edge. The album’s opener, ‘I Loved The Way’ (a hit if ever there was one), nigh on shakes her ex by the scruff of his neck; ‘Cold Storm’, which demands that he take a good hard look at his own faults, is pure Patti Smith does Jumping Jack Flash. Pina performed each song to Helmut before recording the album. Rather than either of them reaching for the carving knife, they are now, she insists, good friends. “It’s happened only recently,” she says, beaming. “There’s still a lot of anger on both sides but it’s hidden. It only comes out now and then.”

When it does, you can be sure that Pina will write a song about it. These days, however, she is sharing her life and her Ardgroom home with her new love, a lanky drummer and guitarist named Andy Hogg. “I fit in his armpit,” she grins. The two met when Pina sang at a club called McCarthy’s, up the road in Castletownbere; Hogg’s not inconsiderable musical talents can also be heard on Quick Look.

“I love living in Ireland,” says Pina. “I appreciate the openness and calmness of people here. I love being in a place where people are so excited about music. I’ve tried doing other things, but nothing else interests me. And now I know,” she adds fiercely, “that I’m going to keep on doing music until I’m old and grey.”

Words by Jane Cornwell

Quick Look was originally released on the Real World imprint PRE Records, a label set-up to allow a different strand of music to sit alongside the Real World Records releases.

At the time Peter Gabriel said, “In starting PRE we get an opportunity to highlight some of the artists from our own musical world. I never really wanted to go outside Real World Records but one of the problems with the music business is it’s very hard to get stuff racked and firms are cutting space that would have gone to world music, and for some of the acts that are from a rock cultural heritage, they’ve always had a tough time being put in the world music section.”