The Girl in the Year Above are something of an enigma in the music business. Until recently, you could only hear the band’s music via snippets on social media, living room performances on YouTube, or at their live gigs.
Despite having only two songs officially released, they have supported the Kooks on a huge European tour, have had a stellar cover of Massive Attack’s ‘Teardrop’ on the soundtrack of ‘Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man’, and have attracted over half a million hits on those two tracks alone!
Prior to their sell-out gig in Belfast, the band took time to sit down with Folk and Tumble to discuss their meteoric rise, that name, and the way forward for the band
Girl in the Year Above, are: Jennifer Ball- Vocals, Jeanie White- Piano, Backing vocals, Nathan Coen- Acoustic Guitar, David Kennedy- Electric Guitar, Bass guitar, Shane Kennedy- Acoustic guitar and Kapil Trivedi (Kaps)- Drums
FT: So an Irish/Cornish band? Can you tell us a little more about the makeup of the band?
Nathan: People have seized on that aspect, which is good, as we did want people to hear that Celtic influence in the music. Jen, you’ve always had that influence from your family?
Jen: I actually didn’t think too much about it, until we did the show in Sheffield, when it was mentioned I grew up around ‘Fagan’s, which is an Irish pub, which I guess is where the Irish influence for me came from, but then again, I’m also Cornish and picking up sea shanties from my dad, and the tradition of storytelling.
FT: So how did you all meet up then?
Shane: Well, David’s my older brother.
Nathan: I was around when Shane was a young pup, and David and I have been best friends since we were about 7 years old. So we met in Skerries (a seaside town 15 miles north of Dublin) and went to school together. These boys moved down to Cork shortly after.
Jen: I met David in a bar he used to work in, and I was in love with him immediately, and that’s how I came to meet these boys (all laugh)
FT: So these lads are just hanging on? (Laughs)
David: And that’s how you got me, my best friend and my brother!
Jen: Every time we hung out, we’d end up playing music, and I was like, ” Why aren’t you in a band”?
Shane: And you and Jeanie met in Glastonbury.
And everyone knows about Kaps, we’ve known about him for years, from drumming in the Mystery Jets, who were a huge band for us growing up.
FT : So the name has nothing to do with school? Where did the name come from?
Jen : Oh, that was me. I used to live opposite a wine bar. It was also the first night I met Nathan. There was a girl who worked there, and we started chatting over a cigarette, and she asked, “How old are you, by the way”? And I’m like “Guess”. And she said, “I think you’re older than me, not because you look older, but you remind me of a ‘Girl in the year above”. And I thought, mmm! So I wrote it down, and when I met Jeanie in Glastonbury, I said, I got a name for the band, and it just stuck!
FT: So, how long has the band been up and running?
Shane: Year and a half, two years? Not too long in the grand scheme of things. In terms of the song writing and gigs, it’s all come together quite quickly.
FT: I suppose that’s my next question, because you haven’t taken the conventional route of most bands. It’s not a young band releasing an album, and it goes through the roof. You haven’t done that. It’s been YouTube Clips, live performances, and only two songs and a cover released? So how has that worked?
Jen: I like to think of it as using new tools to promote an old school way of getting music out.
Shane: The first thing was those little live recordings in the living room. And that was enough to pique the interest of some people
Jen: There was a thing where we had to apply to Glastonbury, we had to put a clip of the band playing live, and a song, a demo. So we did it, rushed it out
David: And afterwards, we saw how well it worked, and we kind of hung out in the same flat, and we’d write songs there, and Jenny would get the phone out, and we’d film the songs we wrote and then repeat the process. And these little clips really seemed to resonate with people.
Jen: People know the words of songs, even though they’re not out yet. I think there’s a warmth to it, there’s a one-to-one-ness.
FT: It is rare for a band to do it this way, without an album?
David: I think it really helped grow a following, and the other big thing was doing the first real live shows. I think before that happened, none of us really had a sense of what was going on. Yeah, we knew there was some interest in the videos, and it was going well on social media, but when we did those shows and saw the reaction from people who came to those gigs. That’s when it turned the corner very, very quickly. We had our fourth gig in Glasgow, and the reaction to that gig changed our ideas.
Nathan: I couldn’t believe that reaction, and off the back of that, we immediately got invited to do the Kooks European tour, 22 dates around Europe. Charlie from Soul Agency said she sent a short video to the Kooks, who said, ‘These guys are great, stick them on the tour’.
Shane: Honestly, it felt like Wayne’s World!
Nathan: the Kooks took a chance with us; we had no music out at this point. They could have taken any band with them on tour, but they took a chance with us, and they have invited us back for more dates
Jen: It’s like the ball has been relentlessly rolling since then. The stars just aligned.
FT: There is a lot of energy on the stage, which the crowd feed on.
Jen: People have said that. That’s an invitation in. We don’t try to be cool on stage, try to be sultry or whatever. I think what people enjoy is how it can go from, between songs, being so silly, to being so real, so human, and within a song, it can be heart-breaking and gut-wrenching, but also exciting and full of love, and it goes between all these emotions so quickly.
Nathan: What you see is what you get.
FT: So how does the song writing work?
Jen: It’s very much a collaborative thing.
Nathan: We like to hang out together, and it gets to the point where we start playing and working on some songs, as we often do for hours, working together, or we come up with sections or bits of songs and work together until we have a song. We bounce ideas off each other, and something might inspire me
Jen: This is a band made of six songwriters; it’s not just one person, and everyone waits on one person to bring it all to the table. If you have a little dry spell, there’s always someone else with an idea, and then you’re inspired by them, or vice versa, and the ideas flow.
FT: So, is there an album ready to roll?
Nathan: I think there could be, but there isn’t. We are still moving so fast. We’re writing and recording, and we’re looking to put things in the set. There are a lot of songs coming through, and it doesn’t feel like they’re settled enough
Jen: There are still songs in the background that we are working on and exploring, and we’re more excited about some of them than some of the ones we’ve finished.
David: It’s a very fertile time for writing, rather than refining them down to an album at the moment.
Jen: Our production style at the moment is to draw the absolute most out of the songs that we can, and I think that’s set us up with some really great singles, and I think when the time comes for us to want to put together a significant body of work, we’ll really relish that opportunity.
FT: I think that’s quite refreshing. A lot of cynical people in the music industry would say, ‘Strike while the iron’s hot’. The Peaky Blinders soundtrack and the Kooks tour have really piqued people’s interest, so put the album out now!
Shane: Yeah, we’ve heard a lot of that
Jen: I think a lot of our good fortune has been about responding to the changing landscape of the music industry, and not being too tied to what the ideas in the past have been.
Nathan: To be fair, we only put out our first song a couple of months ago! The first release was in April, so it’s very, very early days, but it’s going great at the moment.
FT: Which is ‘Mama, my heart is achin’, which is a great example of the song writing. When I first listened to it, it was a lament following the death of a loved one, but it’s the usual, ‘She’s gone, and my heart is broken’, song; there’s a lift there as well, remembering the loved one?
David: Yeah, I think that’s what we aimed for, there’s a really nice energy at the end. By the end of the song, there’s a smile on the person’s face, and you feel good! I think Jen had the song pretty fully formed when we first hung out, so it makes a lot of sense for it to be the first single and the start of the story.
Jeanie: That whole spirit of ‘uplift’ perfectly reflects Jen as a person; it’s really hard to be down when she is around.
FT: It’s a difficult topic to sing about? Writing about personal experiences, like the death of your mum, that we all go through, resonates with everyone listening.
Jen: People don’t sing about shit like that. We are trying to put songs out there about universal experiences that people just don’t write about. People write about break-ups and heartbreak, which is fine, but there’s a bigger spectrum of issues out there.
David: Or if they do, they don’t write in a way in which people connect with so readily. There is a brightness to it, and hopefully, we make the issues accessible.
Jen: We’ve been labelled ‘pop with a punch’!
Dave: I think the songs sound really nice, which draws you in, then when you listen to what they’re about, it hits home.
FT: Folks, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us today, and the very best of luck in the future, although I really don’t think you’ll need any luck.
Band: Thank you!
Later that evening, I watched the band perform upstairs in the dark confines of Voodoo. There is a fresh, emotional excitement to the sound of this band, a unique liaison of Celtic storytelling and undulating musical soundscapes, that sets them apart as a group set for a meteoric rise, and one to keep an eye out for.
So, in a few years, you may well see me as a smug sod, near the stage at Belsonic, or the 3 Arena in Dublin, while the band are headlining, doing my best Jimmy Rabbitte from The Commitments impersonation. “I always knew they were going to be huge. Did I ever tell you about the time I saw them play upstairs in Voodoo?”!