After selling a million copies of her debut album of blissful sixties pop, Rumer returns with an equally gorgeous set of covers of overlooked seventies classics. Alan Corr talks to her about life, love and the mysteries of the male mind
On the stage of London’s Hammersmith Working Man’s Club, Rumer is giving it maximum shimmer as she cruises elegantly through a selection of songs from her new album of cover versions, Boys Don’t Cry.
The singer is clearly enjoying herself as she sings Neil Young’s A Man Needs a Maid, Jimmy Webb P.F. Sloan and finishes her short set with Slow, the breakout hit from her debut album Seasons of My Soul.
Most of the audience is left in a trance and there, down the back grinning, avuncularly is none other than “whispering” Bob Harris himself, the seventies host of The Old Grey Whistle Test and a man who provides a neat connection to the era of male singer songwriters Rumer is celebrating on Boys Don’t Cry.
And before you ask, there is no cover of The Cure song of the same name. “It’s not my era.” she says. Then again, the songs of Neil Young, Clifford T Ward, Gilbert O’Sullivan, Todd Rundgren and Isaac Hayes are hardly the 32 year old’s era either. As with her debut album, Rumer seems to be skipping a whole generation of music and transporting us back to a simpler time.
The next day she is sitting in the upstairs room of The Tudor Rose in West London. It’s her favourite pub and the very place where she and her musical partner Steve Brown (in a previous life he was Glenn Ponder, Alan Partridge’s band leader) used to meet and perform.
“We were being silly in here and we’d sing anything, any old shit. It was just a bunch of friends playing together.” Rumer says. “We’d call it music appreciation Friday and for the first year before we even started demoing my songs we spent a year listening to music and for this new album we must have recorded 45 songs, some demoed and some in various states of undress. It was like the soundtrack to our friendship. This is very much the story of us.”
"People think that if you’ve a millionaire if you’ve sold a million records."
Dressed in bohemian black and with her long hair slightly unkempt, Rumer is a friendly and refreshingly open character. She sips on a half pint of Guinness and toys with an extremely battered iPhone. “It’s been through the wars. I have thrown it a few times! But that’s what the record industry does to you.” She is also doodling on the back of a napkin. “I’m writing notes. I’ve been invited to the Whitehouse to sing for President Obama,” she beams. “So I’m going to be in someone’s house and they have children so I want to bring gifts so I’m just jotting down some ideas. I’m trying to find first edition Enid Blytons for them.”
As well as that invite to the White House to honour songwriters Burt Bacharach and Hal David, since her debut Rumer has also been over to Bacharach’s house in California, performed live with Shirley Bassey, and received an e mail from Richard Carpenter, brother of the woman Rumer’s singing style is most often compared to.
Seasons of My Soul was a hazy voyage into an era of timeless female vocalists like Karen Carpenter and Dusty Springfield but she’s taken a totally different direction on Boys Don’t Cry. All these songs were sung by men, and sensitive men at that.
“It is kinda of ironic – boys don’t cry and then you’ve got all this blood all over the tape,” she says. “There’s economic deprivation in Brave Awakening, there’s kind of macho, moody insecurity on A Man Needs a Maid. Home Thoughts From Abroad is so passive/aggressive – he sings I miss you but you haven’t written to me and while we’re at it, you better not be shagging that guy next door.
"It’s so passive aggressive – oh, have you sound someone to mend the leaking cistern? A letter would be nice, I miss you . . . it’s like four seasons in one day of emotions. He’s all over the place. I think it’s fair to say that’s a male way of dealing with things like that.”
Her version of Gilbert O’Sullivan’s We Will won her praise from the man himself. “I called him to find out about the song I said what happened at Aunty May’s house? And he said, you make it sound sinister. Hahaha.” She says. “He told me that his father died when he was 10 so his mother was a really strong woman who brought up the family on her own and the song is about all the memories of his home life and his childhood. Gilbert’s really cool. We wrote letters to each other. He told me he bought Seasons of My Soul when it came out.”
Richie Haven loves her take on his song, It Could Be The First Day, and Jimmy Webb recently performed Rumer’s version of his P.F. Sloan on Later . . . Young’s A Man Needs a Maid raised feminist hackles when it was first released. “I don’t think it’s sexist no. I don’t think it’s macho at all. It’s just about a man who is on a lonely mission, he’s a travelling musician, he doesn’t feel well and he can’t really give anyone anything and in a way he’s being quite honourable. He doesn’t want to drag a woman into a relationship. he just wants someone to help him out. it’s really complex.”
Out of all the songs on the new album, A Man Needs a Maid may have struck the biggest chord with her. A life on the road or in the studio has left Rumer with little time for relationships and she laughs ruefully when I ask her does she still go home to an empty apartment in Brixton. “Hahahaha. I don’t have a boyfriend. I have two lovely ex boyfriends who are now two good friends who I still see regularly for movie and coffee.
“I would love to find someone who could handle it. I’d love to meet someone who would be ok with it. You’re late back from a video suit, you’re tripping over suitcases, there’s no food in the fridge, long gone are the cooked breakfasts, long gone are the foot massages, never mind anything else.
"Work takes over with me and not everybody wants to be dragged into this all-consuming lifestyle. It’s quite lonely. It’s a very unique situation – one minute you’re performing, the next minute you’re in the studio. The person in your life needs to be understanding and supportive and self sufficient and extremely kind and unselfish and practical. A modern man. it’s a lot to ask for! Let’s put the word out – is there a nice Irish man out there!? I’ve got Irish roots.”
The fan mail keeps coming however. “I got an excellent one that said, `Dear Rumer, do you know Richmond? A cream coffee sometime would be super! Love, Rob’ and there was a phone number. Obviously written by an eccentric gentleman.”
Seasons of My Soul sold a cool million but she says she hasn’t made a penny in sales. “There’s not as much money in this business as one would think,” she says. “There is money but not as much as there used to be. People think that if you’ve a millionaire if you’ve sold a million records. But (she clears her throat mock theatrically) we’re not in this business to make money. It’s all about leaving something beautiful behind.”
Have Rihanna and Gaga leaving something beautiful behind? “I can’t listen to that music. I understand it’s popular music but I can’t listen to it for more than a few minutes, seconds actually. There are a couple of songs I don’t mind but it’s not the artist – it’s more the producers I can’t stand . . . Bacharach and David would write songs for artists.
"Even though they had a sound I didn’t connect the dots that Dusty Springfield singing The Look of Love was the same as Dionne Warwick singing Walk on By or Aretha Franklin singing Say a Little Prayer. They were their songs. I don’t know but I think recent music has got a lot worst. I’m very fussy. I don’t like very much. I like a lot of bands who are underground. Who aren’t very well known . . . ”
“Do you like Bossanova, easy pop lounge music?” she says producing a CD from her bag. “I made this ridiculous record. I did collaboration with an easy listening longue organ player. His name is Rory More, he’s quite a character this guy. He’s from an Irish family of Paddy builders. His real name is O’Donoghue but he changed his name to More. I was at his 40th birthday party and he has seven brothers who are all tattooed and they rip him to shreds.”
She takes out that battered iPhone again and plays me some of his chintzy, kitschy songs. “Isn’t it great?” she laughs. “I play it when I’m doing the housework.”
Alan Corr
Boys Don’t Cry is out now
