A delicate shade of blue

The story of the overnight success has long been the staple music industry fairy tale, yet it is often just that – a fantasy. More often than not the road to recognition is a long and hard one. Just ask Susan Bluechild, whose own personal journey started with a musical upbringing (a classical pianist mother, second cousin lead singer in the Sultans Of Ping FC, that sort of thing) and later took her to London in the mid ‘90s, hoping to find that elusive record deal.

For Susan, the experience was exasperating.
“It’s extremely frustrating when you’ve always known what you wanted to do with your life, which is have a career in music,” she says.
“Music was always my passion. Having gone to London at an early age and realised that it was the place to be to meet people and make contacts because this place [Ireland] was just a dead dog as far as I was concerned.”
Spending a lot of time in the UK, only to get knocked back time and again, was very trying, she recalls.
“As time went on you start to wonder if you’re supposed to be doing this, but I had a tremendous will to succeed. I’m very confident about my music, I love singing, I love songwriting and that’s what kept me at it”.
Her next step was to move to LA, where she found a mentor in the form of Michael Lovesmith, a respected veteran of the US music scene. It was a turning point.
“Suddenly to find myself in place where someone actually recognised my music and the type of market I wanted to be in was great,” she says.
“Michael was the first major person I’d met who was prepared to open doors for me. I’d never really experienced something like that over here. I remember him sitting there and telling me he was hearing Sheryl Crow in my music, he was hearing Madonna. It was all very overwhelming”.
Despite all this positivity, it would still take until 2002 for Susan to get a record released and then only after starting her own label. “It was a feeling of empowerment in a way but it was still very difficult,” she admits.
“It required money, it required the right kind of people to launch the whole thing. I knew I could do it but it was a question of having people I could trust.”
She remember going into the studio four years ago and for the first time making a record that she felt could compete in the charts.
“I wondered why I hadn’t done it years before, but it wasn’t what people did then; they gigged, worked their arses off and hoped to get signed off a demo”.
Competing with what out there at the time could have meant heading down the solo singer-songwriter route, something that Susan was desperate to avoid.
“I grew up listening to Belinda Carlisle, Madonna, Sheryl Crow and people like that, and that was the kind of music I wanted to make. I didn’t want to end up singing and playing an acoustic guitar. I wanted to get a really good production that would make my music stand up.”
Success came in the shape of her debut single ‘Some Girls’, a summer pop tune that proved to be a radio smash. However, it has taken Susan four years to hone the sound that she really wanted for her debut album Non-Stop To Venus, a more mature, rock orientated record than before.
Already her music is starting to attract attention. Family Guy animator Jonathon Caustrita is a fan and has produced the video to latest single ‘Sunrise’, while one of those early influences has also adopted her cause.
“Belinda Carlisle came across my music on My Space and had left some comments. She linked our pages and said that she loved my stuff and started advertising it on her page”.
Susan Bluechild, then, not exactly an overnight success story, but proof that the fairy tale sometimes comes true.