Laura Izibor dissolves into schoolgirl giggles as she recalls the first time she played BB King’s Blues Club in New York. It was St Patrick’s Day; Manhattan was awash with Shamrock whimsy and green Guinness. Sensing an opportunity, Izibor’s manager printed up a batch of flyers promising “a soul singer all the way from Ireland”. Naturally, the audience – a boozy, misty-eyed rag tag of ex-pats and Irish-Americans – expected a freckled peasant girl with red curls and a Riverdance rictus in her smile.
“They just couldn’t get over it. Obviously, they turn up thinking there’s going to be pale skin, red hair, the lot,” laughs Izibor. “ I walked on stage. I didn’t say a word. And they were like, ‘She’s Irish? What’s going on?’”
Nobody could accuse her mentor of misleading the New York public, though. Izibor is a soul singer in the truest sense – when she closes her eyes and opens her mouth a world of ache and longing and pain fills the room. Remarkably, she is just 18. For her to channel a lifetime of heartbreak feels absurd. Surely she’s faking it?
“You can’t fake it,” responds the Dubliner, matter-of-factly. “People will spot it straight away.”
What Izibor brings to the game is a uniquely Irish marriage of melancholy and self-deprecation. This proves to be a potent formula. On her soon to be released debut album – a project many years in the hatching – she carves out a distinctive space: her music drifts languidly between Norah Jones and Billie Holiday yet is tinged with a particularly Celtic sense of mournful longing.
“If you have a nice, squeaky clean PG-life, the audience just won’t believe you,” Izibor asserts. “Anyone can mimic a soul singer, do the whole Tina Turner thing. But to really convince them, there has to be something there.”
Professionally, at least, Izibor has suffered her share of knockbacks (she’s less forthcoming about her personal life). Several months ago, her two year relationship with Jive Records, the hit factory that has hot-housed the careers of Britney Spears and Justin Timberlake among others, petered out. This, putting it mildly, was a shock. Jive, after all, had snapped her up when she was still a schoolgirl. Now, abruptly, its interest in her had waned. Should she wish to explore opportunities elsewhere, Jive made it clear it would not stand in her way.
The falling out didn’t drop from the clear blue sky, however. Behind Jive’s sudden lack of interest was the departure to Atlantic Records of Steve Lunt, the A&R man who signed Izibor in 2004. With Lunt out of the picture, she was no longer a priority act. Life on the backburner did not agree with her.
“Jive wanted to put me in a box,” Laura proffers. “I never felt they were actually trying to mould me into something or make me this big teen pop star or anything like that. Nonetheless, they maybe didn’t know how to work me, how to move forward. And Steve was the force with me. When he left it was sort of up in the air.”
Fortunately, Lunt had lost none of his faith in Izibor. Shortly after he quit Jive she followed him to Atlantic, where she is now happily settled. Looking back at her time with Jive, there are, she insists, no hard feelings: “Do you know, I haven’t a bad word to say about the label. We were just on different pathways. They gave me two years of development. For a young artist, it was ideal. There was no stress, no pressure. I was given money and time. Then it just sort of came to a crunch. And no, there wasn’t a ‘hit’, and from Jive’s perspective, there wasn’t this, ‘Oh my gawd, we can’t lose this girl.’ It was a mutual sort of thing. It wasn’t nasty.”
If the turmoil took its toll on Izibor, she certainly doesn’t show it. For all her youth, she has cultivated a hard-boiled exterior.
“As a woman in music, you’ve got to be strong,” she explains. “It’s tough being a young girl working in a man’s world. In the studio, you’re working with these big name producers and they’re like, ‘Who are you?’. But you have to go in there and, even if you don’t feel it, say ‘This is how it is.’ And they respect you after a while. You’re got to be made of steel.”
Izibor has notched up a great many air miles along the way to finishing her album, which bears the rather grandiose title Let The Truth Be Told. There was an initial sojourn in Manhattan in 2004 when Jive put her up in a swish Chelsea apartment and set her working with producer Stuart Matthewman whose credits include Sade. The expectation was that the two would hatch something bluesy and sepia-tinted (at the time Izibor was widely likened to Carole King). But the Dubliner was still developing as an artist. By the time her sessions with Mathewman yielded concrete results, she had already moved on (“Stuart was great – he did what we asked but in the end we realised it wasn’t what we wanted”).
Subsequently, Izibor would clock up studio time in Miami, LA and Atlanta (the last was her favourite: “It was a lot like home – there were suburbs and trees and the people were down to earth”). Along the way she hooked up with such producers as Cool and Dre (the Florida team responsible for The Game’s ‘Hate It Or Love It’). Her favourite collaborator, however, was Christopher ‘ Tricky’ Stewart, the bump ‘n’ grind maverick behind the Madonna-Britney collaboration ‘Me Against The Music’.
“We wanted something edgy and simple and Tricky had that background,” she recalls. “We had the authentic flavour, he brought something contemporary. We went to Atlanta to work with him rather than to get into the whole ‘A-town’ r’n b thing per se.”
Raised in the anonymous middle class suburb of Rathfarnham, Izibor confesses she has no idea where her soulful voice comes from. As a child, she showed little interest in music (“I only really started listening to people like James Brown after my career was in motion”). She didn’t even sing in public for the first time until she was 13.
“We were in drama class and the teacher asked us to get up and sing and I begged her to leave me out. She insisted, so I just got up and closed my eyes. When I finished it was so quiet in the classroom. I was thinking, ‘Well, I must be really bad, because everyone got a bit of a clap’. And all the kids were looking at me. They couldn’t believe I could sing that way. I couldn’t really believe it myself.”