News

Introducing… Roxanne Emery

• 28th Oct 2010

Much can change in the space of 12 months, sometimes even total reinvention. Take, for example, Roxanne Emery. This time last year, the 26-year-old was holding down a high-flying job in the city at an investment bank. This year, she is suddenly the country's most irresistible new pop star.

“Do I miss the banking world?” she says. “I'd be lying if I said I didn't miss certain aspects of it, the pressures and the excitement of the 5am starts, and the intense atmosphere, but what I'm doing now is more than I could ever have dreamt. I thought I'd never say this, but I love to sing my songs. I really do.”

The city's loss, then, is our gain. Roxanne's forthcoming debut album, Remember Me, is an understated, subtle delight, a record of perfect pop songs, but each concealing a hidden heart, her songs combining the honeyspun melodies of, say, early Bangles with a voice as spine-tinglingly clear as Natalie Imbruglia circa Torn. You wouldn't have necessarily expected her to have grown up a gifted, grade 8-level pianist and clarinettist with a penchant for Green Day and The Offspring, but as we have already seen, initial appearances can be deceptive.

There is more to Roxanne Emery than meets the eye.

She was born in Southampton to academic parents, and by the time she was at Warwick University studying Philosophy, Politics and Economics – the chosen degree of so many in government – the woman could have fast-track herself into the cabinet had she been so inclined. Instead, what really appealed to her was the E in PPE – Economics.

“Banking is a very male world, very aggressive and even intimidating,” she says. “You wouldn't find many 21-year-olds working in that kind of environment, except of course the secretaries to the all-powerful money men. Banking was, back then, terribly sexist. It probably still is.”

But Roxanne, no shy and retiring wallflower, was more than a match. And so, shortly after her degree, she found herself in the full cut and thrust of a testosterone-fuelled world. She loved it – the early mornings, the late and frequently sleepless nights, the addiction to the Blackberry.

“I’ve spent at least six months having to deny my banking background,” she laughs. “We had a terrible reputation, didn't we? Almost!”

But Roxanne was also a lifelong music fan. In addition to Green Day and The Offspring, she loved REM, Alanis Morissette and all kinds of dance music. Finding herself in her early 20s working in finance and living with three other women in London's West End (“it was very Sex and the City!”), she began increasingly retreating into her own, more creative world. She bought herself a guitar, and in the evenings, still pin-striped and in heels, but her Blackberry on silent, she would disappear into her room to write songs for no other reason than the simple pleasure of it. She never had any plans to do anything with them, she says, “I simply did it because I loved to write. It was a release after all the pressure of the day.”

But then one day, a former boyfriend introduced her to a record producer, who teased a demo out of her. This demo then went out into the world on her behalf, and almost overnight she found herself in demand, and courted by at least three record labels.

“The idea of singing my own songs never really appealed to me,” she admits. “I loved writing, but I thought perhaps somebody else could sing them.”

For a while, she seemed oddly resistant to singing despite a voice born to do just that. In 2008, she lent her vocals to a song called A Day That Fades by dance act Cosmic Gate. A big hit, it prompted a slew of further offers, all of which she turned down.

“I just don't think I had the confidence,” she says now. “But then anyone who heard my voice said that it had an edge to it, and that my songs had something to say – but by me, not by anybody else.” And so, after some considerable persuasion, she agreed. “I felt, in the end, I had no choice!”

It takes guts to walk away from a lucrative career, to say nothing about the flat in the West End, but Roxanne did just that. Last autumn, she quit the bank, the flat, and the capital itself, and moved up to Manchester, and into an apartment with her close friend and her older brother, Gareth, himself a former academic dropout. Once upon a time, Gareth was a student of Politics. Much to the initial disappointment of his parents, he too decided instead to turn his attentions to music, specifically dance music. He is now rated the ninth biggest DJ on the planet.

Roxanne, meanwhile, now surrounded by like-minded souls, started to write more songs, and began gigging in earnest. She played to friends, to strangers, at corporate gigs and even, once, at Alexandra Palace (“amazing!”). She hooked up with the De Angelis Records team whose Anne Barrett, the woman who first nurtured Natalie Imbruglia's early rise to fame, and began work on an album that took shape with the kind of natural ease other artists could not help but envy.

“It's all happened so unbelievably quickly,” Roxanne says. “I still can't quite believe it. I mean, this time last year I was still at the bank; now, I've completed my debut album, I play live a lot, and more and more people seem to be interested. It's like a dream. I keep having to remind myself it's actually reality.”

But this all makes perfect sense. Remember Me is an unusually charming record produced by Anthony Galatis and Rick Barraclough and mixed by Jack Joseph Puig (U2, Black Eyed Peas, Pussycat dolls, No Doubt , Rolling Stones). Its songs appear tailor-made for heavy rotation on daytime radio, all twinkling and glistening and, like their author, terribly pretty. But it is also a record that goes deeper than the surface sheen, for its lyrical themes reveal a darker, and occasionally more troubled, heart.

“In real life, I often have trouble putting into words precisely how I feel,” Roxanne explains, “but in song, for some reason, I don't.”

And so Remember Me features songs like the stunning debut single ‘Real’ (out 8th November) and other stand out tracks including Burning Blue and The Fall- each song relayed in language people will instantly identify with. And then there is LATE, an unbearably poignant paean to her mother, who died three years ago.

“There was so much I wanted to say to her, but I never got the chance to do so in person,” she says. “It's a difficult song to sing, and I frequently cry while doing so, but it's also, I think, my favourite.”

And it is this very depth that characterises so much of Remember Me, as it does the woman herself. It's a tricky thing to make music seem so effortless, as natural as breathing, but Roxanne Emery does it, with humility and authenticity, and with the most beguiling of tunes.

So, is she considering a return to banking any time soon?

Her smile is a coy one. “No,” she says.