Features
Fair Maiden: ‘This Weird Genre That Doesn’t Exist’
By Doug Wallen
Adelaide’s Ellen Carey built Fair Maiden around her spooky vocal incantations. She discusses their long-awaited (and really, really good) debut album with DOUG WALLEN. Photo by XIXI CAO.
[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.] From witchy opener ‘India’ and the eerie warble of ‘Sad Song’ to the gospel airs of ‘Lord’ and the call-and-response country-pop cuteness of ‘Wait For You’, Fair Maiden’s long-time-coming debut album quietly covers quite a lot of ground. But at heart of the self-titled LP is an ancient-sounding strain of folk music that befits the band’s quasi-medieval name: songs like ‘Lady of Fortune’ could have easily found life as cautionary ballads passed along by minstrels in the Middle Ages.
Fair Maiden began as a solo (and primarily vocal) outlet for Adelaide’s Ellen Carey, who’s sung for the now-defunct bands Jemima Jemima and Birth Glow. Eventually she recruited her brother Joel (Wolf & Cub) and Liam Kenny (Bitch Prefect) – both also of Peak Twins – and later her former Birth Glow bandmate Steph Crase (Summer Flake, Batrider, et al) to flesh things out some. But, as is the way in Adelaide, all three collaborators moved to bigger cities. Fair Maiden managed to record their eight-song album with that lineup – working with Jack Farley (Beaches) in Melbourne – before enlisting the new rhythm section of drummer Noah Renolds and guitarist/bassist Hamish Baird that now backs her at live shows, alongside Crase’s guitar and backing vocals.
Live and on record, Fair Maiden’s mystique lies largely in their determined minimalism: simple threads of music creep and crawl along beneath Ellen’s spooky vocals, which can evoke anything from a sweet country belle to some malevolent sorceress. Despite the album’s shortness and starkness, its songs linger long after and encourage back-to-back listens of the whole thing. They’re sweet and dark, romantic and even a bit evil, teasing us with a moody vagueness.
Ahead of album launches in Melbourne, Ellen discussed her troubled relationship with musical instruments and how Fair Maiden defy everyday genre trappings.
So Fair Maiden started as your solo thing, outside of other bands?
Yeah. I had just come back from Berlin my other band, Jemima Jemima, and wasn’t really doing any music stuff because all of those guys had gone to other countries and were doing their own thing. I just felt like I really wanted to keep going at it, and so I ending up just doing some recording on my computer. I’m not tech-savvy; it was totally basic stuff. Because I didn’t know how to play an instrument, I just ended up doing heaps of vocal things to fill in the background. So yeah, I used to just perform that live and that’s how it all started.
Over the years that followed, did you learn to play an instrument?
I used to play the piano when I was younger, but I’m so bad at it. Also, when I was in this band Clue to Kalo, [leader] Mark [Mitchell] asked if I wanted to sing and play the keyboard. I stupidly said yes and he made a lot of really tricky, difficult parts I just had to force myself to learn. So I can play the keyboard I guess, but I’m quite traumatised by it. [Laughs] I find it really difficult to play an instrument. It’s too much pressure! [Laughs] I don’t know how people do it.
So in Fair Maiden you usually just sing?
Yeah, I just sing and hit the tambourine. Which requires no skill.
I always liked what I heard of Birth Glow. Is that band still around in any form?
No. Every time I’m in a band, everyone at some point decides to have a massive sea change and go interstate or overseas and just change direction. But yeah, I was living in this house in Adelaide with Steph [Crase], who’s in [Fair Maiden] now, and Nick Walton, and we used to get drunk and do stupid songs and just think we were hilarious. Then suddenly we were like, “Maybe we should do this proper.” So we started playing some songs and they were really just ridiculous and started playing shows and that was really, really fun. That was actually before Fair Maiden.
Yeah, but then Nick moved to Melbourne and that just left Steph and I. So I guess that’s when I said, “Well, do you just want to do Fair Maiden stuff together?”
When you play live with Fair Maiden, who all is in the lineup now?
Well, originally it was my brother Joel and Liam Kenny, and then Steph joined. But then those guys moved to Melbourne and Sydney, so I asked my friends Hamish [Baird] and Noah [Renolds]. Noah plays the drums and Hamo plays guitar and sometimes bass, and Steph plays guitar mostly. And I just sing and she helps me sing as well: she does a lot of backup.
So obviously this album was a long time coming…
So long. It’s ridiculous. [Laughs]
“I moved [to Melbourne] about 10 years ago, and I don’t think I could do it again. Can’t be bothered.”
Why is that?
It’s just a lot of dumb situations and bad luck, I think. We decided to do it and the boys moved interstate. Then we all went over to record with Jack Farley [in Melbourne]. He was living in a warehouse at the time – he had to get out of the warehouse in like two weeks. He already had all this stuff backed up that he had to finish and it was too much. So we were already on the backburner for that and it took a while to get that sorted. That process took about … it felt like about seven months. It was kind of ridiculous, as much as I love Jack. Maybe don’t write anything bad about him! [Laughs]
Then we started talking to Joe [Alexander] from Bedroom Suck and did a lot of different emailing. It just felt like it was taking ages. Now it’s finally happening. It’s almost unbelievable, really.
Are there many more Fair Maiden songs than what’s on the record?
Yeah, there’s five or six more. Some of them we don’t play live, because some of them are just a cappella vocal stuff and that just makes the boys [in the band] horrified, so we choose not to do those ones. [Laughs] Actually, today we’re going to Port Adelaide because Pat Lockwood got a grant and he’s going to record us. We’re just going to do five songs. It’ll be good to get them down. But I don’t really know we’re going to write new songs, because Steph’s not here anymore. We’ll have to wait and see.
You could move to Melbourne.
Yeah! [Laughs] It sucks – everyone’s there. It’s ridiculous. I moved there about 10 years ago, and I don’t think I could do it again. Can’t be bothered. [Laughs] It would be an easy answer though.
Certain songs on the record have a real folk thing, and then there’s some ’60s stuff and other directions. Does all of that just represent what you’re into personally?
Yeah, pretty much. I just really love folk music and listen to it a lot. And that inspired me at first to do it, because I liked the female vocals and how simple everything was. Then I went through a bit of a ’60s girl-group phase, and that influenced it quite a lot. And my heart really lies in cheesy R’n’B bullshit. [Laughs] So it’s a real mix. Sometimes it feels a bit schizo.
When I write a song and the other guys all hear, they put their input in and they’ve all got different influences. So it’s a bit of a melting pot. I like that.
The folk stuff is interesting because it doesn’t sound recent or even like ‘60s or ’70s. It sounds ancient, somehow.
That’s just a fluke, I guess. I don’t know how that happened.
It’s partly your singing, and the skeletal instrumentation. It’s not produced or polished: it sounds like some lost archive.
That’s cool, I like that. I guess just not knowing how to really play an instrument or really have a clue of how to do a lot of stuff, it just ended up being this weird genre that doesn’t exist. [Laughs]
“There’s this whole next generation of amazing bands coming up [in Adelaide]. It’s a nice community.”It’s a pretty short record: there’s only eight songs and it’s about 25 minutes long. Is that just how many songs you had ready going into it?
Yeah. I mean, we couldn’t really do that much more because of the timeframe, and it was really rushed. It was only over two days. We just decided that would be a good number [of songs]. Everything I’ve ever put out has been really short; I just don’t know how to write a long song. I’m just too ADD or something. For me, that’s probably a nice amount of time to listen to a record. But it was more time constraints – we probably would have put more songs on it if we could have.
With the Fire Records [deal with Bedroom Suck], the album’s coming out in Europe. That must be exciting for you.
Yeah, it’s really cool. It’s kind of overwhelming because all these conversations have been through email and I am so bad at emailing, as you probably noticed. [Laughs] So I keep getting swamped with info. That’s why Steph is so great, because she’s on top of everything. She knows what’s going on. But from what I’ve read, it seems amazing and a really cool opportunity. It’d be nice to play overseas one day – that’d be pretty special.
For me it’s been a great year for Adelaide music. I like your record a lot and then the Wireheads record. I know there are other ones I’m not thinking of right now, but it seems like a new wave of bands there.
Yeah, it felt like there was a period where a lot of people left and went to Melbourne and Sydney and it was a bit of bummer. I was concerned that would make an impact on the music scene, but it’s like the opposite has happened: there’s this whole next generation of really amazing, talented bands coming up and they’re really interesting and cool and proactive, so they’re recording a lot and playing a lot of live shows. It’s a nice community.
What are some Adelaide bands people should know about?
Wireheads are really amazing, and I really like Bruff Superior. Noah is in that as well. I really love Rule of Thirds. [Steph’s band] Summer Flake was really great but I don’t know if she’s an Adelaide band anymore, since she bloody pissed off. [Laughs] Emu played last night: they’re really cool. They’re really loud.
How do those new five songs you mentioned compare to the record?
It’s pretty much the same kind of shtick, where it’s a bit of everything. There’s one song that’s a really simple, a cappella folk song that’s the same over and over, just different lyrics. I want it to be really fast and folky. I don’t want to write all the songs – I really like other people bringing things to the table, just to make it more interesting. So Hamo wrote this one song that we all worked on, and that’s more loud and a bit more rocky, I guess. There’s another one that’s like a ’60s pop song, and another one that’s a bit louder as well.
Who’s the guy singing on the album?
Liam. And there’s some where my brother Joel is singing too. But it’s mainly Liam. I miss that – I miss having a boy backup vocal. But having Steph is just ridiculously amazing.
You mentioned an R’n’B influence before: can you think of a song where that comes through?
I can’t really, but if I write a song I’ll just put in on my computer and it feels like it could just slot into an R’n’B song, like weird little bits of a chorus. And once I get that, I sort of have to be like, “No, we’re not going down that path.” But Noah is doing a lot of amazing, dancey, techno-y solo stuff and he wants me to sing on that, so there might be a bit of a Fair Maiden side project.
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