The Scotsman Sessions #221: Christine Bovill & Simon Wallace

Welcome to the award-winning Scotsman Sessions. With performing arts activity curtailed for the foreseeable future, we are commissioning a series of short video performances from artists all around the country and releasing them on scotsman.com, with introductions from our critics. Here, singer-songwriter Christine Bovill performs her song Where You Found Me, accompanied by pianist Simon Wallace

Sometimes, in the endless cyclone of this damp and dreary world, a piece of music can emerge from out of nowhere and occupy your soul. Christine Bovill does that. Hyperbole be damned – her voice is stunning.

Fringe-goers may recognise her as the star of Christine Bovill’s Piaf, that critically acclaimed and sold-out tribute to the great French chanteuse, but in her own right she’s a gifted singer-songwriter steeped in pre-Beatles European and American pop.

“As a somewhat loner of a child,” she explains, “I listened a lot to the records of my grandparents. I began collecting old ‘20s and ’30s vinyl records from the age of around 13. I came across two seminal discoveries: Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Cole Porter Song Book and Billie Holiday’s Lady Sings The Blues. They were utterly transformative.”

This intimate performance of her self-penned Where You Found Me, which is accompanied by pianist Simon Wallace, exemplifies Bovill’s craft.

“I’m most alive when singing,” she says. “Inhabiting the world of the song provides me with oxygen. French Chanson offers that platform more than any other style, as they’re story songs built around characters living out a full narrative – a three-act play in the course of a four minute song. Jacques Brel is a master of this. There is no greater feeling in the world, and I’m the luckiest soul that I get to do it for a living.”

For more on Christine Bovill, visit https://christinebovill.com/index.html

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