Music / Jazz

Taking flight

By Tony Benjamin  Friday Sep 16, 2022

Ishmael Ensemble singer and songwriter Holysseus Fly was just 25 in 2019 when they told her she had cancer. Absorbing the shock of the diagnosis, what went through her mind? “In true honesty,” she recalls “my first thought was ‘I can’t die now: I haven’t even released my first album yet!’” Now, happily, as 2022 draws to a close it’s great to hear that not only is she well and clear of treatment but she’s also (excitedly) about to headline shows in London and Bristol (Crofters Rights, October 11) to launch Marigold – “my first ever solo single under my own name ever into the world, ever!” The single, released on October 16, will be a taster for her full EP coming out next year on the Severn Songs record label. “It’s all finished, six tracks – I got the masters yesterday.”

The song is a striking highlight of her live shows, a poetic slow burner held together by her remarkable and expressive voice. It grew out of her cancer experience and finding the resolve to pull out of an understandably dark period, reconnecting with her creativity to liberate herself. “Before writing Marigold I was really low, there’d been some more worrying scans. It had been about two years and I was fed up with being miserable about it. So I just set myself the task of writing five or six songs in a month, quickly, just letting them grow and not thinking about them too much. It was a whole new approach and I found I was allowing myself to expand genres and be OK with new material that sounded a bit more alt-pop – I’d been coming from the jazz world but that’s part of me, too.”

Holysseus Fly (Pic: Giulia Spadafora)

The song’s lyrics capture exactly that moment of transformation and liberation that freed her own creativity to find “what’s trying to come out of me instead of trying to make something I think I should make.” But having written it for voice and piano she then faced the challenge of making it into a production – something she hadn’t tried before. She approached Rob Pemberton (The Staves), a friend, and they co-produced the tracks at his Stroud studio. For Marigold they chose a minimal arrangement, heart-beat percussion quietly embellished under simple piano chords, building to a climax with backing vocals: “I didn’t really know what I wanted it to end up sounding like,” Holysseus admits, “but I did know I wanted the emphasis to be on the storytelling.” That works well, but inevitably the song also showcases her impressive vocal skills, something she had been working on during lockdown with the mighty Hannah Williams (“she’s an absolute powerhouse!”).

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Holysseus performing with Ishmael Ensemble in 2019 (Pic: Tony Benjamin)

It’s early days yet but as she develops her ideas for production so too she expects her live act to expand. Her first ever solo performance was simply that – herself alone on stage with a piano and a microphone. Latterly Waldo’s Gift drummer James Vine has provided electronic percussion and the October shows will also feature backing vocalists. She envisages that in the future she will use more of a band but she’s in no rush to grow things too quickly: “I definitely would love to make the shows more epic and I think I will get there but it’s one thing at a time for the moment.” It’s a wise approach yet there’s a real sense of momentum about the emergent Holysseus Fly that suggests that the epic may well not be that long in coming.

The Holysseus Fly Marigold Single Launch, with support from Hanah is at Crofters Rights on Tuesday October 11

Marigold will be released as a digital single on the Severn Songs label on October 16

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