Breakfast With Bristol24/7: Emily Breeze

Emily Breeze really doesn’t like early mornings so meeting her for breakfast for this interview was problematic. We did, however, manage to arrange for it to take place just before midday at the Canteen, just a couple of minute’s walk from her front door.

We spoke over coffee just one day before the release of her new album, Rapture, whose opening single Ordinary Life sees Breeze talk and sing about her life in Bristol, mentioning walking down Stokes Croft.

She is seemingly content that she will never quite make the big time after decades of plugging away as a musician in between jobs that have included a waitress, bookseller, painter and decorator, and currently a lecturer at BIMM.

So what has now changed as she receives regular BBC 6 Music plays and is about to embark on a national tour?

“Nothing has changed,” Breeze said, sipping a flat white. “I’m doing what I’ve always done.” She credits Craig Charles with picking up the song first and does say that she recognises “some irony in the lyric about the acceptance of your fate and your mediocrity and how that can be a beautiful thing… strangely it seems to have chimed with people”.

Forty-two-year-old Breeze was having a day off on this particular Thursday which meant that she needed to run a few chores. But with a heavy silver cross hanging from around her neck and vivid red lipstick, she remained very much the frontwoman.

Previously lead singer in Candy Darling, Breeze now performs under her own name but still with a band beside her. She seemed slightly abashed that she was about to go on tour selling merchandise with her own name on, saying she had asked the designers to make her name as small as possible.

T-shirts with her unobtrusive name on could soon be worn by fans up and down the country as Breeze is compared to the likes of Dry Cleaning and Wet Leg, two groups with female vocalists who also alternate between speaking and singing.

“It’s super trendy now but we were doing it first, not to be hipster or anything, just before the trend hit. When I listened to Dry Cleaning and her posh monotone, even I thought it was me.”

“I thought, ‘oh god, this is going to really fuck us over because potentially if you’re a woman, if there’s one woman doing a thing they say we’ve got one, so there’s no room for any others. But it actually seems to have helped that this has swung into fashion. It’s fantastic for me as a writer because I can be just that: a writer. I’ve never been much of a singer.”

Lucy J Turner illustrated Emily Breeze for the new Bristol24/7 quarterly magazine

When I ask her what it feels like to be about to give up so much of herself into the public domain via the release of Rapture, she says that she has been too busy to think about that too deeply.

“The 21st century version of suffering for your art isn’t dying of syphilis in an opium den, it’s just going through an endless rigmarole of promotional activities in a digital world.”

Rapture has also been a long time coming, with half of the album tracks recorded pre-Covid and half recorded after the pandemic.

“When other people were writing novels and baking banana bread, I was teaching over Zoom which left me in negative equity in terms of inspiration and I went utterly fucking mad as well like everybody else did.”

Breeze then had to wait for the huge delays in vinyl pressing, meaning that the album “sounds really old to us, but I am proud of it. You go through phases wear you think, ‘What was that? Am I delusional? I hate all of it.’ But luckily right now I’m in the swing where I think it’s a really solid album and some really fantastic people have been involved in making it sound fantastic.”

Emily Breeze is playing her album launch party at All Hallows Hall in Easton on March 11, with support from Wilderman, Milkie and DJ Heidi Heelz. Get tickets from Headfirst.

Illustration: Lucy J Turner

This feature was first published in Bristol24/7’s new quarterly magazine

Read next:

• Album review: Rapture by Emily Breeze – ‘A sprawling epic of an album’
• Emily Breeze: ‘I swear I am gonna quit every few years’
• Breakfast With Bristol24/7: Ngaio Anyia

Listen to the latest Bristol24/7 Behind the Headlines podcast: