London, UK · art-rock

Anna Calvi

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Operatic guitar heroine — twice Mercury-shortlisted, all flamenco-flecked drama and white-knuckle restraint until the Telecaster finally erupts.

Anna Calvi was born in London in 1980 to an English mother and an Italian father, both therapists who also played music as amateurs. She spent much of her first three years in hospital being treated for congenital hip dysplasia. Her sister, Nuala Calvi, became a journalist. Her father exposed her to a wide range of records, and summers spent with her grandfather in Rome added to that mix.

She started playing violin at six and picked up guitar at eight, later graduating from the University of Southampton with a degree in music built around further violin study. She idolised Jimi Hendrix as a teenager and was drawn to the composers Messiaen, Ravel and Debussy. Before pursuing music full-time she worked as a private guitar instructor and, for a period, in a toy shop.

Classically trained on violin before turning to guitar, Calvi plays a Telecaster in a style that draws on flamenco phrasing and reverb-heavy tremolo as much as on rock lead playing. She did not begin singing until her mid-to-late twenties, having had what she described as a phobia about it since childhood.

Her songs pair that guitar work with a dramatic, wide-ranging voice and arrangements that hold back before opening out, and her writing has dealt directly with gender and desire, matched on stage by a sometimes androgynous appearance.

Calvi's self-titled debut album appeared on Domino Records in 2011 and earned a Mercury Prize nomination, a Brit Awards nod for British Breakthrough Act, and a European Border Breakers Award. One Breath followed in 2013 with a second Mercury nomination, and after the 2014 EP Strange Weather and music written for a Robert Wilson staging of the opera The Sandman, her 2018 album Hunter brought a third Mercury Prize nomination.

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art-rock