Marling and Calvi hit Australia - the interviews

Two of the performers in my top albums of 2011 list are about to tour Australia, both of them insanely gifted young British women - Laura Marling (pictured directly below) and Anna Calvi. This week I interviewed both of them for features in The Australian. Extracts below:

LAURA MARLING

THE idea that popular musicians naturally react against the culture of their parents took root in the early-to-mid 1960s. But while that notion might have been seductive enough to last several decades, it's now essentially meaningless.

For evidence you need only turn to interviews with some of Australia's top new year's musical visitors from overseas. Fleet Foxes lead singer and songwriter Robin Pecknold, for instance, talks intently about getting his inspiration from his folks' Crosby Stills Nash and Young and Fairport Convention albums, while Britain's Anna Calvi is open about how much she gained from her Italian father's love of music.

Now Laura Marling, named best solo female artist last year in the Brit Awards, tells The Australian how much she gleaned from her musical parents in Hampshire in the south of England. "I was quite lucky," says Marling, 21, who last year released A Creature I Don't Know, her widely acclaimed third -- and predominantly acoustic -- album. "My dad used to run a residential recording studio..." 

ANNA CALVI

Callas and Piaf may be singing legends but they are not often name-checked by rock performers. Calvi -- who grew up in West London and takes her name from her music-loving Italian father -- clearly doesn't occupy their respective genres of chanson and opera. Nonetheless she doesn't see this as a barrier. "If you take Edith Piaf, I love her because there was such a rawness to her voice," she says. "In a way she was very rock'n'roll. She was a tough woman. Maria Callas, a lot of people complained that her voice was really ugly, because it was very distinct. That's something you get in rock music as well."

These stated influences are best thought of not as literal touchstones -- she doesn't really sound like either of them -- than the inspiration for a stirringly theatrical approach. In weaker hands, a desire for heightened dramatic effect in song so often leads to sentimental melodrama, hence the dreaded power ballad. In key Calvi songs Desire and Suzanne and I, the intensity is unmistakable yet the performance never overwrought. There's always light and shade, and plenty of atmosphere, much of it inspired by Calvi's reverence for the music in David Lynch's films (particularly Angelo Badalementi's scores) and Ennio Morricone's writing for the Sergio Leone westerns...