i'm shocked that anyone else knows of her myself she does have a bit of beth orton about her.

im downloading naama hillman's ep i'll let you know what i think

new solo artist as far as i know

vid for New Romantic from the new ep out oct 1st (i think)




AMAZING SONG

don't know when an album will be released. she has one ep out called london town and she has a new ep out on monday.

another video for a song on her new ep
Night Terror

if anyone wants a link for the new ep let me know

'My Manic and I' - Later... with Jools Holland

'My songs are not pretty'

At the age of just 18, Laura Marling may be Britain's most promising singer-songwriter. She tells Jude Rogers about her dark, bold music

In a recent posting on a music website, one of Laura Marling's growing army of fans described her output as "pretty folk songs about boys". "That made me so angry," says Marling, her white-blonde hair held back in a clip, her thin frame wrapped in a trench coat. This girlish figure sitting opposite me in a west London cafe may have just turned 18, but her songs bear the experience of someone much more mature.

"No, no, seriously," she goes on. "Take another look. My songs are not pretty. They're what I call optimistic realism." She tips her head impishly. "Some are depressing, and I have depressive sides to my character, like most people, but I'm always telling myself to look on the bright side."
In a music scene teeming with talented young women, Marling stands apart as quite possibly Britain's most promising singer-songwriter. She's not a soul-influenced ingenue like Adele or Duffy, nor a pop performer in the style of Lily Allen or Kate Nash (with whom she has toured), but an accomplished performer in the folk vein. In fact, she manages to make folk feel modern. Her bold, dark songs recall Joni Mitchell or Neil Young, yet remain her own. She has already notched up a Glastonbury performance and, hilariously, was refused entry to her own gig at a London venue for being too young - so she busked outside instead.

Marling's music may dwell on life's difficulties, but her upbringing was far from such things. She was born in Eversley, near Reading, in 1990, the youngest of three girls. Her mother is a gardener, her father an amateur singer-songwriter. He taught Marling the guitar from the age of three, and forced all his daughters to listen to the 1960s folk records he loved: Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan. "Dad would sit us down and say, 'This is real music!' I learned so much so young."

Marling started writing her own songs in her early teens. The turning point, she says, came when she heard I See a Darkness, the brooding 1999 album by Bonnie "Prince" Billy, the bleak, folk-influenced American singer-songwriter: "It was like a shock to the system." What did she love about it? "Its intensity. It was almost as if I shouldn't have been listening to it, as if I was invading his emotions."

But it was the American musicians Nina Nastasia and Diane Cluck who most inspired Marling, though she worried about her singing. The artists she loved had distinctive, evocative voices; she felt "like a girl from Reading". "So I tried to make it different, but I sounded like a knob. It took a lot of time and practice for me to realise that there's no point trying to be something you're not." Today, her voice is simple, strong and affecting, recalling the natural folk-rock voices of 1960s singers Sandy Denny and Jacqui McShee. Live, its power is astonishing, not least because it emerges from such a young, bashful-looking woman.

Marling started gigging three years ago. She played shows in the unlikely environs of Brentford FC, and attracted the attention of Virgin Records, which signed her in 2006 and is releasing her first album, Alas I Cannot Swim, today. One track on it, Tap at My Window, is inspired by a Philip Larkin poem, which makes it all the more surprising that Marling - whose image-rich lyrics suggest a love of literature - failed her English GCSE. "I loved books," she says, "but I didn't love tearing apart a character. I like building a character."

She gets a lot from books; her favourite authors are Jane Austen and the Brontës. "They're always made out to be so sweetly romantic, but they're not - they're brutal. I love the way you can fall in love with a piece of literature; how words alone can get your heart doing that." She admits to struggling with some writers, and pulls two books out of her bulky handbag to make her point: James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and comedian Russell Brand's autobiography, My Booky Wook. "The Joyce is really interesting, but guess which one I've been reading today." She raises an eyebrow theatrically. "It's really well-written, though!"

For someone so young, Marling writes convincingly about breakdowns, tough emotions and sex. Her characters are strong, fighting to protect the people they hold close. One song on the album, Night Terror, contains a particularly affecting line about a lover having a nightmare: "I roll over and shake him tightly and whisper, if they want you, well, then they're gonna have to fight me." Marling admits the songs are personal, but will divulge nothing more. "It's just stream-of-consciousness stuff, really. And like everyone else, my consciousness has dark, jagged parts. Especially when it's four in the morning and something's happened and you have to write about it."

But if her songs are streams-of-consciousness, she sees the album as a single entity. "I really wanted it to be a coherent piece of work, with running themes about love and death and water. Like a journey, from songs about the distance between people, to the lift in the album's middle, and then back to distance again. Ha! I feel stupid saying that out loud."

Marling also differs from the average 18-year-old in her strong views about how music downloads have changed listeners' experience of music. "People don't appreciate music any more," she says, suddenly verging on anger. "They don't adore it. They don't buy vinyl and just love it. They love their laptops like their best friend, but they don't love a record for its sound quality and its artwork. I wanted to do something about it."

This confident approach - a striking combination of old-fashioned ethics and youthful idealism - has characterised Marling's career so far. Apart from her solo work, she sings and rattles maracas with the folk-rock band Noah & the Whale. Last year, she pointedly refused any studio makeup when she appeared on Later ... With Jools Holland, and she recorded her album in just one month.

She has also produced a special edition of it, called Songbox. Inside a wooden box, fans will find the album, a gig ticket and 12 mementoes to represent each song, including a board game. Listeners must work out which song each memento is for. "I wanted to show, in a physical way, how much work goes into an album," she says. With her own career now building momentum, Marling feels that this is a good time for new artists. "It's like the industry has come full circle," she says. "You feel it in the air. People are more willing to give you some time to develop, a chance to be who you are." That sounds like optimistic realism, I suggest. Marling's pale face lights up. "And don't we need more of it!".

Alas I Cannot Swim is out now on Virgin

music.guardian.co.uk/pop/story/0,,2252029,00.html

Are you going to Neil Young, Ross? You utter wanker. I need to see him, but the tickets were so fucking expensive


I've been listening to Laura Marling's album at work, gone through it 4 times now, but just can't get into it Ghosts is fucking great though

Laura's going to be appearing on BBC2's 'The Culture Show' this Saturday - performing a song in the bar and chatting with Lauren Laverne.


It's due to be broadcast at 7.10pm, BBC2

I really like her. Got her album a couple of weeks ago.