"To
describe Billie Ray Martin's sound as soulful would be an understatement.
She has the sort of voice normally unheard outside gospel choirs and
churches, unless you're listening to Aretha Franklin or Mahalia Jackson,
that is."
The Sunday Times Magazine
Not so long ago a psychic told Billie Ray Martin that she was put on this
earth to heal people. When they hear her new songs, her friends call her and
cry down the phone, and she often cries rivers herself while writing them
but, she assures, "they're happy tears".
To anybody with a soul, the return of Billie Ray Martin is long overdue.
Where the average "soul" singer seems content to substitute technical
bluster for raw emotion, Billie's voice taps into and lays bare
long-withheld feelings, deep-seated memories, and passions beyond your
wildest dreams... put simply, this woman has the power to make you howl like
a baby.
Forming Electribe 101 -
Billie gave dance music fans something to think about. Their first single,
"Talking With Myself", rode the crest of the deep house wave with highly
individual style. Its striking blend of Billie's oblique, other-worldly
vocals and lush electro had critics thumbing their thesauruses ragged,
leading to it being unanimously declared one of the finest records of the
decade. Two more bits and an album followed, as did a Depeche Mode support
slot. But, in 1992, Billie left the group to follow her muse at leisure, a
muse that has been leading her down more curious alleyways since infancy.
Growing up in Hamburg among a family of avid Elvis and old German popular
music fans, Billie had every single by the Beatles in her collection by the
time she was five. Her teenage years were taken up by Elton John, and
"playing every song over and over until I had absorbed it with every cell of
my being". In the early '80s, Billie moved to Berlin and had her musical
sensibilities tweaked yet again, first by the electronic experimentation of
bands like Cabaret Voltaire and Throbbing Gristle, and then superlative soul
by Aretha Franklin and Martha Reeves. Billie began forming various soul and
R&B bands, but it was a desire to fuse the two - "the intellectual and the
emotional", as she puts it - that led her to London and the formation of
Electribe 101.
Since Electribe's break-up, Billie has released two monumentally beautiful
records; Persuasion and 4 Ambient Tales, made with Spooky and The Grid
respectively. They both drew her close to her goal of creating music that is
equal parts Kraftwerk and Phil Spector, and her new songs for Magnet put her
closer still. Signed to the label on the strength of a euphoric show at
London's Jazz Café, Billie's first single for them is the high-energy disco
rush of 'Your Loving Arms'. The forthcoming album, however, is a collection
of soaring, sting-in-tail reflections on the subject of burnt out
relationships on which Billie justifies all those Aretha comparisons with
every breath she takes, 'Deadline For My Memories', 'Waiting for the past',
'You and I (Keep Holding On)...the titles speak for themselves. But they
don't offer much indication of Billie's current, upbeat state of mind, the
prospect of singing live again filling this supposed mistress of melancholy
with sheer joy.
"I'm so happy when I'm on stage," she says. "I'm my real self, I joke with
the audience, I don't have a problem in the world - not a doubt, not
anything. I'm flying". Grab a Kleenex and prepare for lift-off.
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