Pitch-perfect Frances strikes a chord
At 22, she’s playing Glastonbury, doing press visits to the Antipodes and securing Brit nominations. Ashley Ropati meets Frances, tipped as the next big thing.
Record labels rarely tour complete unknowns down to the Southern Hemisphere unless they’re extremely confident that stardom beckons.
Frances – real name Sophie Frances Cooke – was until recently a young violin student who discovered she had perfect pitch.
But the next stop for Frances after a brief New Zealand visit was last week’s Glastonbury music festival – where she took her place on a bill that included Coldplay, Muse and Adele.
‘‘It felt pretty amazing, especially this early on,’’ she said. ‘‘I mean – I haven’t even released my debut album yet so it’s cool that they’ve invited me to play.’’
Frances made her first track Fire May Save You at the age of 20 on French label Kitsune. Two years and two EPs later, the young musician received her first nomination for the Critics Choice Award at the 2016 Brit Awards in February and it’s little wonder why.
‘‘I’ve always wanted to make music because I couldn’t really do anything else,’’ she laughed.
‘‘Well, I could have, but I don’t know what I would have done. I think if I was going to do anything else with my life, it was always going to be music-related. A music teacher or something, I always knew that that was my thing. There was really no other option.’’
On the brink of her debut album release, Frances describes the comparisons between herself and fellow Brit exports Adele and Sam Smith as ‘‘extremely flattering’’. ‘‘The fact that people are saying that is just really nice,’’ she said. ‘‘And you know, where the stars align and things come together, you don’t really know what’s going to happen until you get there. It’s really quite encouraging to be compared to them, especially this early on.’’
Frances was born in Newbury, Berkshire, and studied at the Liverpool Institute of Performing Arts. It was her school violin teacher who first recognised she was pitch-perfect – the ability to identify or re-create a given musical note without the benefit of a reference tone (‘‘I try to actually tune it out now, honestly. It can be a bit frustrating’’). By the age of 8 she was playing violin and at 10 had very nearly mastered piano, while her dad’s love of indie music and her mother’s interest in Motown – particularly Carole King – influenced her early passions.
‘‘Adele’s first album came out when I was about 15 or 16: it was quite a pivotal time for me. I was deciding if I’d go to university to study music or what I was going to do. I think I heard her first album and I thought ‘Yep, I want to make something like that.’ So she was a huge influence.’’
Frances’ breakthrough single Don’t Worry About Me quickly gained her recognition. ‘‘People ask me if the a capella thing came later, but I actually wrote [the song] in the order that it happens. So I wrote the opening lines first, I didn’t really know what they were for the chorus or whatever. I wrote that first, away from the piano and then I went to the piano and wrote the little piano bit that comes in, then I wrote the chorus. I literally wrote it in the order that it is in the song.’’
‘‘It just felt really natural, to do it like that and make sure I kept the a capella in. It took me a few attempts to do the a capella live – I chickened out the first couple of times.
‘‘During a show in New York, I was like ‘do it, just do it, you never have to come back to New York ever again if it goes awfully wrong, I’ll just run away’ but it was fine.’’
The Don’t Worry About Me music video, released April 29, has since garnered more than 500,000 views online on Vevo.
Despite her new found success, Frances admits there are still moments when she feels like a complete ‘‘fan girl’’.
‘‘Meeting Sam Smith for the first time I was a bit ‘eeeek’, but I was lucky because we share the same management . . . but if I met Chris Martin from Coldplay I don’t think I’d cope. I’d freak out or I’d talk too much.’’