FROM TV SOAPS TO UNCANNY POP… KEELEY FORSYTH CLIMBS OUT OF THE DEBRIS.
EVEN IN THE age of the portfolio career, there’s something startling about Keeley Forsyth’s change of direction. Look her up on IMDB, and her CV includes appearances in Peak Practice and Coronation Street. Listen to her debut album, the elementally stark Debris, and the mainstream sitting-room rapidly vanishes from the frame. “I have, if I’m honest, always felt not quite right in certain elements of the acting world,” says Forsyth, “but I’ve had to navigate it because it’s my job and I have to earn a living. I definitely feel more comfortable on the artist side. But it’s a bit strange coming out to my family – ‘So this is who I am’ – when they’re like, ‘Where’s that girl who was in Heartbeat? We’d quite like her back, please.’”
Debris, with its strings, harmonium and occasional thready electronics, moves to a different pulse altogether. Forsyth has written songs for years – sometimes on accordion – but she had an epiphany hearing late-period Scott Walker. “I thought, Oh – maybe it is kind of acceptable.” Raised in Oldham by her grandmother, Forsyth grew up entranced by singers – Doris Day, Judy Garland, Kathy Kirby – and was sent round the corner to a retired opera singer called Olive Valentine for lessons. Yet what comes out of her mouth on Debris is so remarkable – unearthly, like Anohni or Beth Gibbons – that she refers to the person producing it as just “she” or “her”. (“Keeley,” meanwhile, “is more mezzo-soprano.”)
Friends have told her she sounds possessed on Debris, a reaction to Black Bull’s twisted fairytale imagery, or Lost’s untethered psychic free-fall. Before writing Debris, she experienced “a psychologically traumatic time” that left her unable to move her tongue for a few weeks. “When I do perform and sing, I try to bring everything into it – that’s probably why I feel possessed sometimes, because it’s trying to breathe life through that throat that I felt had gone.”
On Butterfly, Forsyth sings of a house without a roof, a garden of snakes, a strange transformation that leaves her “half butterfly/half window”. “I think I’m just interested in the sound of what it’s like to be a woman,” she says. “I’ve got two children, I’m a single parent. It’s about two things having to exist together. The cycle of a woman’s life, having to live in this existence of giving birth and labour and pain but having to love – just being made of these different things.” Debris stands as a powerful metamorphosis.
“We’re allowed to change,” says Forsyth.
“That’s OK.”
“I’m interested in the sound of what it’s like to be a woman.” KEELEY FORSYTH