Rebecca Downes

As years go 2016 was pretty spectacular for blues rock singer / songwriter Rebecca Downes. The release of a second

album Believe has been met with pretty much universal critical acclaim, with a string of pretty impressive gigs following in its wake.

Then there was not only being nominated for but actually winning Best Emerging Artist and Best Female Vocalist at the 2016 British Blues Awards. These being won against some pretty stiff competition including The Laura Holland Band and Kyla Brox respectively. “It’s been a great year and we seem not to have gone from A-to-B but A-to-G or something like that,” Rebecca laughed.

“It’s taken a lot of hard work, but I think you need a little bit of luck along the way too. This isn’t the easiest industry in the world. You just have to keep going and we’re just going to do everything we can to keep the momentum up. The constant ploughing away at it brings the rewards I guess.”

Of course it isn’t just Rebecca and her fabulous band. There are a lot of others we don’t get to see and who the Birmingham born singer is quick to acknowledge. “There are a lot of people behind the scenes who work especially hard for us. Everyone has played their part and we all hope it continues to grow.”

Winning two such prestigious awards certainly help to keep the Downes Train rolling. “Without doubt winning Best Vocalist was the stand out moment. It was a really, really special moment and made all the more so because it’s a public vote.  I know everybody says this but I really didn’t think that was going to happen. It was a total shock. Being nominated was a great thing, but to actually win, well, when the call came through I was genuinely dumbstruck. I just couldn’t believe it. I was screaming and shouting all over the place, making a right fool of myself but not caring. To be recognised like that is, well, tremendous.”

Although not from a particularly musical family, music nevertheless played a bit part in Rebecca’s upbringing. “Everyone tells me Gran, my mum’s mum, had an operatic voice and Stanley Myers who wrote Cavatina from The Deer Hunter is a distant relative, but that’s it pretty much. My parents are both big jazz and swing fans though so they were listening to Ella Fitzgerald and Frank Sinatra a lot of the time. Billie Holliday, too. My mum would insist that these were the people I needed to listen to and to forget the poppier kind of stuff that was around at the time.”

Rebecca is about to take to take the same stage as some pretty legendary names herself. Steve Hackett, Ian Anderson, Bernie Marsden, Ian Paice and Rebecca will  be performing at Butlin’s in Minehead as a part of the Giants of Rock Festival at the end of January. “It’s pretty scary to be honest. I just hope we do ourselves proud because to be included on a list like that is incredible. We’re going on before Jethro Tull on the Sunday, January 29th, so yeah. There will be one or two nerves kicking around that night I’m sure.”

So what does Rebecca learn from being around other artists who have been performing for so long. “I try to watch as many of the other guys at a gig like this as possible because there is always something you can learn. You always take something away, even subconsciously, from a performance. I remember seeing Connie Lush years and years ago at The Robin. She has always been a big influence on me and I just love to watch what she does on stage.  She is such an amazing performer. Connie’s the perfect example of how to be on stage. She is just so energetic, so full of life. She has this fantastic voice and so obviously loves doing what she’s doing. She just makes being on stage look like a walk in the park, she really is that good.”

Yet having seen her at The Mold Blues & Soul Festival in August 2016, it’s also clear that Rebecca Downes relishes being on stage and feels at home there. A fact underlined on the capture of her performances in 2016 which feature on her recently released live album, BeLive. “I wouldn’t say I necessarily feel at home on stage, but rather that it’s the only place I am who I really am. There are a lot of sides to everyone, probably, but on stage is where I am definitely the most confident, the most happy.”

“When I’m not there things don’t feel quite right somehow. Everything surrounding a gig, before and after when you meet people, is just incredible so, to be honest, when I’m not doing that I feel as though I have very little purpose. I

don’t do very well when I’m not gigging at all.”

This was a love of performing born almost by accident. “I was about twelve or thirteen or something, when this band said they’d heard me singing in the choir and asked me to try out for a band they’d put together. I’d dreamed of being a singer but never ever did I think that I could do it. So I went to this audition they’d set up anyway, really just for something to do.”

“They wanted me to sing two songs, Eric Clapton’s Wonderful Tonight and, bizarrely, Bryan Adams’ Run To You. The band started playing and when I was singing I can clearly remember thinking: ‘Wow! This is absolutely what I want to do for the rest of my life.’ That moment, standing there singing Run To You in front of a live band was remarkable. It hasn’t stopped being remarkable ever since.”

BeLive wasn’t really on the horizon as a third album. However, when it was suggested it became something real pretty quickly. Recorded in several venues, BeLive is a capture of some magnitude. “My Producer and Sound Engineer Mark Stewart suggested it to be honest and once he did, it seemed like the most natural thing to do. I’m always going on about how sometimes I can feel uncomfortable in the studio and he’s always saying how hard it is to capture me at my best in that environment. I always tend to over think a song I’m recording, so capturing that edge – that energy – can be really quite difficult.”

“We got it right on Believe because we tried different techniques and things, but to me playing live is where I’m at my most energetic. It’s just me, no whistles and bells, no over dubbing … just me and the band doing what we love to do.

When I listened to the completed BeLive straight away it was the happiest I’ve been with a recording of mine. No faffing about, it is just raw. I absolutely love it.”

Rebecca co-writes with her guitarist Steve Birkett. “It’s a completely organic thing. Sometimes I’ll come up with an idea for a song and play it on an acoustic guitar because that’s how I write, or sometimes he’ll come up with an idea. Then we’ll just work them out together. We come at everything we write from every conceivable angle, but they are always a joint project no matter whose original idea the song might have been. By the time it’s finished it’ll have changed so much anyway it can only ever be a joint project. I’ve written with Steve for years and writing can be a pretty lonely business. You get song blind and think something’s really good when it really isn’t, you know, so it is great to have someone you can trust to help steer the song in the right direction. In Steve I have the best.”

Rebecca Downes BeLive is available now.