Charlotte Yates "Archipelago" 2013

...By the time Putty broke up later in 1990, Yates knew she wanted to write and sing her own material. And the songs were starting to come.
“Some of them were good, some of them weren’t good,” she remembers. “I knew they had something when people had a reaction and could sing stuff back to me. And then one of them cut through, which was ‘Red Letter’. That got some serious traction. That particular song, I just played it on the guitar, and went, ‘Hmm? Hmm!’”
A demo of the song, recorded at Marmalade studio, secured her an Arts Council grant towards making her first solo album. Released in 1991 as Charlotte Sometimes/Queen Charlotte Sounds, the album was noted for its strong intelligent voice and songs that moved easily between the personal and the political…

…Though her solo career was underway, the next few years were largely dominated by When The Cat’s Been Spayed, the irreverent vaudeville trio in which Yates was joined by singer Jackie Clarke and vocalist/percussionist Robin Nathan. Their name was a veterinarian play on that of popular all-women quintet When The Cat’s Away. Yates also spent time as a coordinator for the Festival Of The Arts in Wellington, and a spell in Australia as director of the Melbourne Fringe Festival.
Her second solo album The Desire and The Contempt came out in 1997. Produced by former Crocodile Peter Dasent, it included a couple of vocal quartet arrangements by Tony Backhouse and featured New Zealand expat Jonathan Zwartz on bass. Again the breadth of Yates’s songwriting was on display, from the quiet intimacy of ‘The Summer and The Snow’ to the skanking reggae of ‘Scratches’ and harder-edged rock of ‘Over The Moon’.
Before her next album, Dead Fish Beach, recorded in Wellington in 2001 and featuring Darren Mathiassen on drums, Yates fell into the first of her “poet” projects.
“I was asked to write a song for a Vietnam tribute and I was flummoxed because I didn’t know anything about Vietnam. I’d been a kid during the Vietnam War, and was not interested in any sort of militaristic situation. They wanted a female song. They’d heard a song on The Desire and the Contempt, ‘Last Night’, and liked that. That was the sound. I felt pretty uncomfortable but I took it seriously and read books, doing research about it.”
The breakthrough came when she stumbled on an anti-war poem by James K Baxter in a pack of clippings from the period. “Most things seemed so dated, but Baxter wasn’t. It leapt off the page at me. I remember thinking, ‘This sounds like a rock song. Wouldn’t it be cool to put this to music?’”
So pleased was she with her discovery, that she began to imagine what a whole album of Baxter poems set to music might sound like. “I just did a wish list. What if I got Dave Dobbyn, what if I got so-and-so, wouldn’t that be cool?”
She approached the late poet’s publishers who put her in touch with Baxter’s widow, Jacquie Sturm. To Yates’s surprise, Sturm gave her approval. Then she sent a tentative proposal out to several record companies, to gauge interest. Universal came back quickly, requesting a meeting. “They said, ‘We really like it, can you do this?’ Game on! They wrote me a letter of support for a funding application there and then.”
Once the Baxter album was completed – featuring performances by some of New Zealand’s biggest names including Dobbyn, Martin Phillipps, Emma Paki, and poets Sam Hunt and David Eggleton, as well as Yates – a live show was mounted as part of the 2000 International Festival Of The Arts…to be continued... - audioculture

trax:
1. A Heart To Make 2. Before The Blue Begins 3. Hold Your Heart 4. Think It Through 5. Lighthouse 6. End Of The Tunnel 7. Falling Down 8. I Will 9. Lovelast 10. Stains Your Heart 11. Dreams Are Like Sand 12. Surely The Sun 13. Mad (Gilli.bird Remix) 14. The Awakening River (Mark Tierney Remix - Bonus)
…served by Gaius…