It's just as well for Marli Buck that her dad can't count, otherwise her childhood in the sleepy northern town of Lytham St Annes might have been very different. Her musician father had plans to turn his half-Italian, half-Welsh brood of kids into the new Jackson Five until it dawned on him that he only had four children. Besides which, musical harmony is hard to come by when "one brother only listens to Megadeth and another only likes Clannad. Poor dad, his dreams were shattered!" she laughs.Marli herself gave him just as much grief a rebellious child, he locked her in the dining room to practice for her piano lessons, but she escaped by climbing out of the window. Still, by the age of 17 she'd managed to learn something, because she'd moved to Manchester and was working as a music director for Granada TV, sitting on the Sherlock Holmes set and teaching 40-year-olds to sing and play piano.
(A thank you letter from Helen Mirren and being asked on a date by the Gillette man were the perks of the job.)Then there was drama school, where Marli would skive acting classes to hide out in the men's changing rooms writing songs on their piano. Much to her parents' horror, she dropped out to be a rock star yet was soon in New York working with Dave Gahan from Depeche Mode. Sony flew her in for a meeting when she only had one song to perform ("I managed to improvise a second one" she recalls), then Chris Blackwell, the legendary founder of Island Records, took interest and personally signed her. Yet Marli was stuck in a bad relationship at the time, which was having an impact on her music-making, and Island let her go.Once she'd sorted her life out, Marli felt action was needed and did a stint on Fame Academy. It was long enough to get her noticed by the right people she got snapped up by a top management company - but short enough to save her from the reality TV tag. "I don't even watch those programmes, it was just a means to an end," she admits. SONYBMG were glad to see her back on track and offered her a deal, and with the right people around her, Marli found her song-writing changed. "I'd always written in the third person before, but suddenly I was able to write about what was really going on in my own life," she explains.
When she started writing from the heart, she was amazed by the passion that came out especially when she took to "sitting in the studio at midnight with a bottle of wine, just writing and writing."Not all of it was happy stuff by any means - the album 'Little Girls, Big Hearts' (lead off single 'Be The One') - co-written with and produced by the Goldust team, is about love and longing but also deals with death, fears and even an out of body experience. Yet there's also a strong sense of what the singer-songwriter describes gleefully as "pure unadulterated pop I am actually quite a chirpy girl!". But what strikes you before anything else is that rich, compelling voice of hers, which ranges from Tori Amos in the depths to Nelly Furtado in its highs. Yet more than anything it is uniquely Marli Buck, and destined to be widely heard. Now there's one thing her dad can count on.
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