Ginny Clee

''Songs of experience, rather than fantasy, by a songwriter who knows her craft and hasn't forgotten the principal that singing the phonebook with soul is always better than singing the songbook like a contestant on Pop Idol''
Nick Coleman The Independant on Sunday
Ginny Clee releases her first solo album, ‘Hold On Tight’ (Sore Thumb STR-CD2) in late Spring 2005. Formerly one half of The Dear Janes, Ginny has spent the last few years working on this, her first solo album. ‘Hold On Tight’, is a collection of witty, wry, melancholic songs predominantly co-written with her regular writing partner Pete Smith. The album also features her version of the Blind Willie Johnson number ‘God Don’t Never Change’, which she first recorded for a compilation CD called ‘Dark Was The Night’, a collection of his songs by various artists and which features in the new British film ‘Driving Lessons’ starring Julie Walters which will be out later this year.
The wicked humour within Ginny’s lyrics is matched only by her ability to make a grown man cry; there’s something heartrending in her gentle vibrato and delicately husky cry. It is little wonder, therefore that the likes of Billy Bragg, Robyn Hitchcock and Ian McLagan have been seduced into sharing either stage or studio with her.
She says: “I‘m actually a very happy person who had an unfashionably happy childhood - but I prefer sad songs, always have. I love a good weep at a tortured tale. I have a deep empathy with sadness and over the years I seem to have become a raconteur of other peoples misery.”
With ‘Hold On Tight’, her self-produced first solo album, the former Dear Jane beguiles performances from Guy Evans (Van der Graaf Generator), Giles Perring (Echo City, Fad Gadget), Simon Edwards (Talk Talk, Beth Gibbons, Billy Bragg), Ben Mandelson (3 Mustaphas 3) the house of Roy Dodds (Fairground Attraction) and a dog named Elmore.
These willing victims create the landscape in which her songs flourish and bloom. These are songs that continue a tradition that has drawn Syd Straw to co-write and Emmylou Harris to sing her work.
Visit the website at: www.ginnyclee.com