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 to access audio and video on collective you need real player.Achy Breaky Heart. Emma Niblett’s voice is only just audible over the clatter, rumble and occasional panicked horn bleats that make up the soundtrack inside her tour bus, but it’s clear enough to confirm that a Yankee twang has yet to adulterate her droll Nottingham tones. Last night was the first show of her tour, a party in her adopted hometown of Portland, Oregon, to celebrate the release of her third album, This Fool Can Die Now. She’s lived in America for some time now, and she’s comfortable there. Portland was selected for the wealth of friends it harboured, and also its wealth of bridges. “I like bridges. Also, I used to live in California, but I couldn’t afford it anymore,” she explains. “It just makes more sense to be in America, given what I do.”  What Emma does, under her nom du rock of Scout Niblett, is make wonderful, powerful, unique music, her voice sometimes tenderly cradled by hushed guitar strings, sometimes bolstered by lightning-rod metallic riffs, or sometimes accompanied only by her expressive drumming. “I find it quite hard to separate the albums,” she says, when asked about This Fool Can Die Now. “They’re all part of one big work-in-progress, a little memento of where I was then. All of my songs, they’re all painting part of the same picture from different perspectives. I usually end up writing tragedies [laughs] because that’s close to my interest in things. In other songwriters I’m attracted to a certain chaos, an emotional storminess. Heartbreak, if I’m being honest.” Heartbreak is a constant in Emma’s songs, presented with an unflinching, at times discomfiting, honesty. Songs such as Wolfie from her previous album, 2005’s striking Kidnapped By Neptune, and her new single Kiss, a scorched and sorrowful ballad accompanied by Will Oldham, are sublimely bereft, movingly intimate. “Sometimes, when I’m playing my songs, I’ll feel a bit bad,” she grins. “Because I’ll be looking at the audience, and start to feel like I’m directing the mood of the room. I don’t want to put people in a bad mood. But people can hear that someone else feels something, and I know that feels good, healing.”  She named her last album in tribute to her interest in astrology, and the effect Neptune was having upon her chart, sending her life into an extended period of disarray that has, nevertheless, provided much meat for her songwriting. “And he’s not gone away yet,” she hisses, of the mischievous oceanic god. “I still feel pretty delusional, and the record’s still in that realm of feeling delusional, of not seeing things clearly. It’s a weird place, but a very creative place to find yourself in.”
Stevie Chick
Scout Niblett - This Fool Can Die Now is out now on Too Pure.
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