http://www.montrealgazette.com/entertai ... story.html
Webb Sisters Return to Leonard's Hometown
By BERNARD PERUSSE,
The Gazette
April 1, 2010
When Charley and Hattie Webb first started singing together, as children growing up in Kent in southeast England, they favoured the music they heard around the house.
Choral music, Cocteau Twins, the Carter Family, classical piano pieces, the Indigo Girls and Kate Bush also found their way into the mix at various times, but the initial impetus for the sisters to harmonize came from singer-songwriters whose works were found in the parental record collection.
Their father, a hairdresser with a second vocation as a rock 'n' roll drummer, was big on singers like James Taylor and Linda Ronstadt.
Some of Taylor and Ronstadt's best records were produced by Peter Asher, whose crystalline studio sound played a serious role in defining folk-rock, 1970s style.
Asher - who, as a member of the British pop duo Peter and Gordon in the 1960s, discovered a thing or two about harmony - now manages and produces the Webb Sisters. In a recent telephone interview, he said he took them on because he was struck by the purity of their vocals. "They've got that ethereal, perfect-choice-of-note, incredibly-good-pitch thing the McGarrigles had," he said. "Or maybe the Roches. And, of course, Linda Ronstadt and the kind of singers I've had the pleasure of working with. They're up at that level."
In a separate conversation, however, the sisters were wittily self-effacing. They seemed in awe, for example, of Sting, whose recent album, If On a Winter's Night..., featured their vocals.
"It was one of those moments you can't quite believe," Hattie said, "hearing that voice come out of his mouth, not through a speaker."
"I wanted to pinch myself," Charley said, with a well-timed pause. "And pinch him."
"Pinch his bum, maybe," Hattie added, before both cackled.
Even on a dodgy phone connection, the spirited exchanges that can come only from siblings ring clear. Asked about the instruments they plan to bring for their Club Soda show Saturday night, Hattie began to talk about her mandolin, which goes by the name of Henry Snow. Quizzed about the origin of the name, it was Charley who broke in. "Oh, no," she said. "I've seen the Hattie face."
For the record, the instrument somehow suggested its own name. "Apparently, her instruments all talked to her," Charley said, with laughter breaking through both phones on the other end of the line. "I don't have anything to say about that."
But for all the playful horsing around, the sisters are dead serious about their music. It has been that way since they sang in choirs in their teens and into their 20s or performed as kids in community fundraisers. "It's strange sometimes to listen to recordings or see videos of that stuff," Hattie said. "In a way, we haven't really ever changed what we've been doing."
Their featherweight but deadly precise harmonies run through everything from their 2000 debut album, A Piece of Mind, through their two recent EPs, Comes In Twos and The Other Side.
Not to mention the way their voices colour Leonard Cohen's gravelly rumble. The circumstances leading to their presence in the bard's band go back to when they were with Universal in 2004 and asked to work on a children's album. Their collaborator on the project, which was ultimately not recorded, was Cohen's singing partner and co-writer Sharon Robinson.
When Cohen decided to tour after a 15-year absence from the stage in 2008, Robinson invited them to a rehearsal. "We weren't quite sure whether Leonard was looking for us to actually be in the band or to be a support act or just to hang out," Hattie said. A couple of days later, however, Cohen's musical director, Roscoe Beck, asked Robinson and the sisters to come up with some vocal arrangements. They were in, and some Webb Sisters songs were temporarily shelved.
Remembering the city tour Cohen took them on two years ago when he returned for three homecoming shows, they playfully issued a plea for the Canadian government to let them move to Montreal.
But that will have to wait until Cohen has finished bringing them around the world. The experience, Charley said, has been "musically inspirational, if sometimes a bit overwhelming, in terms of the travel, the pace and the size of the audiences. Leonard Cohen fans are some of the most passionate there are in the world. And the band is a real family."
The Webb Sisters perform Saturday night at 8 at Club Soda. Tickets cost $19.50. Phone 514-790-1111 or go to www.ticketpro.ca
bperusse@thegazette.canwest.com
© Copyright (c) The Montreal Gazette
Read more: http://www.montrealgazette.com/entertai ... z0jqV1wyqL