What are your musical backgrounds?

Carole: I started playing piano as a child and continued with classical lessons till I was eighteen. I had an inspirational teacher who traced a line of tuition back to Lizst, Czerny and Beethoven. Although I loved playing classical music I was more drawn to pop and rock and began playing by ear and making up songs at an early age. I was encouraged to think about studying music at university but I was too wild for that world. I loved Janis Joplin and Joni Mitchell. At seventeen I was asked to join a touring/recording all female rock group called Mother Superior but I couldn't defy my parents expectations of getting a degree.

After college I threw myself into all London could offer, playing with bands, theatre groups, forming my own all-womens' band the Spoilsports and lots more. In my mid twenties I wanted to travel so I bought an alto saxophone and took it with me to Spain. I taught myself there, out among the olive trees of Andalusia. I returned to London at a time when life was good for women musicians. A lot of bands and energy. I played everything I could; reggae, funk, blues, big-band, jazz, free-improv, pop. I worked with great R&B and jazz  singers like Carol Grimes, Maggie Nichols and Jan Ponsford. In 1985 I moved to Dublin and met Maria. And the rest, as they say, is history.

Maria: I grew up on a farm in rural Tipperary. The music I experienced as a child was classical, school recorder band, soprano through to tenor - good fun but limited.  I had a good piano teacher but classical theory drained my brain. At home I would spend hours at the piano playing anything I heard by ear. I was into film soundscores rather than the pop music on the radio. Irish radio was also filled with very bad country & western. Showbands were the only live music around. As I was locked away in the convent boarding school/prison, I didn't get exposed to much music outside. But during my holidays I loved the heavier blues progressive rock like Rory Gallagher, Taste, The Who, John Mayall and then at 14, Tapestry by Carole King entered my heart. Joni Mitchell was beyond me until much later.

So music was simply not encouraged and never seen as an option to live from. And so I reached it much later in life. I think that hearing Ella Fitzgerald sing for the first time really lit my desire to sing seriously. I wanted to think of my voice as an instrument like hers. I started to learn the flute and experiment with improvisation for the first time, the blues harp and taught myself the Irish bodhran (drum) but my voice is what I am. I keep focusing inward on breath and tone and seek to express an authentic self without cliché or affectation.