BURIED TREASURE
Surprise, Surprise
This month’s rediscovered jewel: an abstract painting in folk-rock clothing.
Wake up Boo!: Juliet Lawson reflects on her debut album.
Juliet Lawson
Boo
SOUVENIR, 1973
IN 1971, London-born singer-songwriter Juliet Lawson was looking at a five-album deal with Island Records. “I did a wonderful session one afternoon with Paul Samwell-Smith, the first time I’d ever been into a studio,” she says today. “Then he left to produce a Carly Simon album in America, and it all fell through…”
Had the Island deal come off, and put her in the company of John and Beverley Martyn, Nick Drake and Fairport Convention, it’s likely Lawson’s debut album Boo would have found itself a celebrated strand in that storied, folk-informed moment of British music. Instead, it sank without trace.
In her early twenties, Lawson says she had only the vaguest notions of making it in music. Having listened to Broadway musicals as a kid, she was fully turned onto music by The Beatles aged 13: her first guitar arrived when she was 15, and her own songs followed. The influence of US singer-songwriters – Carole King, Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell among them – completed the picture, as did doomed American-in-Europe Scott Walker. “I used to cry listening to those early Scott Walker albums,” she says. “I like orchestras and the emotion that can produce. I was flirting with, I suppose, somewhere between The Beatles and Scott Walker.”