decide 'we're going to do a project and try and take this somewhere'?
Miel: Initially I did have an album project when I was singing, before I met Andy, of doing French chansons in an innovative way. I was looking for somebody who could help me with that, and so when I was introduced to Andy, he said "well actually, I've worked with Françoise Hardy" - one of my heroines! I said "wow, that's amazing", along with obviously his amazing experience with Simply Red, Simply Minds and Eurythmics. I thought how fantastic and he invited me to the studio and had a look at what I'd been doing. We started chatting about how to do this album of chansons in an interesting way. I was quite into the idea of reggae, he had other interesting ideas.. Then, he made it develop even further by saying "I think you actually write your own music." I never thought of being capable of that. We sat together in a room and started writing and he would say "well I think this is very good, I think this is genuine, go away and think about that", which I did and I spent the weekend crying over 'Beautiful You', my first song. Then, it started all coming together in this wonderful way. Andy is my mentor and he would do these beautiful arrangements. It was this wonderful process where we would sit together and create these songs and then work on the ideas for the French ones as well.
Andy: The interesting thing is, from my point of view, is that I get approached by a lot of people to come and do music with me and sometimes people have very short amount of time to satisfy their ambition. Because, they perhaps think "well, this is just a bit of fun, I'm going to do it." If people have enough resources to do that and for it to just be boxed into a small frame like that - "we've done that and it's great. I've done it in my life, wasn't it good and then I'll move on and do something else". So, when I first met Miel, I asked if she was ambitious and this was because it was a factor for me to get involved and see if we can actually do something together. Even myself at the time, I didn't realise that the ambition was deep-rooted and it would be persistence, devotion, effort, attitude, style, talent and all these things brought to it. I thought "yeah, we can work with this!" I found the initial idea very interesting. French chansons, which I love, and I was very interested in working on that and taking that to another level. So, let's go with this and try this - and what I thought at the time, was that we would work more with modern orchestral arrangements with a bit of
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