The Stool Pigeon

Fabienne Delsol seems like a lady out of place - not because she’s a French woman in London (she’s been here 12 years), but because you imagine time stands still in her world. She dresses in winkle-pickers and vintage tapered trousers, rocks a big forgotten hairdo and makes music that sounds so authentically sixties, it’s hard to believe it was recorded in the modern day. Gorgeous new album, Between You and Me, is a case in point: from the photo and the typesetting on the cover to its mix of songs sung in French and English, you’re transported perfectly back to a time when pop had grace and style and meaning. But, of course, it all came about by accident.

“I think it just happens really,” she says. “It’s not calculated and we didn’t mean for it to sound especially like the sixties. We’re not trying to copy or replicate anything, but we did want the songs to sound like the music we enjoy listening to.”

The ‘we’ here means her partner Liam Watson and the musicians who record at Liam’s Toerag studios in east London, an analogue musical institution now known the world over as ‘the place where Jack’n’Meg cut Elephant’. They must tire of that.

Liam and Fabienne go way back - to when Fabienne first moved to London. A chance meeting resulted in her being asked to audition for Liam’s now-defunct band, The Bristols. “They used to have an Italian singer called Monica,” explains Fabienne, “but she moved back to Italy. Liam was looking for someone to replace her and he asked me. I’d never sung before, but we recorded ‘Questions I Can’t Answer’ in 10 minutes and it came out as a single. We went through it twice and that was it.”

Astonishingly, Fabienne has not played live since The Bristols split. She thinks of the work she does under her own name as a recording project that happens only when it can. “Between You and Me was recorded over a period of about two years,” she says. “There is no band - no line-up. We used the musicians when they were available and that’s why it took so long to finish. It’s very informal.”

If it takes another two years for a new Fabienne record to emerge, it’ll be our loss. She’d like to make music the whole time, but she’s also realistic. “I don’t really think of it as a mainstream thing,” she says, “it’s not a big disappointment for me if my records don’t get reviews. But obviously I love it when people say they like my music.”

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