Alice Faye

As a new artist, how hard is it to get your music heard? Rhetorical question perhaps, but “with great difficulty” would be the resounding answer. Current stats show that over 60,000 new tracks are uploaded to Spotify every day. That’s around half a million a week…two million a month….twenty four million a year. For a new artist, the impact they can expect to make is zilch. Comparable to a shed tear of realisation plopping into the Atlantic Ocean and hoping that enough ripples cause it to somehow stand out, only the foolhardy would believe that they could make it – whatever ‘make it’ is these days – and sustain a career in music.

The keen-for-success artist might also bombard the in boxes of the taste makers and influential movers and shakers on the internet in the vain/vague hope that someone will maybe feature them and their music. Even I, with my ‘outdated music for outdated people‘ tagline get dozens of weekly emails from hopefuls across the globe, all eager for me to feature them here. Sometimes I do, but as you know, mostly I don’t.

If you, the artist, wants to go the more traditional route of trying to woo a record company, the executives will no longer hot-foot it en masse to your headline show in a grimy London sweat-box. Instead, they’ll tap into your socials, check out how many followers you have, how many monthly listeners you can pull and what sort of merch you are selling via Bandcamp or wherever. Can I make money from them? is their first thought. Is the music any good? might be their second. And yet, and yet, great talent is out there…

I’m involved in putting on gigs and in recent weeks I’ve been lucky enough to witness some artists who, with a whole lot of luck, could and should be far more well-known than they currently are. A couple of weeks ago we had BMX Bandits play our wee venue (the Harbour Arts Centre) in Irvine. Duglas Bandit suggested Alice Faye as a support act. He’s such a fan of her that when it came to show time, he asked if he could introduce her to the audience…then walked across the stage to take a seat in one of the front rows to watch her. By this point in the evening, I knew why; during the soundcheck, it was just Alice, Danny the sound engineer and myself in the room, and when Alice started singing…oh man! I looked at the normally stoic and hard to impress Danny, who, lost in faders and reverb and noise gates, raised one eyebrow high and smiled knowingly to himself. He was experiencing exactly what I was; a phenomenon.

Alice’s voice was pure and clear with a tone and depth and unique personality that singled her out immediately as one of the greats. I really mean that. I was thinking Nina Simone, Joni Mitchell, Nico… unique and individual voices, and voices that Alice could sit alongside without being one iota out of place. As Alice sang her heart out shyly to an empty room, even the motes of swirling dust being picked up by the heat rays below the ancient HAC spotlights stopped what they were doing to listen. “This must’ve been what it was like when Amy Winehouse sang in front of someone for the first time,” I caught myself thinking at one point. Preposterous, yet not really. It was both jaw dropping and heart-warming in equal measure – here’s a new artist who can really, really sing. Lovely and astonishing. The song she was singing at the time was, I’m sure, Exact Same Thing, the fourth track on the playlist below.

She apparently has it all, Alice. In her vocal stylings there are clear nods not only to the past but the present. It’d be easy to imagine any of her songs sitting perfectly well amongst the ’60s shimmer and melodrama of Lana De Ray or the downbeat pop stylings of Billie Eilish. What it takes to get noticed then elevated to their sort of status is the golden prize. What’s that quote again about success being 10% talent and 90% luck? Alice Faye isn’t lacking anything on the talent front, that’s for sure. All she needs is the luck. And a lot of it.

Thrillingly, that luck might be happening. Alice has been picked up by the people behind Rufus Wainwright and she’ll support him on a couple of upcoming dates. Rufus’s audience, you would think, should appreciate a quirky voice and floating melody, so I’d hope Alice’s name is slightly better-known come the summer. Talent like Alice is so hard to find. Let’s treasure it when it lands in your lap.