Interview with Corrie Shelley: ‘All of my songs have meaning to me, I really am a storyteller’

Lancashire-based singer-songwriter Corrie Shelley ‘took a while’ to pick up her guitar during lockdown but she has now brought out a new EP, Ghost Light: ‘I’ve used songs that were the extra ones leftover from my Forget Me Not album (which came out last year). There are four tracks, including ‘Mother Earth’, an Acapella track about how we’re treating the planet at the moment. We’ll only have ourselves to blame. There’s a tipping point where we can’t go back.’

The lyrics are testament to how strongly she feels: ‘We’ve drained her resources for wealth and for greed, polluted her waters then cry when she bleeds, stripped all her clothing, left her naked and cold but in return all we do is scold.’

Shelley juggles several hats: she’s the office manager for an adults’ acting group, runs a folk club and takes headshots for actors. However, it all came to an abrupt end with lockdown. ‘It all dried up in one or two days,’ she said.

Her track ‘Ghost Light’ from the new EP is a love letter to the theatre and a reference to the theatrical tradition of leaving a ‘ghost light’ on the stage ‘to appease theatre ghosts’ and as ‘a nod to the theatre that we’ll be back’.

She’s also added a lockdown song, entitled ‘See You On The Other Side’, which she recorded at home before sending it to the sound engineer John Kettle.

‘We assume we know who people are – that bugs me’

Shelley’s songs are invariably about things that have happened to her or to people close to her, she said. Her song, ‘My Shoes’ on her Forget Me Not album is a good example of that. With lyrics such as ‘you can’t judge the life I lead until you know the cost’, the song is about our tendency to pre-judge people: ‘We assume we know who people are before they even open their mouth,’ she said. ‘That bugs me. We have all these layers to us, there might not be a middle ground. We have this habit of hearing an accent, for example, and making an assumption which is usually wrong.’

‘Clocks’ on the same album, is a very moving tribute to her grandfather, who was also her de facto father when her own father left when she was a small child. The sense of loss is beautifully captured by her lyrics: ‘The clocks have all stopped since you left and I can’t rewind the time.’

‘It’s about missing him, even though he died 29 years ago’ she said. ‘He broke his back down the pit and they gave him five years to live – he lasted another 33 years. He took us everywhere, he was a fantastic man.’

Her album title from 2017, The Leaf and the Cane, is a reference to her tea drinking habit: ‘It comes from tea leaves and the three spoons of sugar I have in each cuppa. I drink builders’ tea and I know if someone has short changed me on the sugar [laughs]!’

By her own admission, she has ‘an eclectic listening pool’: ‘I love Kate Rusby, Red Sky July and Darius Rucker as well as soft rock such as Breaking Benjamin and Nickelback. I also really like Frank Turner. I’ve never had a favourite artist, just favourite tracks, because you might love one song by someone but really not like the next one. It’s all about the storytelling – that matters to me much more than the music.’

She also acknowledges the ability of songs to transport you back in time. ‘I love Erasure and I played them on the 10-hour bus journey from Manchester to Aberdeen when I was 17. Even when I hear them now, I’m transported back to that bus.’

‘George Michael’s vocals are to die for’

If she could collaborate with anyone, dead or alive, she’d go with George Michael: ‘His vocals are to die for, so whatever you sang, if he decided you were the lead, he’d bolster you.’ She’d also like to collaborate with her teenage crush, Marti Pellow: ‘He’s still good looking now and still has that twinkle in his eye [laughs]!’

Kate Rusby is another one she’d love to collaborate with. ‘She did a chit chat about her album on Facebook yesterday and I had a dream about her afterwards. In the dream, we were trying to organise a festival and put up a marquee but we didn’t have any tent pegs, so Kate used cutlery instead!’