Daring to be different, singer Christine Tobin is set to delve still deeper into the consciousness of her fans and newcomers alike if the arrival of her brand new album Secret Life of a Girl is anything to go by. An emotional and personal stirring, one step beyond her previous album, the dark Romance and Revolution, Tobin on Secret Life inhabits the world of the young characters in the songs, representing different stages of an untold story, an incipient self awareness and maturity. The album is released at a time when her partner and regular musical colleague, guitarist Phil Robson, releases Six Strings and The Beat, a Bartók-infused strings album flavoured by post-modern jazz and African music alike. Stuart Nicholson talks to the pair about the story behind their albums and their quest to follow the road less travelled while long time fan, Lionel Shriver, author of We Need To Talk About Kevin, describes her reactions to that voice.

Heaven only knows what Mark Twain, who famously coined the saying, “there are three kinds of lies: lies, dammed lies and statistics” in his 1924 autobiography, would have made of the Office of National Statistics. Had he been around today and read its claim that the average length – to use the ugly governmental jargon – of “co-habiting” is three-to-five years, he probably would have cast around for evidence that these figures were, at the very least, lies and at best dammed lies. And to prove his point he could have done no better than to turn to singer Christine Tobin and guitarist Phil Robson.

Two of the most respected musicians on the UK jazz scene today, they have been an item since 1995, a tad longer than the best estimate of the Office of National Statistics. And what’s more, they give every indication they’re going to be together for a long time to come. Both take great pride in what they share together, a mutual admiration society that has given them both a solid foundation to grow in stature as artists and fuel each other’s creativity. “We met at the Guildhall post-grad jazz course in 1988,” recalls Tobin. “We both had different partners at the time. But Phil was the youngest musician on the course and I thought he was gorgeous! He was new in town, but we didn’t really hook-up until 1995, the year I made my first CD which he played on. We’re kindred spirits and he’s really, really supportive.”

There’s no getting away from it. Both are aware they share something special together, even if they both seem a little in awe of it. “Christine has influenced me a lot, which has meant a lot to me,” says Robson. “I have worked with her for a very long time, and we’ve shared a lot of experiences, and because we’re together we’ve talked a lot about music. We began to play together on and off, we saw a lot of each other on the scene and I played something on her first album, and wrote one song. When we got together, through her I got to check out a whole load of music I had never heard before. Of course, as we’re both musicians it’s difficult with all the travelling. The good side is being musicians we understand all about that, possibly more than other people would.”

It’s just as well they’re so understanding because both are about to embark on UK tours in support of their new albums, Tobin’s Secret Life of a Girl and Robson’s Six Strings and the Beat. It’s no exaggeration to say these albums are the finest either has done to date, mature statements by two artists who have come of age on the UK jazz scene. For Tobin, who has been dubbed “the Björk of Euro Jazz,” it represented a return to the recording studio after a break of four years. “I had a body of songs that were floating around that had not been documented,” she says. “There was a thread that runs through them all that linked them together so I went into the studio with the idea of documenting them. When I went back and listened to them I thought this is a record here!”

Robson, too, was keen to document a new ensemble project he has been working on called Six Strings and the Beat. “It was born from a commission from Derby Jazz with whom I have a long association,” he says.

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