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Heap doesn’t need band for backup
By Wayne Bledsoe
Scripps Howard News Service
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When Imogen Heap introduces “her band” during a concert, she’s referring to a bank of electronics at her fingertips.
“People didn’t really get what I was doing because they couldn’t see,” says Heap in a phone call from her London home. So at her shows, “I would give them a little demonstration of what everything does. So that when things do come in, they can go, ‘Oh, she’s doing that,’ rather than just looking at me and thinking that I’m singing and maybe pushing ‘Go.’ ”
The concerts feature Heap’s 2005 disc, “Speak for Yourself” – a lush, one-woman creation that can be difficult to reproduce onstage.
“Harmonizing my voice and playing keyboards, playing foot pedals, using my laptop and tricking off beats and making my own beats. ... I’m doing that all on my own,” says Heap, who speaks in a quick, cheerful ripple of words.
Her musical path has been a fairly solitary one.
As a child, she became obsessed with playing the piano.
“That was what I did all day,” she says. “For as long as I can remember, I would just play and play and play for hours.”
Heap would make crude multi-tracks and beats by recording her compositions on her brother’s cassette recorder.
“I would do a kind of degraded version of what I do now,” she says. “My parents, thankfully, saved me from that embarrassment and got me a keyboard so that I could program beats on that.”
At the age of 12, Heap attended a Quaker boarding school. She found making music more interesting than making friends.
“I was a bit of a country bumpkin, and I didn’t really know anything about boys or anything ... so I was a bit freaked out, and nobody spent much time with me, which was quite fine by me, because I’d much rather be playing the piano anyway,” she says.
In the music department, she discovered an old Atari computer with a sound module and midi sounds.
“I could record piano sounds into this computer and see them on a screen and change the notes, move them around, and I was absolutely freaked out,” Heap says. “So that was kind of my first introduction into programming.”
At 15, she moved on to music school. In her senior year, the students had to compose a work for inclusion on a CD as part of their final exam. Mickey Modern, who managed Nik Kershaw, heard the song by Heap, then 17, and wanted to work with her.
“He kept bugging me, this man, this strange man, to give him more songs of my music. ... ,” Heap recalls. “I didn’t understand what he wanted. I thought he wanted something else. So I kept running away from him whenever I saw him. Then it dawned on me that he really did just want to hear some songs. So (eventually) it was sort of, ‘Here you go. This is what I’ve been doing in my bedroom.’ ” The tape led to a recording contract and Heap’s first CD, “I Megaphone.”
She followed by co-forming the group Frou Frou, but after releasing one album, Heap decided to continue on solo.
“I re-mortgaged my house and paid for all this lovely gear, and on my (26th) birthday I just played and played and played with all my new toys,” she says.
She gave herself the deadline of one year. She would finish by her 27th birthday.
Just before completing the album, Heap took a weeklong bicycle trip from the source of the Thames River (“a boggy patch in a field in the country,” says Heap) to its mouth. She returned refreshed, and finished what became “Speak for Yourself.”
In concert, Heap, now 28, has actually invited the occasional guest onstage; opening-act cellist Zoe Keating joins Heap for certain songs, as has Heap’s drummer-boyfriend, Richie Mills. On her next tour, Heap may add some permanent players.
“Next time I come around, I’d like to have maybe a couple more people just to relieve myself of my duty a little bit and dance around,” she says.
