INTENSE, inquisitive, intelligent, Margot Smith is passionate about her music and her art. It's something that can be as dangerous as it is liberating, and she's certainly had to pay dearly for her artistic integrity, though she wouldn't have it any other way.
MARGOT SMITH STORY -
by MICHAEL (no relation) SMITH
Earlier this year, she "stepped back" into centre stage so to speak with the release of her second album, TASTE (Immersion), five years after her debut, Sleeping With The Lion. A labour of love, it was born out the fragmentation of a long relationship and "rescued" by a group of Sydney-based musicians who had faith in her talent and with whom she was able to develop a trusting relationship. From that album comes the new single,
Bleedmore.
'It's a song I wrote with Michael Wade in Melbourne a couple of years ago. We'd given everyone the album but had no single. What I like about the song is that, everyone keeps asking me if I write female albums and I don't, but this particular song has all those lines about bleeding, trying to soak it up, and I think it is a very female-oriented song, and quite confrontational."
AND yet Bleedmore is wrapped up in a wonderfully languorous melody with these almost metallic (not metal) atmospheric sounds swirling around the sweetest voice.
"I hope so! It's meant to sound beautiful!"
THERE'S even a "remix" of sorts of the song that closes the single (there are two cuts recorded live at the Esplanade in Melbourne included as well), done by Dave Skeet.
"WE just let Skeet take it. I had nothing to do with that. I really like it but it's not the kind of music I would write, which is why I got Skeet to do it. I think he's very on the cutting edge - he's just back from 5 years in NY and I think he's going to be employed by a lot of people - but I don't go to dance clubs and I
don't trance out on drugs anymore. But I do think it's a wonderful remix, it's kind of weird because Skeet is working with me and (Church drummer/engineer) Tim Powles in a project called Crackerbox which I'm incredibly impressed with. It's dancier than what I do - heavy industrial dance stuff. They've kind of pushed me in a different direction altogether, which I wanted to do, and it's more like what I'll probably do my next album as.
IN the meantime, Margot is really getting into her stride with her band, though it's been a long process of defining and refining the ideas that were developed on TASTE and translating them into a live context.
"THEY'RE extraordinary musicians. We had a learning curve where it took us a fair amount of time to get used to each other and what we expected from each other, but after 9 months we've clicked in and it's brilliant now and we're starting to write together, which is really, really good. The guitarist, Mark Tobin, is from Scarlet - strangely enough we were on the same label at the same time (with her Sleeping With The Lion album) and I kind of knew them but not really."
MARGOT, something of a computer illiterate like yours truly, has nonetheless recently seen her website with The Ultimate Band List Design Award, and become a "hot site" on the largest internet music directory in the world. Her manager, Geoff (no relation) Smith, extrapolates.
"THE idea behind it was that a friend of ours in the States had started a website marketing company
(Mobius New Media) with 4 other guys, which, over a couple of months had just taken off, and he told about these 4 bands they'd marketed in the States that all got major record label deals, and was saying why don't we do this. We got the money together and went to him. So we had the website designed and then linked so all Margot's fans - and that's the other reason for doing it - through other websites on which Margot's name had come up, we were getting responses from Germany, Holland, the UK, America, Canada, Brazil. So we found there was this uniform fan base around the world and so the website was the obvious method for getting everyone talking to each other. People can 'talk' to Margot on the website, ask any questions they want. The second phase we're just going into now, this company actually goes into each
country and links the website to all other websites inside that country - radio stations, magazines, online television, etc - so that each month the hits to the website are growing 400 per cent. This is only the 2nd month and we've already had 8000 hits.
MARGOT goes to America late Feb. early March to tour which will also be going 'online', so we here can check the band out as they play Chicago,
NY, LA, Seattle, Philadelphia and Toronto in Canada. As soon as the possibility of a tour was floated on the website, Margot had a flurry of offers to put the band up and questions as to when they were coming so holidays could be put off in order to see them play. Like so many Australian artists, Margot's American
fan base is larger in the US than at home.