Elizabeth McGovern, former Hollywood star, is fronting a band in a South London pub - and she's loving every minute
When the first film you star in, at the age of 19, wins four Oscars, and the second, a year later, spawns your own Oscar nomination, it's hard to know what loftier ambition you can aim for. Playing guitar in a South London pub, the support act to somebody who was once on X-Factor, is not the obvious choice, especially when it has taken you 20 years to get there.
But for Elizabeth McGovern, the actress-turned-singer-songwriter, it was perfect. “Working my way from Hollywood to Balham, I felt as if I'd died and gone to heaven. Slowly and tenaciously, clawing my way down ...” she giggles, while her ringing phone goes unattended, her dog barks manically and her bandmates laugh. “And I couldn't be happier.”
We are sitting in the kitchen of her Chiswick home. The Californian is now a fully fledged Londoner, having married the English producer and director Simon Curtis and had two daughters, now aged 10 and 14. McGovern is best known over here for her roles in Ordinary People, Ragtime and Once Upon a Time in America, and she is still acting. Indeed she will soon hit our screens in the BBC TV comedy Freezing, playing a once-famous actress called Elizabeth McGovern.
But music has taken over as her ruling passion, and if she has to start at the bottom, so much the better. Hence her first gig being in Balham, and her now releasing her first album herself, DIY style.
“I grew up in a house where my brother was a child prodigy classical pianist. And because I didn't do what he did, I never ever thought of myself as a musical person,” she says. So she took instruction in guitar and songwriting from the Nelson Brothers, a pair of musician/producers who are now part of McGovern's band.
“It went on for years in the privacy of our own room, and it was incredibly intoxicating for me, but nothing that I ever dreamt of as any kind of enterprise beyond what it was.”
She also wanted to learn about singing, and so attended a music college near where she lives. “Me and 19-year-olds in every class! I was hanging out with them in the pub afterwards, I was having the best time! At first I felt a bit odd, but after a while they completely accepted me. Those guys were really good - I don't even know why they were at music school, they could just get up there and belt those songs out.”
It is often the case that when you meet somebody more intelligent than the celebrity mill they have been through they lack a certain faith in their own abilities. McGovern has a very gentle and internal intensity, but her extraordinary blue eyes glint as if they mean business.
Having recognised her talent, the Nelson brothers brought in Ron Knights on bass and borrowed Goldfrapp's drummer, Rowan Oliver, to record an album. Together they are Sadie and the Hotheads.
“I've worked with a lot of singer-songwriters, some big names, and at first I thought, ‘Oh God', because a lot of ‘primitive' songwriters write a lot of very basic obvious material,” says Simon Nelson. “But Elizabeth's stuff straight away was just really interesting, these oblique little minimalist riffs and diminished chords even in the first songs.”
Indeed, she wrote hundreds of songs. And the band supported her, even though they have spent years on this project unpaid. “Having been an actress for so long I can't get over the fact that these guys were prepared to do that,” she says. “I'm so touched.”
She is happy to talk about those acting days. She has fond, if hazy, memories of acting with Brad Pitt. “He was the sweetest guy in the world and I hardly noticed him. I swear to God, he used to be just so sweet that if you had told me he was going to be this huge star, I would have been, ‘Brad who?'”
It seems Robert De Niro didn't leave such a good impression, but Mickey Rourke was endlessly fascinating. “You see this in a lot of working-class actors, they're making all this money but they don't feel like they're doing anything real so they hate themselves. I don't think he's sorted it out to this day. But there was no one better to act with, such depth and instinct and heart.”
Recent joys include performing at the Donmar Warehouse in London (alongside her neighbour Colin Firth), and playing Daphne du Maurier's lesbian lover in BBC TV's biographical drama Daphne last year.
McGovern loves literature and poetry - Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath. So the lyrics are crucial for her. “My problem with a lot of contemporary music,” she says, “is that it seems to be filling the mix with a lot of sound for sound's sake and not illuminating the lyrics. Our music serves the words rather than the other way round. So anything that wasn't needed, even if it was a brilliant piece of music, had to go.”
This method makes her record an extremely gentle one. The song Be With the Ducks is about being watched by ducks on a day out with a secret lover. “They couldn't get the measure of us/ We measured love and lust and trust/ We'd spent so much time lying down/ Not getting around to getting around” - then you realise the lover is her newborn baby. I Miss You is about the years she spent acting in New York, having escaped LA, an ode to her actress friend Kathryn who took her to parties with Diane Keaton, Woody Allen and Warren Beatty. One Thing Leads to Another muses that “You can talk about your daddy/ You can talk about your mother/ You can psychoanalyse, try to uncover ....” but concludes that “You build a house inside yourself, bit by bit/ Then you gotta move in, you gotta live in it”.
Elizabeth McGovern is finally doing just that.
Sadie and the Hotheads play every Wednesday night at The Castle pub, London W11. Their debut album, I Can Wait, is available from www.sadieandthehotheads.com
Source : entertainment.timesonline.co.uk
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