When a song called "Fall on Me", was recently played on Johnnie Walkers Drive Time show on BBC Radio 2, he was inundated with e-mails wanting to know who this new singer songwriter was, where they could find out about her, and most importantly would he please play more. He had so many requests that he plugged her website the next day, and informed the listeners that it was taken from "Montpelier" a debut album by a singer songwriter called Jane Taylor who was from Bristol and who bizarrely enough wasn't even signed to a major label. He played her song again the next day only to be inundated once more with questions and messages of more please... Hits to the website, e-mails to Jane herself and orders for the CD came flooding in... with a BBC Radio 2 Live session booked for Feb 2nd 2006 on The Johnnie Walker Drive Time Show, the journey begins...But Jane Taylor's journey really started some three years earlier when she decided to give up life working in the real world and focus her attention on the fact that she'd been writing songs since she was little, and maybe there was something in that.
Walking into a Bristol studio to record her first single she fantastically bumped in to Angelo Bruschini, the guitarist from Massive Attack who was so intrigued by her sound that he offered to play guitar for her. The single was called Blowing This Candle out, and it became the first recorded track of her EP,Barefoot, which she went on to release at Ronnie Scotts. She booked her first UK tour and together with local BBC radio interviews and live sessions she began to build up her fan base across the UK. In 2003 she won the International competition ‘Reach' and, supported by her band, toured Ireland with three other bands from the USA and Canada. She then went on to win both the UK and the International Song writing Competition, again with her single 'Blowing This Candle Out', in the singer/songwriter category where no less than 11,000 people entered. Last year, she appeared on the arts program ‘Earshot' for HTV and more recently her song 'Getting To Me' has been included on the soundtrack for the new Sony Television's DVD of the hit TV series 'Dawsons Creek'.
The fact that she's also managed to perform at Glastonbury Festival and the Edinburgh Fringe two years running, headlined the Wurzburg music festival in Germany, played to sold out venues frequently and consistently in Bristol and the South West of the UK, not to mention being played on national BBC Radio, may not come as a complete surprise when you see her perform live. The fact that she does this independently is, however, something to consider.
After almost two years of performing and touring with her band, Jane finally secured backing, through Exec Producer Johnny Stirling, to complete her debut album, ‘Montpelier' (after an area in Bristol where she wrote most of the songs). The album was recorded in a barn at the beginning of winter out in the countryside near Sarsden, Oxford, and was released in 2006 through her independent label Bicycle records.
Astonishingly , creating and manufacturing Montpelier˜ involved some 250 people along the way. The immediate recording and production team (including award winning Producer and composer Bill Lovelady who composed string parts for the album and also mixed it alongside co-producer and engineer Hugo Richardson and Angelo Bruschini, who guest mixed three of the tracks) and the hundreds of people that pre-bought the album 3 months in advance to produce funds to manufacture it. Testiment to the faith people have in what Jane creates.
Plans to promote and tour the album over in Ireland are already underway, and her official UK tour is currently being arranged for the Spring of 2006, but she will be performing a handful of special gigs around the UK before then, (check out the dates for gigs in your area on her gig page), because for the full spine-t
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