The Guardian

London

Even in her raw state — not long out of bed, and diligently ploughing through cauliflower soup — Thea Gilmore is a head-turner. Her refusal to be moulded by the music business is just one of a long list of compromises she won’t make for the sake of her career.

Here is another: at a time when major-label recording contracts are like gold dust, Gilmore has turned down offers from four of the five majors, instead releasing her five albums through an obscure independent in Cheshire, in the north west of England, where she now lives. “I have a deep need to control everything,’’ she says, sounding mildly embarrassed. “I don’t want anyone telling me how to sound or how to look.”

Perhaps this is why she has remained one of music’s best-kept secrets, despite having been dubbed the female David Gray. Gilmore, meanwhile, is up against the most sexualised era in pop history. She has five self-written albums under her belt, the capacity to self-finance and the respect of the album-buying sector. Gilmore is quietly aloof about it all.

Gilmore is from the Dido school of bookish middle-class girls — her Irish parents are an illustrator and a book editor, her sister Freyja a scientist — and by extension she enjoys the luxury of not needing the cash. Perhaps this is why her songs are idiosyncratic things that sound as if they were written for her alone. They fizz with unexpected similes.

Gilmore began writing songs at 15. Her influences were the artists in her parents’ collection, including Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan. She released her first album at 18, by which time she was (and still is) in a relationship with her producer, Nigel Stonier.

“But I don’t write love songs,” she emphasises. “Love is a problem most vicious. It’s a dirty, filthy emotion with so much clouding of the issue. With men, love begins with sex and ends with a deep need for an emotional crutch.”

In the same breath, she claims she has never encountered overt pressure to look sexy.

“But I think it’s terribly sad the lengths girls go to, pouting on the cover of their CD. The easiest way of controlling people sexually is to say they’re not really being controlled.”