Christine answers questions about her April 2003 release You Draw the Line

On You Draw the Line, you sing rearranged covers from the post-1960s singer/songwriter canon, Bob Dylan’s All I Really Want to Do and Leonard Cohen’s Tower of Song (from 1988’s I’m You Man). Do you identify to a larger extent with this introspective, storytelling writing school than the Tin Pan Alley scribes?

Yes, I think with traditional jazz songs there’s been an unspoken agreement that you only write about certain subject matter. It’s just that something comes to you out of the blue, some idea or something that triggers your imagination. So I’m not gonna say ‘I can’t write about this because it’s not your traditional jazz subject matter’. A lot of people in the jazz establishment find that unacceptable. Whereas in the audience I quite often have people come up and say ‘gosh I hadn’t been to a jazz gig before but I really enjoyed that’ and they weren’t expecting those songwriting aspects of it.

So what were your original influences?

From the age of 10 I grew up listening to my older sister’s record collection: Janis Joplin, Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix and later David Bowie. At 18/19 I bought my first jazz album which was Joni Mitchell’s Mingus album. Who are your current influences? I bought Patricia Barber’s latest record. They were playing it a lot on Jazz FM. I find it quite reassuring and encouraging that she got signed by Blue Note and got through because it’s singer-songwriter and quite dark as well. All the things that have been banished. It also gives me a glimmer of hope.

The final song on You Draw The Line called ‘Intellectual Engineer’ is a defiant socio-political rant against an oppressive Philistine culture, with phrases such as ’he can carve you into pieces with his categories and codes’ . Who or what is the Intellectual Engineer of this song?

It’s not about anyone in particular. If you happen to be saying something that’s different and people don’t recognise it as something they know straight away, they just cast it aside or criticise. People are very impressed by money and success. They don’t necessarily want to hear something from the heart or real.