I had this emotional block about hearing my voice. “I wouldn’t sing in school or even in the shower. “I had a phobia about it until five years ago,” she said in 2011. The panel also features Nick Mulvey, Corinne Bailey Rae and broadcaster John Kennedy.Ĭalvi did not begin singing until her mid-twenties. In October 2015, having been previously nominated twice for the award herself, Calvi joined the panel again to decide the winner of the 2015 Mercury Prize. After graduating, Calvi worked as a guitar teacher, giving private lessons to help finance her music career until 2010. She attended University of Southampton where she studied violin and guitar, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in Music in 2003. She came to be much influenced by 20th century composers Messiaen, Ravel, and Debussy, attracted “to the impressionistic element of the music”, and would try to recreate this feeling on the guitar, an instrument she was compelled to learn on discovering Django Reinhardt and Jimi Hendrix at the age of 13.Ĭalvi originally intended to study art, but instead opted for a degree in music.
By the age of 10 she was using a double cassette karaoke machine to overdub her playing. “Something would take me over whenever I’d seen an electric guitar,” she later recalled. Whenever I saw an instrument I would get so excited and my heart would beat really fast.”Ĭalvi first picked up the violin at 6, and guitar at 8. Calvi grew up being exposed to a multitude of genres of music by her music-loving Italian father this eclectic array ranged from Captain Beefheart to The Rolling Stones to Maria Callas, combined with an early understanding of classical music, “I was so taken by the sound. The early things stick with you,” she later remembered. And that’s what my relationship with music is – a world of my own creation that I escape into. “The way I dealt with that was to create my own world. She spent most of the first three years of her life in a hospital undergoing treatment and surgeries to correct congenital hip dysplasia. Her second album One Breath was released in 2013 through Domino Records and was also nominated for the Mercury Prize.Īnna Calvi was born Anna Margaret Michelle Calvi on 24th September 1980 in Twickenham to an English mother and Italian father, both of whom are therapists.
Her eponymous debut album was released in the United Kingdom in 2011 and was nominated for the Mercury Prize and earned her a nomination for British Breakthrough Act at the 2012 Brit Awards. Anna Margaret Michelle Calvi is an English singer-songwriter and guitarist.