Liz Green

Here’s someone new and very good. Liz Green may be best known this year as the winner of the Emerging Talent competition to play at Glastonbury, and getting to open the Pyramid Stage on the Saturday. That’s a big gig for someone who didn’t even have a record out! I hadn’t paid that much attention to her until the other day when she did a live studio session for Marc Riley on BBC 6Music, and wow! she was good.

She hails from West Kirby on Merseyside, and has spent a bit of time gigging around the North West, but surely her time has come to go national or beyond. Hers is a simple type of music making – mainly just acoustic guitar and vocals, but she transcends so much of that kind of stuff. The guitar style is simple and lovely folky-bluesy finger picking, but where she stands out is her incredible voice. Various names have been bandied about in describing Green, including Nina Simone, Madeleine Peyroux, Gillian Welch and Edith Piaf. But for my money, the artist she most reminds me of, considering both her voice and music, is the late, great Karen Dalton.

In fact, listening to Liz led to me going back to Dalton's It’s so hard to tell who’s going to love you the best today, and just marvelling at the genius of it all. Maybe Green is not quite in that league yet, but you know what? Give her a bit of time and she could be. I’m sure she’s got the talent, and today, I’m quite smitten.

So I’m posting the three songs from that radio session for your discovery and delight. They include her debut single a-side Bad Medicine, her own song Hey Joe (no, not the Hendrix one) and The Wall, which has a sweet little mistake bit near the start, to prove that Liz is charming as well as fallible. Plus a bonus of a track from the ace free End of the Road Festival CD that comes with the current issue of Plan B magazine. Speaking of which, I hope to see her at that festival, after hot-footing it from Danielson’s set.

Download: Liz Green – Bad Medicine (live on BBC 6Music)
Download: Liz Green – Hey Joe (live on BBC 6Music)
Download: Liz Green – The Wall (live on BBC 6Music)
Download: Liz Green – Midnight Blues

Buy Liz’s new single from her label, Humble Soul