Boom Town Glory: Liverpool's Natalie McCool moves on up

Natalie McCool’s life in music has so far been defined by awards and the events that closely followed them. First, there was winning the Yamaha-sponsored Make It Break It award for songwriting – a competition judged by Coldplay’s Chris Martin and the chairman of the Music Producers Guild, Steve Levine, among others. McCool was still a teenager when she won the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts-based title in 2007; but it set her and Levine on a collision course, resulting in him signing the LIPA graduate to his own Hubris Records and working as her producer through two EPs and her self-titled debut LP, released last year. Then came the Liverpool Music Week Awards last autumn, and the singer-songwriter’s success in winning Best Female Artist of the Year.

“I’m proud to have won it,” says a cheerful McCool over the phone. “Titles like that are cool because they get people interested.” She hasn’t, however, put too much stock in such accolades. “I don’t think I’ve got to prove anything around it,” she adds. “This year there’ll be another winner after all, and it’ll move on.” Given such recognition and her ongoing partnership with Levine – in the 80s recognised as one of the finest pop producers in the game, thanks to his work with Culture Club – from the outside it appeared that McCool had managed to set herself on a resolutely upwards trajectory. Her self-titled album – a collection of new songs and those taken from previous releases – was a rich listen, balancing the simplicity of her natural tendency for writing pop hooks with lavish production that took in string arrangements and embellished its tom-heavy rhythms with cavernous reverb.

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"You’ve got to be careful. You can go as big as you want; but if the song isn’t there then that’s all for nothing" – Natalie McCool

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However, it becomes apparent during our conversation that McCool doesn’t necessarily consider herself a pop artist; and there’s an incongruity between that record – with its bright production and defined elements – and the person speaking down the phone of her love of, on the one hand, Deftones, and on the other, Cocteau Twins. The latter perfected a balance between songcraft and textural ambiguity that it’s clear McCool would like to achieve herself. “I was pleased with my first album, but it didn’t really reflect me as an artist one hundred per cent,” she admits. “What I’ve always wanted to do is to start with a great song, but then pull it towards somewhere more alternative. The album was very commercial-sounding, which isn’t really me. A lot of the time you couldn’t hear my guitar on some of the songs – which is important to me.”

And so they split. Not acrimoniously – Levine lives on Merseyside and McCool still chats to him – but, in moving on from one of the most well-known producers in the country, the Widnes-born songwriter has boldly shunned a potentially safer route to making a commercial dent in favour of going it alone to reach artistic fulfilment. She is aware that she tiptoes the line of those big, chart-friendly melodies, but says, “You’ve got to be careful. You can go as big as you want; but if the song isn’t there then that’s all for nothing. I play solo a lot as well as with a band, and always think, ‘Would that work in a solo gig?’” Confessing that she’s been a long-time defender of Coldplay’s Chris Martin as a songwriter (“that first Coldplay album remains timeless and I think people forget how good it was”), even she cites their recent output as an example of an act uncoupling themselves from their true artistry to instead tick marketing boxes. “They’ve just completely lost it, haven’t they!?” she sighs.

Given what McCool's been saying, the news that she’s linked up with fellow Liverpudlian David Berger from Outfit to produce her new material sounds like a perfect match. With Outfit’s brilliant debut album Performance a perfect storm of balancing pop nous with more further-reaching sensibilities – in their case taken from the worlds of house and krautrock – Berger seems like someone who’ll understand the tightrope McCool wants to walk with her own sound. Having previously done live engineering for McCool at a festival, Berger invited her to visit his studio after liking what he was mixing. Months later, having split from Levine, she decided to take him up on his offer and – despite the nerves of going into a studio with someone she didn’t know at all – the pair struck up an easy understanding. “He just gets it,” she says. “I have been writing really poppy songs recently, which is really fun. But Dave’s been the one to pull them more towards where I want them, adding guitar textures and different bits of percussion. Plus I’m a real guitar person – I’d had no real interest in keyboards or anything like that; but Dave put all this extra stuff on and managed to twist it to make it fit.”

The first fruition of the pair’s creative partnership is new single Wind Blows Harder, out on Young & Lost Club at the end of June. Likened by McCool to Thin Air – the Bernard Butler-featuring single of her debut LP – it acts as a bridge to new material that she says is “far removed” from what we’ve heard of her so far. However, the seeds of McCool’s new direction are there – in the crisp production around the percussion, in the sparser feel to the elements that shadow the song’s key components of vocals and guitar, and in the lightest bleed of distortion, which works to pull everything together with a slightly scuzzy undertone. “A lot of the time during the making of the last album I was trying to write a really interesting guitar part, but they were ending up so busy it was like, ‘What do you put over that?’ There was no room.” She says, “Here the song comes first, and any guitar parts are textural and not as dominant.”

Wind Blows Harder taps into McCool’s familiar use of weather and nature as metaphor – implemented, in this instance, to document the conflict of a doomed relationship. It’s not a trait she can really explain, though when pushed suggests, “I grew up in Widnes, which is very industrial. It’s got a big power station which is kind of the whole landscape. So maybe it’s a reaction to that.” It’s one of a handful of new songs she’s been working on that will see the light of day over the next few months – unlikely many, McCool isn’t one to stockpile songs and then discard them. “Every song I write I probably release, which is quite strange,” she says. “I’m quite a perfectionist in a way, I guess – I don’t like to leave things unfinished.”

Having collaborated with fellow Liverpudlians Bird last year, McCool has also joined the band Broken Men on guitar and claims that it’s been the influence of these local projects, as well as Liverpool’s current tight-knit community in general, that have informed her more than anything else of late. “Everyone’s just mates and plays with each other round here at the moment,” she observes. “It’s booming. I hope it booms for a long time!”