Embracing their Scottish heritage wasn’t always the plan for songwriting sisters Clementine and Valentine Nixon. Before writing their new album, The Coin that Broke the Fountain Floor, the pair had been on a big, hectic European tour under old band name Purple Pilgrims. However, unbeknown to them, it was to be their final outing under that title. The shows started in early 2020, then, on the Scottish leg of the tour, the Coromandel-based sisters headed to their ancestral home of Aberdeen.
“We knew we had quite deep family connections there, but we were in the tour mindset and weren’t thinking about reaching out to anyone,” says Valentine.
Before the Aberdeen show, their promoter took them both out to watch support act, Ella Davidson and Gayle Brogan, saying something special had been arranged.
Valentine says, “They did this amazing rendition of one of our great-grandfather Davie Stewart’s songs. [He] was a musician in folk circles in Aberdeen.” After the show, they explored the old part of Aberdeen, looking at the places where he’d played and the street corners on which he’d busked.
“We thought we were very much on our own path musically. And then there was this collision of our ancestors and history with what we had been building over the past few years ourselves.” Valentine continues, “We had this spiritual experience that was all the more special because we weren’t looking for it.”
Clementine says it released feelings they had about why they were playing music in the first place – and there was an invisible thread of sorts to their ancestors.
“We were being led on this path that we thought we’d chosen ourselves … it sounds a bit over the top, but it did feel that way.”
Before their visit, the only hint they’d had of their Aberdeen roots was from their maternal grandmother. Of Scottish Narkin (Gypsy) descent, she taught them as children to sing traditional folk balladry.
Clementine says, “They’re a very misunderstood group and an ethnic minority in Scotland. Their job for centuries was travelling around and sharing these a cappella folk ballads and tales that were usually quite tragic. It was an early form of entertainment passed around the country.”
The sisters’ mother was brought up in London and their father in the historic Yorkshire seaside town of Whitby. They say their creative pursuits were also influenced by the latter. Especially because their dad grew up in the house where Bram Stoker wrote some of Dracula, with the town being the place where the vampire arrives in England.
“Goth runs in our veins!”
The sisters were partly raised in Hong Kong, before the family relocated to the Coromandel Peninsula, where they intended to live for a short time, but ended up staying after falling in love with the area.
As the Purple Pilgrims, the Nixon sisters released two albums, including their 2019 Flying Nun debut Perfumed Earth. They say their work under their old name was very insular – “just the two of us hidden away”. But with the expansion of their creative horizons, a change of name felt like a must.
Clementine says, “It’s definitely more collaborative, which is funny because we’ve changed our name to our own first names, but coming out of the pandemic, we wanted a fresh start. Working with new people, it felt like the right thing to do.” And so Clementine Valentine was born. And with it The Coin that Broke the Fountain Floor.
On the album, their past bedroom pop has given way to intertwined voices with more daring and dynamic settings – some verging on the orchestral and operatic.
The third single, The Rope, is representative, its verses embellished with echoing drums and the pair’s ethereal vocals building to a chorus highlighted by strings, a common thread right from the opening track, Gatekeeper. They slow the pace down just the right amount to make it feel truly cinematic.
Clementine says, “We’d always been really drawn to strings. We love them.”
And, so it seems, does US producer Randall Dunn, known for his work with such acclaimed US folk artists as Marissa Nadler and prominent film composer Danny Elfman. “He works within a lot of soundtracking and creates really cinematic sound, so that was a direction we were always very interested in and wanted to try out,” says Clementine.
Dunn brought in drummer Matt Chamberlain, a top session guy who has played on albums by David Bowie, Bob Dylan, Elton John, Bruce Springsteen, Lana Del Rey and Lorde (on Solar Power).
Dunn’s production and Chamberlain’s playing adds to the “ancient mood” the pair had naturally brought to their sound and songs. In the hope of reviving folk music for the now, the duo interlace the traditional with the occasional synth and otherworldly sounds to strike a balance of new and old.
Their vocals are hard to forget, too – for all the right reasons. They intone such lyrics as “with all of us cursed, in a vast universe” in The Rope, and an even darker “you don’t have to feel afraid; the war is lost” in The Understudy to make the album feel like both a haunting lullaby and a call to something bigger than themselves.
The venue for the album release gig was aptly ethereal with Clementine Valentine playing at the ornate St Michael and All Angels Church – a suitable setting for their celestial sound – during the Word Christchurch Festival.
The sisters say they felt right at home performing at a bookworm gathering before embarking on a main centre tour of more conventional music venues.
Unsurprisingly, they like a bit of gothic literature themselves, with both huge fans of the Brontë sisters. They have, they say, “read Wuthering Heights more times than we’d like to admit”.
The Coin that Broke the Fountain Floor is out on digital and vinyl via Flying Nun. Tour dates: Meow, Wellington, Sept 7; The Crown, Dunedin, Sept 8; Space Academy, Christchurch, Sept 9; Whammy Bar, Auckland, Sept 16.
