ORLA

Ely, Cambridgeshire · b. 2000 · FARA Records

ORLA (Orla Weatherby, b. 10 July 2000, Ely) grew up in a small fen city of twenty thousand people built on what was an island before the water was drained out from under it, with a cathedral you can see from twenty miles away across land that has nothing else standing on it. Growing up there means growing up under a sky that takes up nine tenths of everything you look at — not a poetic observation, just what the Fens are. She sang in the cathedral choir until she was fifteen and left it without drama; what it gave her wasn't religion but scale, learning what a voice does in a very large space before she learned what one does in a song. She found her way in through choir first, then five years of function bands and covers across Cambridgeshire that she's neither embarrassed by nor romantic about — it's where she learned to sing four sets a night without damage. She started writing at twenty-two and found she was better at the lift than at the verse, which is an unusual thing to know about yourself and a very useful one.

A genuinely large voice with cathedral training underneath it — clean tone, real control at volume, and an instinct for holding a note steady while everything beneath it moves. Her discipline is that she doesn't arrive big: she comes in quietly on the pre-chorus, sits under him, and only opens out at the chorus, which is why the chorus works. No runs, minimal ornament, and a very precise sense of when to stop. Her influences run the English choral tradition she was trained in and left, audible in her tuning and breath control rather than in anything stylistic; the big-voiced dance vocalists who can carry a mainstage without shouting; and years of function-band work, which she credits more than either.

The competent one, and completely without ego about it — she runs the load-in, does the interviews, and has taken to answering the questions pointed at ELLIS and handing them back to him mid-sentence. On stage she's still and central and doesn't need to move. She can see the cathedral from her kitchen window and from about twenty miles in most directions, which she maintains is the only interesting fact about the Fens. She knows she's better at the lift than at the verse and structures everything around it. Direct, warm, practical.