ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED ON JUNE 29, 1984
By Steve Newton
“I wanted the album to sound as though it didn’t necessarily come from anywhere,” says British singer Annabel Lamb about her new LP The Flame.
“I didn’t want it to sound like a British album and I didn’t want it to sound like an American album. I hope that by doing what we did we dropped somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic.”
Lamb recorded the rhythm tracks for the new LP in London, England and then flew over to Los Angeles to lay down the keyboard, vocal, and guitar parts. That break in between helped give Annabel and her players a fresh start halfway through, and put a real spark in The Flame, especially on tunes like “Weapon of Love” and the title track.
Already Top 5 on a lot of U.S. college stations, the record is proving itself a worthy followup to her critically acclaimed debut LP Once Bitten.
But the fact of Annabel’s swiftly progressing musical career would have been a tough one to predict six years ago, when at the age of 20 she was already settled into marriage, a nursing job, and life in the small suburban town of Croydon, England.
It was an unrelenting desire to pursue music professionally that eventually caused her to hang up the syringe for good.
“I always had this ambition to be in the music business,” she explains, “and finally one day I realized that ambition just wasn’t going away.
“So I went away.”
Annabel moved to London four years ago and started working as a session keyboardist and singer, while developing her own material as well. On the basis of some demos and 24-track master tapes she landed a contract with A&M Records in England, with Once Bitten hitting the North American shores just last July.
For the U.S. release of that record Lamb prepared a version of the Doors’ haunting “Riders on the Storm”, and convinced ex-Doors keyboards and A&M labelmate Ray Manzarek to play on it.
“It’s my favourite Doors song,” says Annabel, “and part of the music I grew up with. Being a keyboard player since childhood, I was honoured to have the seal of approval from the Doors’ keyboard player himself.”
Having acquired one of her favourite musicians to contribute to her first record, Lamb found another favourite in Italian director Marcella Antiana, who shot the recently released video for The Flame‘s title track.
“I loved the Peter Gabriel videos that I saw–“Shock the Monkey” and the one after that–so I tried really hard to find out who directed them, and managed to get hold of Marcella.
“My other big passion in life, apart from music, is movies,” she adds, “so it’s a great thriller for me to get on a film set.”