Bristol singer-songwriter China Bowls brings her sweet neo-soul sounds to Australia for the first time this summer.
China Bowls, otherwise known as Lucie Bowles, has emerged from Bristol's thriving jazz scene with a sound derived from combining her neo-soul, jazz and hip hop influences with a classic sensibility towards songcraft.
Lucie will be making her Australian debut on our summer festival circuit, including performances at Queenscliff Music Festival, Mullum Music Festival and Jungle Love Festival. “I'm really excited,” she says.
“I'm a bit nervous because I'm going to be away for four months, but I'm really excited to come and get involved in a different music scene and be somewhere completely different basically.
“I've heard loads of amazing things about Melbourne and the music scene in Melbourne. I'm feeling quite open and hoping to meet musicians... and I'm excited to write as well while I'm away; I'm aiming to write and record while I'm away.”
Though she's a fairly new artist still building her career, Lucie is already an old-hand when it comes to festivals having spent the past summer absolutely owning the UK festival run with performances at spaces such as Wonderfields, Bristol Harbour Festival, Valleyfest, Truefest, Boomtown and Green Man.
“I've been doing the festival circuit for quite a few years in different ways.
“I used to work on a food stall and then sort of gaze longingly at the stages,” she laughs, “but now it's nice to be going back to them and playing.
“I think they're such a massive part of youth culture; all of my friends and I growing up, our summers were just going to festivals. Ones like Glastonbury are where you think 'oh wow, we're really lucky to get to do this'.”
The first signing for the all-female label Saffron Records, Lucie released her latest single 'To Belong' a few months back and says the live response to the track has surpassed her initial expectations.
“It was quite an important one lyrically; I was much happier with it than I have been about previous songs and felt quite connected to what it was about,” she says.
“It's always nice when people pick bits of lyrics out. At live shows people come up to say they love a line, and that's really amazing when people are really listening and hearing what you're trying to say.”
Though musically her songs are gently alluring and easy on the ears, for Lucie her key focus is songwriting and the ability to ensnare the listener's attention with the story she wants to tell. “Because I'm a lyricist, I think songs are stories and songwriting is just strong storytelling,” she says.
“People need that and I think that is going to be timeless even though we are living in a really different time now musically, and the way that people consume music is completely different.
“In Bristol there's this really amazing community and there's a lot of jazz-influenced music here which is obviously then fed into what I'm doing, and when you have that community around you it's naturally going to feed into what you're doing. I think people will always need songwriting because songs are stories.”
