“For a long time I couldn’t even name a band from South Africa that I really liked. And it’s still kind of like that.”
Cherilyn MacNeil, the singer-songwriter frontwoman of Dear Reader, is lamenting the lack of a music scene in her home country. “It’s very hard to be an English [speaking] band in this country unless you’re making real pop music, or Afrikaans rock music, otherwise you can’t make enough money to even just live. I guess that’s partly why the scene is so small, because people don’t do it; they go and study accounting because they have to.”
Bucking the trend, and investing their faith in American and European audiences to enjoy their simple, heartfelt, folk-flecked song writing, is Cherilyn and fellow Reader, Darryl Torr. “I met Darryl a few years ago. My friends were having this little acoustic evening and Darryl, who is a wellknown sound engineer and record producer down here, was sat right at the back, having a pretty awful time. At the end of the evening my friends were saying, “Please just sing one song!” I’d just got back from Watford and I was like, “No!” I was really shy.” Watford? Apparently Cherilyn has had some experience of “that London”, though evidently not Shoreditch High Street. “I don’t know what’s cool or whatever and most people are pretty much going, ‘Oh, your songs are so sweet, and you’re cute and it’s just crap”. And I’m like, you know, ‘I’m sorry, I can’t help it, that’s me; take it or leave it.’” “Sweet” and “cute” are, indeed, inadequate adjectives to describe the naïve charm of new album ‘Replace
Why With Funny’. The record charts the well-trodden lovesick territory of the singer-songwriter, not breaking any new ground, but making the best of the sad song format. I suggest this to Cherilyn, quoting one of her own lyrics at her from ‘Dearheart’: “I never wrote a love song that didn’t go ‘woe is me’.” “No, that’s really true. When I was writing that song I was in my first really serious relationship and I was basically trying to make him a present, and it was really fucking hard. I don’t write happy songs. I was like, ‘How do I do this? I do love you, but I don’t know how to write this.’ I really had to work at it. I have this thing, right, because I take myself so seriously, and I’m always so sad, and I’m like, what’s going on with the world? What is the purpose of life? Blah, blah, blah…” Harsh critique perhaps, but this degree of self-awareness, along with some beautiful musical arrangements, is what keeps Dear Reader’s sad songs from slipping into cliché. As it stands, they’re refreshingly simple, enduringly listenable and really very nice.
Words: Jonny Ensall
