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City songbird adjusts to a life in the limelight
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year ago you probably hadn’t heard of Gabrielle Aplin. But last Christmas the talented songstress from Bath was thrust into the limelight when her version of The Power of Love was used in John Lewis’ Christmas advertising campaign, beaming her delicate tones into homes all over the country. Last December, the song topped the singles charts, but Gabrielle’s success didn’t stop there. Her debut album, English Rain, reached number two on the album charts and she can also count to her credit seven UK sell-out tours, performances at some of the UKs biggest festivals and more than 20 million views on YouTube. An amazing achievement for a relative unknown. “The last year has been pretty mental,” says Gabrielle as she prepares for her English Rain tour, which will see her returning to the South West for a gig at Bristol’s O2 Academy on November 8. “But it has been great. I’m so happy with everything I have achieved.” And so she should be – she’s come a long way from the girl who taught herself to play piano and guitar and started out by recording songs in her bedroom. “Getting the number one was amazing,” she says. “The Power of Love had been out for a few weeks, and it just came out of the blue.” She might be a rising star on the music scene but Gabrielle has kept her feet firmly on the ground and her humility makes her even more charming and likeable. “I don’t think of myself as being famous at all,” she says. “My life is very normal. Nothing has really changed if I’m honest. I still see my friends and my family all the time. “I have the perfect balance of everything.” Gabrielle recently celebrated her 21st birthday, but while other starlets in her shoes might have hit a swanky London club for a night of champagne-fuelled debauchery, she opted for something more low key. “I actually had a day off,” she laughs. “It was really nice.” Gabrielle’s English Rain tour will be a culmination of a year of hard work for the former City of Bath College student. “I’m really looking forward to it,” she says. “I think it’s going to be great. “I love my band, we’re all friends, so it’s going to feel like going on a little holiday. “I love playing in Bath and Bristol, the crowds there are always really good.” There’s a disarming honesty about Gabrielle. Despite the media attention she has gained over the past 12 months when she speaks, nothing feels rehearsed or
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contrived. And his honesty is reflected in her songwriting. And while it might have been a cover version that put her in the public eye, she is a talented songwriter and English Rain is almost entirely her own work. “I just write about what I know and people my age can relate to it,” she says. “The older the get, the more I will have to write about. “I think I’m improving all the time. “The John Lewis advert was great though because it enabled me to get out to an audience I wouldn’t have been able to reach otherwise.” Although from the outside it may appear as if Gabrielle has had a meteoric rise to fame, in fact her success is the result of years of writing and gigging and posting her songs on YouTube. At age 17, she quit sixth form, left Bath and moved to London to pursue her dream of getting noticed and continually creating. She started her own record label and continued posting online, gathering fans along the way, until signing to Parlophone last year. “It’s all been very gradual,” she says. “it has never felt like hard work because it has happened over a long period of time. “Now I just feel like I’m doing what I should be doing.”