FEATURE: Meet The Webb Sisters

Daylight Crossing’, The Webb Sisters' debut album, is an utterly charming, melody-led Rumours for the 21st century. ‘Daylight Crossing’ will be all over the charts soon enough, the girls' gorgeous, cut glass vocals bleeding from radio sets up and down the country.  

 "We were kind of lumped together really," says Charley Webb of why she and her sister, Hattie, decided to make music together. "We never actually chose to sing as a duo; it was almost as if it was chosen for us, somehow."

Hattie, the slightly more mystical of the two, thinks it might have had something to do with destiny: "We were never *not* going to be singing together. Charley  and I have always had this natural connection. Yes, we're sisters, but there's more to it than that, I think. We've made music with other people along the way, and that's been fine - mostly - but I just think we understand one another better than we do anybody else.

We click, and we complement each other perfectly. Charley has always been very good at  being part of the system, for example. She was Head Girl at school, she is so self assured… so capable. Me, I'm more  firey and impetuous, I guess. And somewhere in all this, we find balance. Balance and harmony. And passion, that too."

Charley Webb is 27 years old, Hattie three years her junior. They were born in Kent to a session drummer father and a tennis coach mother and have a deep musical heritage that spans generations. On either side of the age scale, they've two brothers, and both, like their Peter Skellern- and Dave Travis Band-collaborating father before them, also make their livings as drummers. “Growing up,” Charley says, “music blared from every room.”

"The family house was infested with it, and Dad played everything really loudly, so much so that you often couldn't hear yourself think. We'd go on these driving holidays in the summer, and he'd make compilation tapes for the journey: everything from James Taylor to Crosby, Stills and Nash, Nick Drake to Fleetwood Mac." Their own tastes would later extend to Jeff Buckley, Sinead O'Connor, Alanis Morissette and the Indigo Girls, and so, Hattie continues, "there was no escaping the influence of music. Fortunately, we loved it."

And, of course, both almost helplessly gravitated towards it. Aside from Charley's brief obsession, aged 11, with becoming an ambulance driver ("God knows why, I'm not medical, though I do like to drive fast"), the sisters were never going to do anything with their lives *but* music. Charley began studying the piano at six, Hattie the harp from eight. By the time they were teenagers, the pair were giving recitals around the country, appearing at parties and posh functions, often earning up to £600 a gig, a tidy sum of money given that their peers were probably collecting minimum wage from the local Tie Rack.

"It's the harp," Hattie explains." The harp demands those kinds of fees, but if you think about it, it's entirely appropriate. Do you have any idea how long it takes to learn to play the thing? Also, it weighs a ton! It's not easy to lug around, the harp, so trust me, we earned every penny!"

At such events, they'd play jazz, classical and folk. Sometimes, if requested, they would perform the songs of The Carpenters, and often with a prodigious flare that belied their youth. Twice they played for Princess Anne, and once for the Queen. They'd do charitable functions to raise money for disabled children, and would grace end-of-year bashes in la-di-da halls at Cambridge University. They were much in demand and, says Charley, "we  met lots of musicians on the circuit.  All kinds of people."

One of them was a producer called Johnny Pierce, who later invited them to Nashville to write and record what would become their debut album, Piece of Mind. This was six years ago, Charley fresh out of university (where she was studying Film), Hattie having just completed her A levels. They spent six months in the US home of country music, relishing their first experiences in the studio. From here, they gravitated on to California, where they would play and live in and around LA, selling the album from gig to gig. Presently, they decided to settle in Venice Beach, living in what Hattie likes to term now as "an artists' commune, full of creative people - as well as the occasional tramp", where they would write and play together, swap ideas and spend lazy Sunday afternoons hosting mushroom tea parties. "Which were fun," she says. 

The sisters were soon spotted and landed a publishing deal. A record deal soon followed and the creation of ‘Daylight Crossing’ began. They wrote and recorded songs collaborating with musicians such as Mike Elizondo (Eminem, Fiona Apple) and Jeff Trott (Sheryl Crow, Aimee Mann). Two years later , the sisters returned to the UK when they came to the attention of Mercury Records and it was here that they recorded their debut album. Production came from two bonafide heavyweights: Steve Lipson (Sting, Annie Lennox) and Youth (The Verve, Dido).

And the result? The result is rather fine - an uncommonly assured, West Coast-flavoured album at turns wistful (‘I Still Hear It’), lush (‘Torches’) and even vigorously windswept. ‘Everything Changes’ closes the album, and is an explosion of torrid, edge-of-the-cliff emotion. It lasts for five minutes and 19 seconds, and climaxes flat on its back, quite breathless.

"That song has a huge impact on us whenever we play it live," Charley says. "Hattie and I almost collapse by the end of it. Why? Well, it taps into something quite profound. We wrote it over a couple of months, and there are now loads of different memories attached to it, some good, others bad. And playing the song definitely takes us through each of them."

They will be playing it live now at every opportunity they get, and it'll prove to be some showstopper. But then The Webb Sisters have earned it: ‘Daylight Crossing’ is the summation of a lifetime's worth of preparation. They plan to enjoy it.

"Everything we've done since birth has led us to this point," Hattie says, eyes wide. "Everything from  Dad's drumming to us moving to Nashville, then to LA, to signing with Universal, to here and now with this record. Charley and I have always been open to anything that has come along, and it's wonderful, I think, how life throws up so many possibilities. And the best thing of all is that it doesn't feel like we've reached any kind of finishing line now that the album is finally ready; it feels like we are just beginning. The journey is still unfolding."