Long before she conceived compositions of her own, Camille was obsessed with listening to music. It has never been OK to talk to her during a song she's into, or to turn the volume down to make yourself heard - you must press 'pause', then 'play' again when you've finished interrupting, or you'll be forced to rewind to the exact site of your transgression…. Like music fans everywhere, Camille recalls events and eras of her life through the music of the time. Camille's hopeless romanticism seems, to her, dreadfully out of place in the everyday world, but it has always been embraced, normalised and celebrated in the music that she loves.
Though making her own music had not previously occurred to Camille, once it started happening, there was no stopping the stories and poems from spilling out into songs. After years of unproductive floundering on piano, Camille started playing guitar shortly after moving to Amsterdam in 2003. She immediately began writing, recording songs on cassette in her tiny-but-acoustically-brilliant bathroom, and sending them back to her family in Australia. The sweetly-biased reviews encouraged Camille to start performing at open mic nights, nestled in the safety and magic of Amsterdam's enchanting backstreets. It was there, in the strange, altered reality of the medieval city's alternative art scene, that Camille crossed paths with the ultra-eremitic, uber-gifted Patrick Jered; future co-founder of Elephant's Ear Music. In two red wine-soaked afternoon recording sessions, Patrick's savvy ear and funky home-equipment captured two albums of Camille's earliest songs, including 'Darkened Sky', a rare duet with surreptitious songstress Monique; Camille's sister. These recordings have never been released, but they encouraged Camille to keep writing, writing, performing, performing, recording each new batch of songs, for memory's sake, on a palm-sized device, throughout the rest of her dream days in Amsterdam.
A far cry from the grey skies and haunted hallways of Europe, Camille resides, for now, in the sub-tropics of Queensland, Australia, where she recently teamed up with the multi-talented producer/musician James North to record her debut EP, 'The Other Side of the World'; a collection of songs penned in Amsterdam and Tanzania. The EP is available on i-Tunes, and the CD will be available through Elephant's Ear Music soon. Camille performs regularly and writes new material constantly, continuing to draw inspiration from the important things in life: lust, storms, grief, philosophy, space, oceans, love, travel, the moon, guilt, canals, time, regret, change and - most of all - music. She will begin work on an album in the near future; possibly another collaboration involving the elusive Monique and the reclusive Patrick….
