Lisa Verrico, from Ramunë Kubilius
The Prodigy
Lisa Verrico is a reporter for Scotsman Publications, Ltd/Scotland on Sunday. This article appeared in the February 27, 2000 issue, and Ramunë Kubilius kindly sent it on to BRIDGES.
"Gintarë is not a woman you would necessarily notice if you passed
her in the street. She is of average height, quite good-looking and, today
at least, casually dressed in jeans, a jumper and a baseball cap. If she was
not in London, but in her native Lithuania, however, the thirty-something
singer would stop traffic." Lisa Verrico, of Scotland on Sunday, starts
her article on Gintarë, a child pianist and teen idol who is starting over
in Britain. What follows is an excerpt from Verrico's article.
Although she has spent the last 15 years in the West, back home, Gintarë (pronounced Ginta-ray) is a star of Posh Spice proportions. At the age of 13, she was playing to audiences of up to 100,000, who would flock from as far afield as Finland and Russia to hear her.
Long before Charlotte Church, she was the Pope’s child prodigy of choice. When she went out, it was always with two bodyguards in tow.
“I was the biggest pop star my country had ever known,” says Gintarë, in an odd, East-meets-West accent. “I still am, even though I haven’t been there for years. My records are still played on the radio every day and my albums are always in the charts. In my teens, it was crazy. I got letters from fans saying they would kill themselves if I didn’t marry them. It was all so strange.”
Now a divorced mother of two living in Oxford, Gintarë is about to relaunch her music career after a break of over ten years. Her new album, Earthless, which comes out next month, sees her on the same label as the likes of Supergrass and the Pet Shop Boys and is her first stab at a career in the West. A mix of atmospheric synthesisers, classical composition and Gintarë’s gorgeous, haunting vocals, Earthless is best described as a cross between BjUrk, the Cocteau Twins and Tori Amos. Like Air’s Moon Safari, it sounds like pop from another planet.
“I don’t copy anyone,” insists Gintarë. “My only influences are classical and those are in the song structures, not the sound. I have two albums I take everywhere with me – Massive Attack’s Mezzanine and The Prodigy’s The Fat of the Land. Apart from Craig Armstrong, who I don’t call pop, I haven’t heard anything else I like for the last two years.”
Born in the tiny, Lithuanian coastal town of Tauragë, Gintarë began playing piano when she was just 18 months old. Her parents, Edmund and Nijolë, were both acclaimed classical musicians and conductors who performed all over the world.
Until she was ten, Gintarë, practicing for four hours a day, played only classical music. Then friends at her state school introduced her to rock. “I loved groups like Emerson, Lake and Palmer, ELO and Pink Floyd,” she says. “It was pop, but it was also complicated music with some very powerful piano playing. Whenever my parents went out, I would play pop. I have a great memory for music. I can hear anything, then play it back on the piano. When I was five, I heard "Yesterday" by The Beatles on the radio. I remember climbing up onto the table to get closer to that melody. Then I went straight to the piano and played it. I’m not a big Beatles fan, but I’ll never forget first hearing that song.”
A star pupil at the [children's music] academy, Gintarë was picked to play on national TV when she 12. A year later, she was offered the leading role in a new musical called Chasing the Fire. It was an instant hit. Overnight, Gintare became famous.
“Everyone went crazy for the show,” she says. “It was a rock musical and no -one had heard anything like it before. People came from other countries just to see it. We recorded an album of the songs and it was a huge hit. I think every home had a copy.”
Gintarë’s success allowed her to form her own avant-garde pop group. The academy disapproved and expelled her, but by then it hardly mattered. Over the next five years, she released nine albums, all of which topped the charts. None of the songs, however, were her own.
“At the time, Lithuania was under Russian occupation,” she says. “It was KGB rules that you could not record your own music. It was considered too western, too rebellious, especially if you were my age. I had to cover songs by established artists that the government approved of.”
Just before she turned 20, Gintarë left Lithuania. Desperate for a normal life, she decided to stop making music. In New York, she met and married a businessman, with whom she had two sons. For seven years, she didn’t write or record a note.
“I’d had enough of music,” she says. “I wanted to live a bit, to learn languages and see the world. I missed playing and performing, but I didn’t miss all the stuff that goes with it, like the mad fans. I had a very happy marriage and two lovely sons. For a while, that was enough.”
By the mid-Nineties, however, Gintarë was itching to get back to music. She bought some synthesizers, rented a studio, and started to write her own songs. When her marriage ended, she moved to England from America and began touting her demo tapes around record companies. Finally signed by EMI’s Parlophone label, Gintarë wrote and recorded the twelve tracks on Earthless (which was released on Parlophone on March 13th) in a matter of months.
“I took classical definitions and turned them into pop,” she says. “The songs are just my voice and layers of sound. There are no other musicians. I know I’m not the world’s greatest singer, technically-speaking, but I do have an interesting voice.”
Gintarë’s next step is to put together a band to play Earthless live. “I’m definitely a concert person. I want to get up on stage and prove wrong all the people who told me that pop and classical can’t mix. I know I can do it. When I was 15, I got my parents to agree that Pink Floyd are as valid as Mozart. Compared to that, this will be easy."