Daisy Carbin is a London-based folk musician who just released her first song, “Close Gap.” It’s a warm, cosy tune recorded with friends back home. She’s pursuing her BA in English here in Exeter, where she plays bass and sings in the Roxy Revival. She has her first solo gig in Exeter on Thursday October 16th at the Little Drop of Poison, with Alex Page and the Matt Smith Cosmic Experience.
I first met Daisy Carbin almost two years ago at The Angel, a dingy bar on Queen Street that has since shut down. She was running a weekly Blues Jam with her friend Bert Addison (Roxy Revival; Japan, Man; Sid Plus One), and I’d tagged along with some friends. I don’t remember what she sang, or much of that night, but I do remember being struck by her voice: exceptionally warm, clear, suffused with emotion. We’ve been friends ever since, and on Monday, I sat down to interview her.
Daisy’s drinking a Coke in the corner of the Black Horse, wearing an eclectic outfit that was no doubt cobbled together by rifling through charity shops back home in London. She lights up when I ask my first question – how did she get started playing music?
“Allegedly, I sang before I could speak,” she laughs. Some of her earliest memories are of her parents coming in and telling her to stop singing and go to bed. She was in choir from a young age; she had a “really lovely” choir master, Hannah, who took her parents aside and said, “This kid’s got something, I really think she has potential.” She and her family found Andrada, who ran AB Music Academy with her now-husband, and Daisy would attend on weekends. She learned piano with them, but singing is what stuck – she says, “It was weird, I had this quite mature voice for such a tiny little thing.” She’s really grateful to Andrada and feels so lucky to have gone to that music school. Music was always an intrinsic thing that she enjoyed; when the adults around her encouraged her, it validated her to think she could continue playing music.
I sang before I could speak… I had this quite mature voice for such a tiny little thing.
When she was 14, she picked up the guitar. When she was 16, she formed Beltane Dew with her friends Lola Terek (bass), Pari Ahuja (guitar and vocals), and Finlay Calvey (drums). They recorded a few songs and made music videos, and the basis of the band was having fun as friends. But even before that, Daisy would write her own songs, and she played me a song from when she was 15. In her words, it’s “pretty unspectacular,” but there’s echoes of where her music was always heading. Her voice lilts over a simple chord progression, bending towards the sweet tone she’s since refined. A lot of her early songs were “what [she] imagined songs sounded like,” with facsimiles of constantly rhyming lyrics inspired by the music she listened to as a kid.
She would also jam with her friends back home in northwest London. She remembers one Parents Evening, she and her friends Dia and Pari snuck off to the music tech room and recorded three songs with the express goal of making the most insane things possible. One track, “Queen in my Bed, Where’s Her Head?” is almost a limerick, funny and brimming with the enthusiasm of making something with your friends. “Music is fun,” Daisy says, “it makes me think of silly things like pulling up Garage Band and being with my mates.”
Daisy is constantly inspired by her friends: Pari never ceases to amaze her on the guitar, and Lola’s music taste is always wonderful. During her first year at uni, Bert would bring his guitar over and they would just play for hours. She smiles wistfully, saying, “My friends have had such a role in shaping me as a person. They mean a lot.”
My friends have had such a role in shaping me as a person. They mean a lot.
Her song-writing process expands beyond her friends, though: the most important part is a cute notebook. She pulls out a pink and blue book with a ballerina on the cover, reaching towards the far edges of the leather. “My mum bought me this notebook,” she says, turning it over in her hands, “Then I decorated it, so now it’s like, “Okay, it’s mine.” It’s an important space to me. It’s also not just songs or lyrics.” She flips through to a recent page, and I catch glimpses of her gently looping script as she shows me notes from a lecture where she forgot her iPad.
She writes prose and poetry too, although that doesn’t always translate into lyrics. Above all, Daisy is a collector of words and images, tucking them away in her notebook and her mind until the right inspiration strikes. I call her a hoarder, and she immediately laughs, saying, “You’ve seen my room! It’s full of crap. I’m a hoarder of cute, esoteric things.” And it’s true, from embroidered cat pillows to incense burners to photos of her friends, Daisy’s room is covered in the things she loves and cherishes.
The nice thing about hoarding, though, is you build quite the personal archive to dip into. She’s an expert playlist curator, with over 1,000 in her Spotify library to fit each and every mood, no matter how specific. Daisy also has a deep love for films: one film in her personal canon is American Honey (2016), whose soundtrack blew her away; “I didn’t know films could do that, that music could be so important.” Past Lives (2023) is another film she loves, and “The best part is that there’s this lost love, and maybe they were made for each other at one point, but they’re not the same people anymore.” The score, though, which she calls “a wall of beautiful sound,” “really moves the story and the emotion within it.”
The visual arts inspire Daisy too, and she’s gone to art galleries and exhibitions since she was young. Her friend Lola is an artist from a family of artists, and Daisy credits her with putting her on to different kinds of art. Music videos, the perfect intersection between music and filmmaking, are another creative source. A recent music video Daisy loved was for “Taxes” by Geese, which taps into the frenetic energy of their music. That video was a moment of “Yes, I get it and I really like this” for her, after another friend (yours truly) had recommended the band to her (read my review of their new album). Another reason Daisy likes Geese is that the friendship and love the bandmates have for each other really shines through with their music.
Being away from Exeter and her band for the past year, her solo music happened out of convenience. In London, she was meeting other musicians all the time and so she started playing music on her own. She’d done it before occasionally at The Angel, and she credits the pub with shaping her into the musician she is now.
The Angel Blues Jams were a “little boiling point” of creative energy in Exeter, “the last of its kind.” Looking back on the weekly jams, Daisy says, “It was so beautiful because of all the different people who would come in… I’ve met friends for life through that” (I can attest to that). Daisy and Bert worked hard to make the jam a welcoming environment, and it was “quite a karaoke thing in some ways, but then we’d have moments of musical genius.” The free-flowing, energetic jams gave Daisy more of an understanding of the music she wants to make. The Angel gave her more confidence, and it gave her the Roxy Revival – “it was a really inspiring musical place.”
[The Angel jams] were so beautiful because of all the different people who would come in. I’ve met friends for life through that.
The Angel also helped Daisy find her feet on stage, and nowadays when she’s performing she’s a natural, grounded in her body and the music she’s playing. “Sometimes I feel like I literally find my voice on stage,” she cringes, before saying, “I hope it comes across that I’m trying to be sincere and authentic to me. I think sometimes people get too caught up on having an image, and I’ve definitely struggled with that, especially as a woman in music.” Curating an image and brand on social media something Daisy laments as well: “it’s so disheartening… right now, if you’re not doing that, then you’re potentially missing out on the viral song or video that could be what “gets” you in. There’s an abundance of musicians online, and unless you’re doing something really, really different, it’s hard to break through in that space.” But Daisy doesn’t want to be viral or famous: she just wants to feed herself through her art.
Music is a necessity for her. The songs she wrote in the last year–”Close Gap,” “Ode to an Aimless Evening,” “Lazy Calm,”– were just “word vomit. Sometimes lyrics or chord progressions or ideas will literally fall out of me.” This creative need is cathartic, but occasionally draining, especially for Daisy’s confessional lyricism. Many musicians have a reputation for constantly tweaking their music, but Daisy sometimes finds it hard to return to a song, and for music that is so raw and emotional, it makes sense that she might need a nap afterwards.
Sometimes lyrics or chord progressions or ideas will literally fall out of me.
Her solo career has been massively encouraged by her friends, and her first solo gig was in May at the Dublin Castle in Camden, North London, supporting her friend Letty Acra of Japan, Man. I actually saw Daisy play there again in July, and she grins at the memory, saying, “God bless the Dublin Castle!” She’s immensely grateful to the friends who invest in her as a person and as a musician; Lola is even coming to Exeter to film a music video for “Close Gap.” Lola always encouraged Daisy to get serious about music, and over the past few months they were deciding on her stage name. They floated a few, like Daisy Mae (“but that’s a cow’s name”) and Bonnie Le Flame (“I don’t even know, man”), but one day, in a burst of inspiration, Lola asked, “What about Daisy Carbin?” And it is, actually, the perfect moniker for music that is personal and intimate and connected to her life.
Right now, Daisy is focused on finishing uni and seeing where her solo music goes. She’ll continue with the Roxy Revival, and has a new project in the works which she jokingly calls “Geese 2.” She’s going to keep writing songs and playing them, meeting cool people, and taking it easy. Daisy is a phenomenal musician, whose boundless creativity shines through in everything she does. Catch her “playing a little song and doing a little dance” at the Little Drop of Poison on October 16th.
I’m drinking a Coca-Cola; anything could happen!
