Miss Garbo

We are Louise O’Hara and Andy Chapman aka Miss Garbo. This is our tale: a story of how the urge to write and perform music has kept alive our creative partnership for twenty years amidst the commercial desertification of the music industry.

May 2000. We met at Scream Studios in Croydon, south London as a consequence of an advert Louise placed in Loot. We’d both been in and out of bands previously, as a part-time thing. Louise had a bagful of gorgeous tunes and lyrics in her head, outpourings of her life and loves and the eternal push-pull of human relationships. Andy arrived with a black Fender acoustic and a love of great songwriting. Together, we worked those ideas into fully fledged songs and recorded half a dozen of them over two sessions in 2001-2002 with the multi-talented Jules Hodgson.

We were pretty happy with how they turned out too. Future Music magazine agreed, making our first demo their CD of the month. Such things matter to unheard-of artists taking their first uncertain steps into the harsh light of public judgement: a little unsolicited affirmation goes a long way.

Taking encouragement, we touted our wares around the music biz: labels, managers, publishers all received our eager jiffy bags and, like so many bored debutantes at a ball, duly let us know by three-line rejection letters that they would not be adding us to their dance cards. Predictable, of course. And we still kept writing…

We started gigging, first as a duo and then as a band with the legendary drummer Vince Dunn and genius-of-bass Paul Pink providing a funky, rock solid rhythm section. Small clubs and bars, some full and raucous and some quieter than a Trappists tea party but every one a step along what Julia Cameron calls the Artist’s Way.

It’s the being it and doing it that matters: the grasping of words and fragments of melody and chord patterns from the slow leaf-fall of ideas in our minds and the hard, often frustrating but ultimately joyous work of assembling those pieces into a finished song.

We’re still doing that. Despite the rest of life happening, despite the need to earn a living, despite the world becoming ever more chaotic. We write, we record, we perform. We hope you’ll like what we have created.

We must also always be open to the possibility of delightful surprises. None more so for us than in 2019 when the great August Darnell heard some of our 2002 recordings and declared himself utterly smitten with them, especially with “Forgotten”. Had COVID-19 not intervened, that song would now very likely be about to be released on August’s label 2C2C as our first single. It may yet be – we certainly hope so!