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Victoria Kelly: The Best of Both Music Worlds - Page 2

© Anne-Marie de Bruin

But as fate would have it, by the time the group's next album Vicarious was made, Victoria had left, as had Mark Tierney, so now sometime-singer Fiona McDonald had left the Headless Chickens and was back in the fold. This was not to be the last of Victoria's involvement with the Strawpeople, however, as she was asked to do strings for the album, and struck up a friendship with Fiona McDonald into the bargain. "I left the Strawpeople and Fiona had been with them previously and then decided to collaborate with them again because she's in a way the perfect singer for them. I was then asked to do string arrangements for their album and I met her that way. There's always that strange thing where you meet people for the first time and you've heard a lot about them and you don't know what they're like other than through hearsay, but we just got on like a house on fire and because of that we work extremely well together."

Consequently, Victoria is now working with Fiona again, as she is currently writing string arrangements for the upcoming McDonald solo album. In addition to this, Fiona was also called upon for help when Victoria was writing the soundtrack for the next Scott Reynolds Miramax film, Heaven, which comes out later this year. "In the last write of Heaven I really needed some objective ears in the studio so she came and helped to do all that kind of stuff because she's such a wonderful musician that she can hear anything that's not in tune."

While finding that Victoria has much in common with her musical friends, it is interesting to learn that she comes from a very different musical background from the Strawpeople and their fellow bFM alumni Greg Johnson. This is because Victoria (who finished a music degree at Auckland University in 1993 and plays piano and oboe) never had anything to do with the student station. "They all started off in bFM and popular music and I started in classical. I don't know - classical music and bFM just don't mix with each other. Its more a popular and youth culture thing and classical music doesn't really feature in that, so the music school and bFM were separate at university. There were obviously composers that were involved, but I wasn't one of them till I started being in bands."

It would seem that Victoria Kelly's musical work combines the best of the popular and classical fields and this is again reflected in her work with ex-Unitone HiFi dub merchant Joost Langeveld for the soundtrack of radio drama, Claybourne. "Joost and I were creating a library of music for the radio show because there's no way you're going to get a budget that's big enough to score 96 episodes of a five-minute radio drama for each day, so we had to create a library of different moods, atmospheres and ambiences to complement any possible combination of events that could take place in the story. Joost and I work very well together too. He and I have very different backgrounds and approaches to music, and combining them leads to something new and exciting always happening."

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