Peppermint Radio – Kate Walsh

Peppermint Radio – Kate Walsh

Tracks: 11

www.myspace.com/katewalsh

I will begin with an interesting fact:  singer songwriter Kate Walsh is the only unsigned artist ever to have had a number one album on the iTunes chart. Not to mention that she has played with Mark Knopfler and had songs featured on Grey’s Anatomy.  Thus it is something of a mystery to me that she is not better known.  Her fourth CD, Peppermint Radio, has possibly the best title I’ve heard all year.   It is a  compliation of covers of songs from the 1980s and  1990s; as these songs were from her childhood, Walsh chose the album name because, as a child, she used to make believe that  her sewing machine was a mixing deck and that she was working on a radio station named Peppermint Radio.

Admittedly I am not usually a big fan over cover songs, much less whole albums of them, yet something about this CD undoubtedly works.   Perhaps the greatest reason for this is that they are not all obvious songs which hold a risk of becoming tacky; rather, they are songs which clearly hold meaning for Kate herself. This certainly comes through in her delivery. From Erasure’s A Little Respect to Blur’s Beetlebum, by way of Duran Duran’s Save a Prayer to EMF’s  Unbelievable, it is evident that there was a conscious decision not to attempt to mimick or recreate the original version.  Rather, Walsh opted to pay these songs the ultimate honour, and has made them entirely her own.  Thus the songs are not only kept fresh for the listener, we are given the chance to rediscover and appreciate them in a whole new way. That, in my opinion, should earn both Kate Walsh and Peppermint Radio, more than just A Little Respect!

NB Kate Walsh is touring in support of Peppermint Radio during November. Information and dates available at: www.katewalsh.co.uk