Biography

Hi, we're a band called Morton Valence. Yes, the name sounds a bit like a solo artist, but we're actually a duo. Our voices are very different, but they work well together. We are Anne Gilpin and Robert 'Hacker' Jessett, Anne has a parallel life as a dancer and Hacker has played with a variety of bands in the past including Alabama 3 and the Band of Holy Joy. We've been making music together for more years than we can count and have released seven studio albums. We term our music 'Urban Country', which is basically our take on country music. The fact that we come from London - although Anne is originally from Northern Ireland - and we tend to write about our immediate vicinity, makes our interpretation a bit different from the American stuff. We've never really worked to a formula I guess, but that doesn't mean that what we do isn't authentic, quite the opposite in fact. As all we've ever been, is 100% us. We're into lots of different music, we like film soundtracks by composers like Ennio Morricone, Michel Legrand and Roy Budd. We're into The Carpenters, John Prine, Patsy Cline, Nancy & Lee and quite a few bands are classed as 'shoegaze'. We grew up listening to a lot of punk and underground electronic music, and we like the Mexican singer Chavela Vargas. So I guess you could say our tastes are catholic, which probably comes across in our own music, but we've never really thought about it that much though.