Katy Carr

An exploration of her Polish roots gave Katy Carr the inspiration for her new album, finds
Graeme Thomson
First time visitors to Glasgow might be anticipating any number of delights, but it's safe to
say that tracing the footprints of a deceased brown bear won't top most to-do lists.
WAR HERO: The story of
Second World War veteran
Kazik Piechowski's escape
from Auschwitz was the
starting point for Katy Carr's
latest work.
Katy Carr, however, is a
woman with her own
agenda. The true story of
Wojtek the Soldier Bear –
made a private in the
Polish army in 1942 and
commended for his
heroism at Monte Cassino
– is just one of many
unusual song subjects on Carr's fourth album Paszport, and she is particularly excited about
her forthcoming Celtic Connections visit because "his first steps on British soil were in
Glasgow. There's a photograph of Wojtek walking through the streets after he got off the
boat from Naples. We have a lot in common. He was Polish and Scottish, just like me".
As you may already have gleaned, Carr is no ordinary singer and Paszport no ordinary
album. A deeply emotional and beautifully realised exploration of personal roots and wartime
history, it tenderly and poetically pays homage to the people who fought for Poland's
independence only to see the country taken over by the Soviet Union at the end of the
Second World War. Aside from a stirring hymn to Wojtek – who ended his days in Edinburgh
Zoo – there are lost love stories, folk tales, laments for the 1.8 million Poles transported to
Siberia and a song about the conflicted loyalties of pilots forced to bomb their own cities.
Though Carr was raised in Nottingham, her mother is Polish and until the age of five the
family lived there. She remembers "having to wait in queues for things that weren't there,
and picking mushrooms in the forest with my grandmother. I wanted to reconnect with
Poland but as an adult I needed something to open the door. Then I stumbled on this story
and it led me on a wonderful journey".
Her initial source of inspiration for Paszport was Kazik Piechowski, a 92-year-old war
veteran whose story she first heard while watching television in her aunt's house in southern
Poland. Though she struggled with the nuance, she realised that he was telling the story of
his escape from Auschwitz.
Some detective work on Google led to nothing, but a friend later found a YouTube clip –
"and that was it". Carr wrote Kommander's Car, which first appeared on her 2009 album
Coquette, about Piechowski's daring escape in June 1942, a feat undertaken in Rudolf
Hess's car while disguised in SS uniform. Later she made contact and found him "so open,
kind and wonderful". That meeting was the basis of a documentary, Kazik and the
Kommander's Car, and led directly to Paszport. The album opens with a new version of
Kommander's Car and is dedicated to Piechowski, who Carr insists embodies the quietly
heroic spirit of a dark era in the country's history. "He was born in a free Poland and then
everything was taken away from him. He represents an entire generation of Polish people
like that."
Carr has always been drawn to the 1940s and vintage aviation. Sartorially she sports a natty
line in retro glamour. As a child she had a poster of Amelia Earhart on her bedroom wall and
later became a qualified pilot with the Air Training Corps. After meeting Piechowski she
immersed herself in Polish wartime culture, soaking up personal stories and cultural myths,
visiting key locations and museums and even brushing up her language skills at university in
Krakow. At the start of all this Carr's Polish was rudimentary; now she has written and
recorded almost an entire album using it. "I'm convinced the ghosts were telling me what to
write," she says. "With some of the songs I was sitting on a bench in Warsaw and I just
started to sing them out of nowhere."
She was deeply affected by the whole process. "I spent about two years crying," she says.
"The cruelty was so unnecessary and heartbreaking. They are incredible stories but
completely untold, which has made Poland think its history isn't valuable." The music on
Paszport accentuates the album's themes, fusing klezmer, gypsy jazz and classical music to
create a contemporary European folk music. "I wanted it to sound like what the partisans
might have played in the forest, but with 21st-century technology," she says. "It needed grit
and passion, I didn't want too clean lines. I wanted it to have a raw edge."
I wonder how Piechowski's generation of Poles – and subsequent ones – feel about an
outsider stepping into their history to articulate their often painful stories. "It's been so
positive," says Carr. "It's fantastic for the people who inspired it, their stories are finally being
heard. It's a great honour for me. It feels like I have a duty to do this really well for all the
people who didn't have a voice in those times." Yet she also hopes Paszport has a wider
resonance for all disenfranchised people, whatever the specifics of their stories. "I don't see
this record as something stuck in time," she says. "It translates to a number of different
cultures and places right now. I've had people writing to me from Afghanistan, Russia, Costa
Rica, Africa ..."
Carr promises her next album will explore her Scottish roots – her paternal grandfather is
from Dumfries – and squeals that playing Celtic Connections is "a dream come true. I've
done Poland and now I need to do an album about Scotland". She says she fancies writing a
song about Queen Mary's bath house. Is there room for a bear?
Katy Carr plays Oran Mor on January 26 as part of Celtic Connections. Paszport is
out now on Deluce - Heraldscotland

An exploration of her mother's Polish roots by an English singer-songwriter; but not a
subjective trawl through family history, à la Who Do You Think You Are?.
Paszport is more oblique than that. Instead of sloshing through Carr's personal
world, the listener is invited into a series of narratives that embrace a variety of
possible Polands, some fictive, some doubtless not, all apparently derived from the
Polish experience of WW2. Angular, theatrical, Klezmeric. Intriguing. - The Indipendent

‘Following the singer on her journey is like plunging into one of Norman Davies’s books
about redrawing the map of Europe. Carr wants us to look east, specifically to Poland, her
mother’s homeland. Ambitious, quirky and rich in folk melodies, the vignettes give us a
glimpse into the psyche of a country that has maintained its sanity – and its sense of humour
– in the face of endless turmoil. Carr’s pure, unaffected voice rises to the challenge, and the
arrangements (featuring violin, cello, keyboards, brass and whistle) are never less than
immaculate.’ - The Sunday Times Culture Magazine

Katy Carr describes herself as "an ambassador for the new Poland", which seems odd given
her accent is more east Midlands than east European. Raised in Nottingham, the 32-yearold
singer currently finds herself feted as "the Polish Björk" in Poland – her mother's
homeland – thanks to her brilliant fourth album, Paszport, whose songs honour the nation's
courage during the torment of the second world war.
Talking over dumplings in Hammersmith's Polish Centre, Carr proves an effervescent,
offbeat presence, her retro chic chiming with the cold war decor here. The fascination with
vintage fashion and the 1940s, she explains, goes back to her teenage years.
"My English grandmother regaled me with tales of dancehalls and airmen. I fell in love with
old-school glamour, with torch singers, especially Edith Piaf, and with flying. Instead of pop
stars I had Amelia Earhart on my bedroom wall."
Carr, a qualified pilot, learned to fly with the Air Training Corps. "I was the only girl, and you
had to wait hours to get your turn in the Chipmunk trainer, but it was worth it."
Prone to wax lyrical about the Spitfire –"the machine that saved Britain from nazism" – Carr
honours the RAF's Polish air aces in Motylek (Butterfly) on an album whose other subjects
include partisan fighters, composer Frédéric Chopin and the millions deported to Siberia by
the Soviets (giving a new meaning to the bluesy lyric "I saw a black black train take my baby
away"). Sung in English and Polish, with touches of Kate Bush in its vocals and klezmer and
folk flavours in its string arrangements, Paszport is a concept album gone refreshingly right.
For Carr, the album has been "a quest to discover my heritage", one that began four years
back after watching a documentary about an audacious escape from Auschwitz in which four
inmates stole SS uniforms and drove out of the death camp in the car of its infamous
overseer, Rudolf Höss.
Having written Kommander's Car for her third album, Coquette, Carr sought out the
instigator of the escape, 90-year-old Kazik Piechowski, who survived the war only to be
imprisoned for seven years by the Soviets.
"Meeting Kazik changed my life," she says. "It's been a very emotional journey since, like
hearing my aunt talk about hiding from the SS in the forest with my grandmother. The stories
are surprisingly little-known in Poland, because the Soviet occupation repressed them.
"What I have learned from Kazik and my family is how brave Polish people are. I just want to
do my bit for the country." - The Observer