Spotlight On... Rianne Downey

Rianne Downey began busking in Glasgow aged 15 before uploading covers to YouTube during the pandemic. One of those covers was Rotterdam (Or Anywhere) by Paul Heaton’s band The Beautiful South. Heaton heard it, liked it and three years later called her out of the blue and invited her to sing with him. She’s now his go-to collaborator and has supported the likes of Paolo Nutini and Deacon Blue.

This summer, along with Heaton as well as on her own, Downey has been a mainstay of the festival circuit playing Glastonbury, TRNSMT and Belladrum. Her best year yet doesn’t end there. In October she releases her debut album The Consequence of Love, and begins an autumn UK headline tour.

Downey's country-pop tunes are catchy and dreamy and she boasts one of the best contemporary voices in Scotland; following the release of her latest song Good In Goodbye, we catch up with her to find out more about her busking years, Paul Heaton’s mentorship, how her granny’s dementia was the inspiration for her album’s title track and a close (almost) encounter with a bear while recording her music.

Some of music's biggest stars like Ed Sheeran, Rod Stewart, Gerry Cinnamon and Dylan John Thomas started their careers as buskers. When did you start singing and was busking always something you wanted to do?
I always loved to sing and would get my mum to print out lyrics to my favourite songs like Johnny Cash’s Ring of Fire or June Carter and Carl Smith’s Time’s A Wastin’. I’d do performances in front of her and my grannies. Then when I was ten I asked for my first guitar after I got hooked on Amy Winehouse’s Back to Black. But I didn’t think I was cool enough to be a singer-songwriter. I loved performing, and musical theatre seemed like the way for me at first. I got a scholarship to the Royal Conservatoire when I was at school. 

I would hang about with people in the busking scene in Glasgow. One of my old pals would encourage me to give it a go but I was so nervous. Then one day when I was 15 I just got up and did a song and got the busking bug. It was very daunting. One guy told me to go and shoot myself in the head. You’d get wolf whistles. As you grow up you look back and think about the condescending men who would come over after your set. At the time you think they were being nice and giving you advice, even though they’ve not sung a note in their life. But busking builds a thick skin and taught me how to win people over. Now though, most of the trolling is online.

At 17 I went to college for a month. During that time I went to London to busk for a week and my attention went there – London was busier but rougher. People really didn’t have time for you; you were an inconvenience. But if you won people over it was really rewarding. One night outside Winter Wonderland we worked out three songs which would get us the most money and played them over and over. The last time I busked in Glasgow was when I was 18. It was starting to go downhill. It was when cashless became a bit more of a thing and times have been getting tougher and tougher. I was old enough to play the pubs so that was my next job and I’ve just been plugging away ever since.

In 2020 during lockdown and unable to perform live, you began posting covers and one was The Beautiful South's 1996 song Rotterdam (Or Anywhere). The song's writer Paul Heaton saw it and liked it and then three years later got in touch and asked if you’d go on tour with him because his usual female co-singer Jacqui Abbott was unable to, and you got your big break singing with him at TRNSMT 2023. Do you see him as a mentor?
I’m so grateful to him. I don’t think he’d like me calling him his mentor because he’s very humble and down to earth but he definitely is in some way. I was thrilled when he liked my Facebook post singing Rotterdam, but I never thought anything of it again until almost three years later when I got the phone call to see if I was available. He hasn’t heard my debut album. He said he wanted to hear it the old-fashioned way when it was released and in the shops. I'm on his last album, The Mighty Several, but Paul isn’t on The Consequence of Love. I am doing my album for me and showing people who I am, but hopefully he’ll feature on album two.

You just released your latest single Good In Goodbye earlier this week. It’s the feel-good humdinger tune of the album, tell us about that?
I was 21 when I signed my record deal, when I moved to Liverpool and when I really decided to run with music and try and make something of myself. Around that time I ended a five-year relationship. So that was my first taste of freedom. But it was COVID as well and I lost my Papa. I was just hit with so much loss. You realise how quickly time moved. All of a sudden, I blinked and I was 23. So Good In Goodbye is taking all the negative things that happened to me and turning them into positive.

The title track of The Consequence of Love is about your Granny Cathy, who has dementia. Why did you decide to write a song about that and has she heard it?
My Granny and the family had been dealing with her decline for a while but it didn’t really hit me until I was leaving the UK to record my debut album in Seattle. She had started to deteriorate really quickly. It was her last days in her own house and she was going into a home and you could just really see she wasn’t the woman that I knew anymore, there was this glaze over her eyes. Even though I’d known my Gran had dementia for years I think I was in denial. I then wrote the song which is about how nothing prepares you to lose the one you love. You can know all the facts, prepare yourself and know it’s coming because it’s part of life, but when you actually see that person deteriorating it’s a pain like no other.

I was in so much pain, but I wouldn’t change anything, because I got to have the life with my Gran and saw the woman she was; I have all these memories. [Writing the song] was my way of dealing with grief. I haven’t played her the song yet but I’ve written some of the lyrics in a notebook she has for the family to write messages to her. She cries a lot now and I don’t want to upset her. But I did write down some of the lyrics including: ‘I would walk a million miles in your shoes to take the load off / And I’d save all my pennies to buy back the time that we used up’, so she has seen it in some way.

As someone who loved country music from a young age why did you choose Seattle rather than Nashville to record your debut album? 
The chance to work with the producer Ryan Hadlock who has worked with Brandi Carlile and Zach Bryan [...] I looked into loads of producers, compiled a playlist of all my favourite songs and my favourite genres growing up until now and what is as close to my sound now and the common denominator was Ryan. I plucked up the courage to ask my label to send me over there and I was lucky they wanted to take a chance on me. His studio Bear Creek is in the forest. It’s called Bear Creek because it’s by a creek and in a forest that has black bears. I heard one while I was in the hot tub. I was terrified. I felt very vulnerable at that point [...] As for Nashville, I’d love to play the Grand Ole Opry. That’s my main goal. After I play the Barras.

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Good In Goodbye is out now; The Consequence of Love is released on 17 Oct via Run On Records; Rianne Downey's UK headline tour begins in Hull on 12 October, finishing at The Old Fruitmarket, Glasgow, 6 Dec

Follow Rianne Downey on Instagram @riannedowney

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