The Northern Irish artist, who will celebrate his fiftieth birthday in January, is about to release his first album, after years of torment and addiction.
“I feel like I’m starting a new life” : the singer Kaz Hawkins, after having gone through very dark periods between her birth in Belfast and her recent installation in the Limousin, finally sees the light again, since her signature with a major blues label in France. Arrival at Dixiefrog, publication in the spring of My Life and Ia skilfully put together anthology, first concerts in Paris, programming at major blues festivals… For the past three years, the career and life of this Northern Irish artist have taken a positive turn. “I have spent most of my life struggling with trauma and inner demons”reveals Kaz Hawkins, as he approaches his fiftieth birthday. “It is the peace that I have found here”she adds about her new environment, on the heights of Limoges.
Karen McIntyre (her birth name) was born in the early 1970s to a poor family in the working-class neighborhoods of east Belfast, where singer Van Morrison is also from. Very quickly, his life turns into a nightmare. Violated and abused during her youth, then adult victim of domestic violence and plagued by various addictions, she will find in music, writing and singing a refuge and an outlet. Her grandmother, one of the few benevolent people around her, detected in her a gift for singing and accompanied her to her first auditions. But a meeting will be decisive, the one with the famous American singer of rhythm’n’blues Etta James. “My grandmother gave me a tape of hers and the first time I heard Etta James sing was WC Handy’s St. Louis Blues”, remembers the one who was upset. She will identify herself to such an extent with her eldest that she will be renamed Kaz Hawkins – Jamesetta Hawkins is the real name of Etta James – and will later devote an entire album to her.
Authenticity of the statement
Of Etta James, she has the verve, the timbre, the vocal power, this rattle in the voice, the stage attitude a bit provocative and the strong corpulence. Not the trashy or vulgar sides. But Kaz Hawkins now wants to be recognized for herself. After having scoured the disreputable pubs of Belfast and the north of Ireland since her majority, singing cover songs in front of drunken, stoned and violent customers, she succeeded ten years ago in breaking the omerta and freeing her speech, which earned him recognition from another audience. “I secretly wrote texts for a large part of my life and it was now or never to reveal myself”says this woman whose certain episodes of life are inscribed on the tattoos dotting her body.
Fifteen of his compositions, taken from self-produced records recorded over the past decade, appear on My Life and I, where there is only a cover of Etta James. In songs with explicit titles (Surviving, Better Days, One More Fight…), Kaz Hawkins recounts the vicissitudes of a dented existence, on music ranging from gospel to rock’n’roll via soul and cabaret, with slight country accents. The authenticity of the words, her voice that sometimes shakes the walls, her life that she tells in piano ballads with a strong emotional charge… So many elements explaining the surge of sympathy that Kaz Hawkins arouses. “As survivors, we are naturally empathetic. When I perform my most personal songs, at that moment I give myself to them and, in return, they open their hearts.she explains. “I will be fifty years old in January. I intend for this next part of my life to be one big party, full of new chances, new music and new fans.”at the time when she is working on the recording of a disc, her first with the substantial means of a real record company, to be released in 2023.