After Playing to a packed Elgar Room at theRoyal Albert Hall, Stephanie Benedetti, Kirsty Mangan and Natalie Holt of the Raven Quartet sat down for a quick chat with God is in the TV.
Words/Photos: Mark Williams
MW – So how did the quartet come together?
Stephanie – kind of through Natalie, we all kind of new each other, and she said ‘do you want to start a quartet’ ?
MW – and did you know each other through college?
Stephanie – kind of, Kirsty and Rachel went to school together.
Kirsty – Steph and i met on a Take That video, playing violin on ‘Rule The World’.
MW -so what’s your plans for the rest of the year?
Natalie – world domination.
Kirsty – definitely.
MW – your website mentioned something about an upcoming project involving Alan Moore, can you tell us anything about that?
Natalie – it’s a short film,
Kirsty – which Alan Moore is actually starring in, and obviously he doesn’t go out of Northampton so we’ll probably have to film it there.
MW – so what’s your role in it?
Natalie – we’re not sure, we’ve been asked to sit and play this weird waltz, in Burlesque outfits, but that’s the last we’ve heard of it, hopefully it’ll go ahead but these things take time.
MW– what’s been your favourite gig so far?
Stephanie – probably this one , it was our first live gig with just ourselves,
Natalie – and all the rock stuff is new, a lot of the jazz stuff, it was quite terrifying but it was amazing.
MW – could you see the raven quartyet playing festivals?
Natalie – yes definitely, we’d like to do something where everybody is standing up at the front. It’s less intimidating as well.
Kirsty – we could support a rock band or something too, that would be so cool.
MW – What do you think of Apocalytica?
Stephanie – they’re pretty cool.
MW – have you ever been tempted to pick up a distortion pedal?
All – Nooo.
Natalie – we’ve never really thought about it, it’s been done a lot. Maybe one day we’ll rock out with a distortion pedal, but we’re happy doing our own arrangements.
MW – I loved your version of the Foo Fighters ‘The Pretender’. How did that come about?
Kirsty – Rachel saw an inteview with Dave Grohl, where he said he originally heard it as being played on the cello, and that’s how it came up, that kind of inspired us to do the arrangement.
Natalie – we just found something that seemed to work, because not eveything does. We’ve tried so many different rock tunes and some of them just don’t hold up, because there’s not enough in them, but ‘The pretender’ has a lot of melodies and harmonies.
