Singer- songwriter and actress Juliet Howland told David Hennessy about her new album, haunted house, Irish family and inspirations and acting with big names like Benedict Cumberbatch and Ed Norton.
Folk singer-songwriter Juliet Howland recently released her album Under The Apple Tree.
Written beneath the apple tree in her cottage garden, the record blends Juliet’s own original songs with a stunning interpretation of the traditional Irish/ Scottish number Wild Mountain Thyme and a musical interpretation of I Saw From The Beach, the poem by Irish writer Thomas Moore.
Alongside her music career, Juliet is also an established actress whose screen credits include The Painted Veil, V for Vendetta, and the Amazon Prime series The Wheel of Time.
Her other films include Iris (with Judi Dench, Jim Broadbent and Penelope Wilton), Two Brothers with Guy Pearce, The Last Photograph with Danny Huston and Jonah Hauer-King.
Her extensive television work includes The Marlow Murder Club, Belgravia: The Next Chapter, Innocent (which she filmed in Ireland), The Reckoning, Crashing, Colditz, A Touch of Frost, Poirot, Mistresses, EastEnders, The Royals and Hotel Babylon.
Juliet has also done much theatre work and worked at venues such as Salisbury Playhouse, York Theatre Royal and The Harold Pinter Theatre.
At the National Theatre, she played Moya Lexington in the multi award-winning play After The Dance by Terence Rattigan, alongside Benedict Cumberbatch.
Juliet took time to chat to The Irish World about the new album.
You have lived in London and are now back in Winchester where you grew up. That move back home has been important, hasn’t it? Even the album title gives it a firm place of home..
“Yes. I grew up in Winchester and then obviously went to London.
“I used to compose tunes on the piano but only in the early 90s, when I was at drama school, did I start writing lyrics to my music.
“I moved back to Winchester in 2004 but actually, since moving back, that’s when it all really kicked off.
“I just wrote more.
“I recorded my first album.
“The cottage has given me the most amazing inspiration and it’s just the most wonderful place to write.
“Actually one of the songs on the album Restless Spirit is about the ghost in my cottage.
“I was told it was haunted on the day I bought it and I was handed to keys.
“The executor said, ‘Oh, did I tell you it was haunted?’
“I was like, ’Err.. no?’
“He told me it was a ghost of a woman and she wears a brown coat and she used to stand by the bed of the old couple who lived here and then when he died, apparently she used to cause problems with the wife who lived here.
“I think he said she used to be bumped into and stuff.
“But very early on, I felt some very strange things.
“There were footsteps, light switch things.
“I was renovating the cottage and one night, I was scraping wallpaper off a wall and I just felt somebody behind me.
“I just said out loud, ‘Please don’t show yourself to me because I’ll be really scared’.
“There was literally nothing (ghostly) until I recorded Restless Spirit.
“I did the first take and then went on to do the second take and halfway through it, there was this crash behind me.
“I turned around and things had gone off the shelf.
“I didn’t touch anything.
“I couldn’t have touched it.
“I was on my own.
“Someone swiped some items off the top shelf and I was really spoked.
“But then I thought, ‘Right, I’ve got to get this track down’.
“And I ended up saying, ‘If you’re here, could you help me get this right?’
“And then that third track is the one that’s actually on the album.
“I tried to find a logical explanation.
“I kept on going back into the room thinking, ‘How did that happen?’
“There was nothing that I touched.
“There was no movement, nothing.”
Prior to moving in, would you have been sceptical about ghosts or were you always open to the idea?
“I suppose I’ve always been open to it.
“I’ve always thought, ‘Well, how do we know? These things are entirely possible’.
“I believe that and there are too many strange things that have happened to me that I just can’t find a logical explanation for.
“I suppose part of me doesn’t think it could be possible so I’ve tried to apply logic to it and think, ‘I must have knocked something. I must have dropped something’ but I absolutely didn’t.
“I think I’ve always been a bit open to it and I do believe there is more going on than we necessarily know at times.
“It’s lovely to have written a song about the ghost in the cottage, I suppose, keeping her alive.
“But so far, so good.
“Nothing else has gone flying, certainly no knives or anything like that so that’s good.”
Fingers crossed it stays like that..
“Yes hopefully she’s at peace now.
“Hopefully she listened to the words of the song and she’s gone off somewhere, she’s gone off to Heaven in peace now, who knows?”
Another song on the album is Wild Mountain Thyme, what made you want to do your own version of that Irish/ Scottish folk song?
“I’ve always loved it actually.
“I was singing at Wickham Festival.
“This is 2023 and I had an injury to my arm.
“I couldn’t do a full set on the guitar so I thought, ‘Oh, this is a perfect time to up my acapella’.
“So I learned it for that and it was such a lovely response because so many people know it.
“When you sing it and people join in, it’s just magical.
“My great grandmother, on my mum’s side, was Irish and on my dad’s side, it’s Scottish and I’ve got this amazing, enormous hardback book from the 1800s called Genuine Scottish Melodies and Go Lassie Go is in there.
“It’s just such a beautiful, beautiful song.”
Have you spent much time in Ireland?
“I’ve been to Dublin for work, for acting and then we went on a family holiday near Schull.
“I just thought it was one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever been in my life.
“I loved the countryside, the scenery.
“I’ve been over for a wedding as well to Killarney around there: Just beautiful and stunning.
“I still think that countryside from the Dingle Peninsula and from Cork all around Killarney is just the most beautiful countryside.”
On this album you were also inspired by the Irish poet Thomas Moore..
“What happened was I had a wonderful- He became a friend but an Irish carpenter called Seamus.
“When the cottage was being renovated, he’d come and do some work and he was great.
“He was so supportive.
“Every time I had a gig, he used to come along and he was very funny. Even if the gigs were in pubs and obviously, pubs can be very busy and people were talking, he used to get very cross that people were talking and turn around and tell people ‘sssh’.
“I would say, ‘Seamus, I really don’t mind. It’s a pub. It’s fine’.
“But he was very sweet.
“He knew he was dying of cancer so he was getting rid of his things and he gave me a pile of CDs and a pile of books and one of them was this beautiful illustrated book called Land of the Poets, Ireland and I just put it on my piano and then one day after he died, I just opened the book on the page of I Saw From the Beach.
“I’d never read it.
“I’d heard of it and I thought, ‘That’s so lovely’.
“And this tune just popped out so I just made up this tune on the piano and that stuck really and it was just a lovely one to sing.
“I thought it was a beautiful, beautiful poem and so that’s how that song came about.
“Inspiration can come from anywhere: Book, stories, TV programmes, scripts.”
Obviously you have done a lot of acting but it sounds to me like the music was your first passion, would I be right?
“It’s funny.
“I was always singing.
“It was through doing some musicals at school and it was actually my drama teacher, a wonderful man took me aside one day and said, ‘Have you thought about doing this as a profession?’
“And I hadn’t.
“I knew that I loved singing.
“I loved acting.
“I was doing plays but it hadn’t really crossed my mind to do it as a profession.
“I’d always been playing the piano and I played the flute and taught myself guitar at 18.
“When I went to drama school actually, I picked up the guitar.
“I’ve kept going since then really, a long time ago now.”
You have done a lot of both screen and stage, do you like them both for different reasons?
“Yes I do.
“I think you can have amazing experiences in both.
“I spent my early years doing loads of theatre and I just love that.
“But also I love film and TV drama but particularly film and I’ve had some lovely, lovely parts, some lovely films.
“There was one (The Painted Veil) which is an absolute gem which was in Shanghai working with Ed Norton and Naomi Watts, Live Schrieber so that was very special actually.
“We spent ten days in Shanghai and that was magical.
“I always work with lovely people.
“It’s an absolute joy.
“I like the variety and I love doing lots of music and doing festivals and singing in between that.”
It was in 2010 that you were part of the National Theatre’s cast for After the Dance. The cast was led by Benedict Cumberbatch and the revival would go on to win four Oliviers..
“That was a dream job.
“Actually Dragonfly Days, on the album, was inspired by that summer at the National Theatre.
“In between shows like a matinee and an evening show, we’d all sit out on the terraces of the National Theatre overlooking the river.
“I love Terence Rattigan anyway.
“He’s the most wonderful playwright and it was an extraordinary show and we were very lucky because it completely sold out every show and it won lots of awards.
“I worked with Benedict just as he was on the rise.
“Sherlock hadn’t come out at the beginning and then it came out and we went from having no fans at the stage door and suddenly, there were a lot of fans at stage door, but it was great.
“It was a wonderful play and it was a real gem actually.
“Acting work has inspired quite a few of my songs.
“Bring Them Home (Lanterns at Bel Tine) came from the Wheel of Time which I did for Amazon.”
We were just talking about one actor who made it big with Sherlock which is funny because there is a new Sherlock show starring the Irish actor Dónal Finn who played your son Mat in The Wheel of Time…
“He was my son, gorgeous boy is Donal.
“Oh, he’s the loveliest person and he was a joy to work with.
“He was wonderful.
“He’s such a wonderful chap and of course, he’s on Amazon doing Young Sherlock.”
How did you enjoy The Wheel of Time?
“It’s great.
“Just a joy.
“Really lovely cast.
“We were filming mainly in Prague but season one, we filmed up in the mountains of Slovenia and that’s where there was a ceremony where we lit lanterns and put them into the river and it was to bring the souls of the dead back to you so they can see you.
“It was so beautiful.
“We were right up the mountains in the middle of the night doing a night shoot and it was stunning.
“The lanterns were just all over the river.
“It was very moving.
“It was an incredibly moving scene.
“I had to do a lot of crying.
“It was so beautiful that when I got back, it really stuck with me and I wrote Bring Them Home (Lanterns of Bel Tine).
“It was a great show.
“It was a wonderful show.”
I wanted to ask you about another song on the album called Pedestal, where did that one come from?
“That is a song where I took a seed of an idea of something someone said to me and I sort of stretched it with my imagination, just imagining situations.
“Someone said he put me on a pedestal.
“I thought, ‘No, that’s a really bad place to put anyone because there’s only one way down’.
“And it got me thinking about people in the film world or in the music world who are very successful.
“I think I’d just seen a film on Marilyn Monroe actually and I was thinking back to that time: All those big flashlights, red carpet and someone falling for this woman.
“She thinks this man has fallen in love with her and said he loves her but actually it’s the image of her, the idea of her, it’s her success, it’s the glory, it’s the fame and he doesn’t actually see her as the real person.
“That’s where it comes from.
“It’s just, ‘Did you ever see me?’
“That was the inspiration for that. It was taken from the seed of being told I had been put on a pedestal and thinking, ‘Oh no, that’s not a very good place to put anyone’.”
Do you have Irish musical inspirations?
“I loved folk and Simon and Garfunkel, and then it was Chris De Burgh.
“I think it was when The Getaway came on the scene.
“Then I heard Satin Green Shutters and that’s what actually inspired me to want to pick up the guitar because I really wanted to learn to play Satin Green Shutters because I thought it was the most beautiful song.
“I think I’ve always loved the Irish or Scottish sound and people have come up, when I’ve been singing and said, ‘Oh, are you Irish?’
“Maybe it was the way I sing but maybe it’s just my great grandmother filtering through but I think it’s the music that I respond to and love: Celtic music.”
We are coming up to Bloomsday and you have been inspired to write music by James Joyce..
“When I was at school, we studied Dubliners and I fell in love with the story The Dead.
“I actually wrote a trilogy called Distant Music inspired by it.
“That was my other big Irish piece.”
The Gift, on the album, comes from a family tragedy..
“I lost my brother very suddenly when he was 24 and I was 26 and that song popped out on his birthday a few years ago.
“You can’t carry it.
“You don’t know how you’re going to carry that burden of grief but actually as life goes, you realise that it’s given you something.
“I do wonder would I have done my music? Would I have recorded my first album if Charles hadn’t died, would I have had that attitude: ‘Life is so short, seize the day, go and do what makes you happy?’
“I don’t know but I think sometimes, through grief, you do things that you might not have done before or you do learn to seize the day and make the most of things that might have passed you by in the past.
“I lost both my parents to cancer within a year of each other so I think that also has spurred more music.
“Music is a wonderful comfort and a wonderful tool for expression which I really, really value and I think I’m very lucky that I can do that.
“Actually the song An Angel by your Side, which I have sung at a lot of funerals and it’s been played at funerals, I wrote a few months after my brother died.
“I was sitting in my digs in York just feeling absolutely heartbroken because we were very close and then this song literally popped out.
“I think I’d written the whole thing within ten minutes and it’s called An Angel by your Side, that was on the first album.”
Under the Apple Tree by Juliet Howland is out now.
Juliet play The Sunset Festival, Gosport on Saturday 11 July and The Wickham Festival on Saturday 1 August.
For more information, click here.
