Clair and Rose- the twin sisters from Birmingham (UK) that make up the double act that is Clearrose. I caught up with the duo during their performance at Birmingham Christian Centre’s ‘Main Room’
Amanda: Do you have an album out at the moment?
Clair: Yeah, it’s called ‘Attitudes’; it was released in ’06 and it’s has ten tracks on it.
Amanda: How did you musically get started?
Rose: We’ve both got music related degrees and we’ve been singing since we were about nine in choirs and different groups. In the church and the college that we used to go to we would get together with lots of different Christians and put the melodies together, we also used to go to youth clubs. We would basically share the Gospel and that was our purpose and goal.
We’ve got loads of songs that we’ve written since becoming Christian’s. At the church that we first went to the teaching was really good and so we would write songs often based on what we were learning and understanding.
Clair: A friend of ours at university really got on our case and told us that we must record our stuff.
Amanda: Do you consider this to be your ministry?
Rose: Yeah, we’ve always been heavily into singing; it’s always been a real passion. It’s something that for us just seems innate.
Clair: It’s a means of sharing the Gospel. Since being saved we’ve strongly had a heart for winning people over to Christ.
Amanda: Did you always know that you had a talent for singing?
Clair: We used sing in choral choirs with robes and we used to sing at weddings as part of a choir. We’ve always done backing vocals and we’ve always loved harmonies, so people would always come up to us asking ‘can you be my backing vocalist?’ And so it was one of those things that just gradually developed. Music’s something that we’ve always been passionate about.
Amanda: Do you guys have any testimonies to share?
Clair: Yeah, both of our lives have been full of things that haven’t happened by coincidence.
Before we became Christians I had growths on my eyes and I was dramatically healed, this was when I was twelve years old. I had these growths for a year; I was going to have surgery to cut away part of my eyelids. My dad took me to a church where a group of Christians prayed for me at the altar, I remember feeling really hot which at the time which I thought was probably to do with embarrassment. Within a week they were completely gone. These growths were really unsightly; one would hang down over my eye. Within a week God healed me and this was a massive sign; that God was saying ‘I care that much to do that for you’; making us realise the significance of the Gospel and how much it can change people’s lives.
One of the songs from our current album is called ‘All Things’, which is taken from Romans 8: 28; it talks about how ‘all things work together for good to those who love God.’ We’ve had so many experiences where it doesn’t look like you can do anything about it and you don’t really understand what’s happening, but you come out of it and you realise that actually it’s worked out for my good.
Amanda: How would you describe your music?
Rose: We’ve got a lot of influences. We’ve both studied music and in that there were lots of different types of singing, including classical music. We’ve done a lot of collaborations with different people which has caused us to focus on Hip-Hop and even Electro.
Clair: We did a Ska track last year as well.
Amanda: Who are you influenced by?
Rose: We’ve studied artistes of classical music and they’ve had some influence, but a lot of what we do is influenced by people like Stevie Wonder, Mary Mary and Lauren Hill.
Clair: In terms of style we’ve closely studied people like Trin-i-tee, Take 6, Virtue and Out of Eden; particularly for the harmonies. And growing up we listened a lot to people like and Whitney Houston and Mariah Carey.
Amanda: Did you grow up listening to a lot of black influenced music?
Clair: Yeah, we were very much into the black music that was around at the time. Our parents used to play quite a wide variety of music when we were children. There was a record by a South African group in which there were some really nice melodies, we used to play that record over and over.
Amanda: How have people received your music?
Clair: People seem to enjoy it, particularly young people. We sang one of our tracks; ‘Love never fails’ at a youth club and when we went back a couple of weeks later four of the young people came back and sang it to us, which we were amazed by.
A Hindu girl that we know had listened to our ‘Attitudes’ album and showed us that she had sang all the songs off the album onto her mobile phone, we couldn’t believe it.
Amanda: Where do you see your musical career heading in the future?
Rose: I defently hope that we will have progressed and produced some more material at a quality that we continue to be happy with and that we’ll have a band put together.
Amanda: I can definitely see you guys performing as part of a band.
Clair: Yeah, we’ve never been an ‘island’; we like to involve people in what we do.
Last year we did a series of small concerts at a church in Ladywood [in Birmingham] as an outreach event and we brought in local Christian Hip-Hop and jazz artistes. There were a couple of gangs within Birmingham that turned up at the event which was really good.
Amanda: What are you guys up to at the moment?
Rose: We’re putting together a compilation called ‘Central Streets of Soul’ which features talented artistes within Birmingham.
Clair: The idea came about because there are so many unsigned Christian artistes we’ve met that are really talented and we could see their real passion to share their music and to share The Message, it just seemed criminal to not grasp the opportunity to put everyone’s music together or to at least a sample of it together as an album. This will let people know that there are unsigned artistes out there that are making good music. It will be available towards the end of this year.
Amanda: When people see you do they have a preconceived expectation of your style of music?
Rose: Yeah sometimes, but God uses the foolish things to confound the wise, He breaks down stereotypes and boundaries, which are limitations we put on things. Looking at the New Testament, it would appear that there are three recognised cultures - Jew, Gentile and New Creation. Too often our society is divided by cultural barriers, which actually have no eternal significance and these things have infiltrated into the church.
Clair: I think God likes to surprise us, keep us on our toes and keep us humble.
Interviewed by Amanda Hemmings – May 2008
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