Coming as she does from a respected West End family, I suppose it was inevitable that Eliza Sophie Caird should adopt the name of the celebrated cockney flower girl whose crude, rough edges are famously smoothed out by top-hatted Edwardian gent, Henry Higgins, but given the current market demand for chirpy East End chicks whose privileged upbringings are routinely buried beneath two inches of lipgloss and more dropped aitches than a Chas n’ Dave Scrabble party, you have to assume there’s somekind of clever post-modern irony going on. But even if parallels could be drawn between this and the likes of Lily Allen and Kate Nash, they’d clearly be at a superficial level only. So before we shoot off on the usual ‘Pygmalion-in-reverse’ trajectory favoured by critics of Allen, rest assured that Eliza’s self-titled debut is something a little different. Out goes the customary faux-rap of Nash and Allen’s ‘Islington-beat’ and in come some classic fifties doo-wop, some trad jazz and bucketloads of skiffle.And what a delightful and rather playful, boundary-bucking brew it all is too. ‘Moneybox’ and ‘Pack Up’ have the loose and baggy charm of classic British music hall and ‘Rollerblades’ does for skates what ‘Rehab’ did for Betty Ford; like Winehouse but with more bubblegum, more fizz and more brightly coloured tights. Noveau rockabilly birds like Imelda May and mavericks like Theresa Andersson probably offer a more accurate musical context, but neither of these artists have the same instinctive grasp of the goods or the sheer ebullience of Eliza.
Punchy, mischievous and bouncing along with the kind of energy usually seen in pre-school children consuming too much sugary pop, Doolittle wraps her rubbery, husky vocals around a bakers dozen songs about sex, make-up, downloads and missing dogs meted out with practically any musical instrument that comes to hand. It’s a rites of passage story with balloons, party-poppers and without any of the cynical hostility and petulance that typifies her contemporaries. Hip-hop in the truest sense of the word – a carnivalesque mish-mash of styles and genres slurped up and spat out with a firm lump of modern phlegm. Happy music for happy people doing all manner of happy activities and quite possibly one of the most cheerfully confident debuts you are likely to hear all year.
Eliza Doolittle: as cute as a bagful of puppies and with the tonsils to match.