Sophistication is a word often applied to the French, whether we’re talking about fashion, food or art, and it is certainly appropriate for the musical duo known as Avocado Pie.
Virginie Doris and Annabelle Ducrot have been performing together for over a year, building a following, principally on the French side but increasingly on the Dutch.
Ile-de-France-born Virginie and Annabelle, from the Haute Savoie region, are both well-established in St Martin but proud of their French roots. It’s a very basic line-up: Annabelle provides the instrumentation via a pickup-driven classical guitar, while Virginie is the front-woman, wielding nothing but a microphone, a pure voice and a slinky appearance. Each, though, is a singer in her own right, with Annabelle much more than guitar and harmony vocals. She’s the engine room of the act.
They met in the unpromising environs of a karaoke night, that well-known last resort for the singer without a vehicle for her talent. Virginie takes up the story.
“I had been looking for a woman to form a band with because I had been in bands before but always with men, and I wanted someone I could blend my voice with. And I wanted someone who could play an instrument, either guitar or piano.”
Her own instrumental ability, wrestling with a guitar, she dismisses with a philosophical shrug.
“I’ve been a beginner for 10 years.”
The two decided to try it out, and soon discovered they were on the same wavelength, both musically and personally. With a repertoire derived largely from songs that were popular in France in the 1990s and 2000s, they present a smooth sound that’s big on melody but not so much on drama: you’re not going to get your heart broken at an Avocado Pie gig. What you will get out of it is a sense of wellbeing. Annabelle has a rhythmic guitar style that compensates for the lack of other musicians. She grew up in a musical family and learned her first song, she says, in the womb.
“When she was pregnant my mother used to sing Gabriel Faure’s Requiem, and the first time I heard it as a child, I sang along with it note for note.”
While many guitarists use effects to vary their sound and backing tracks to fill the gaps, Annabelle uses nothing but her nimble fingers and a thumb that slaps like a funk bass player. Her only concession to technological trickery is a loop pedal, which works with songs that repeat a sequence around and around. It records the first time (so you’d better not screw it up) and then repeats the sequence ad infinitum, so the guitarist can play variations over the top of his or her own work.
The self-deprecating Virginie describes her musical upbringing as being largely pop-oriented, while Annabelle was more of a rocker, an electric guitar-toting teenager. Accordingly, their lengthy repertoire has three gears, with the potential to start off gentle and sweet and end up pretty lively, depending on the venue, the crowd and the occasion.
Finding out where you can see Avocado Pie is as easy as liking their Facebook page, so if you like a bit of style and quality on your night out, that’s where to start.
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