The rocking singer-songwriter Anna Calvi tells Jonathan Evans about controlling her fiery passion within – and what happens when she lets it loose

As she preps before bringing her theatrical live performance to Grappa’s Cellar, the British-Italian singer spills secrets to Time Out about her year on the road, and the angels and demons that drive her emotive music.

Your Hong Kong show will be one of the last stops on a tour that’s taken you all around the world. How has the year been?
What’s hard about it is not being home much. But it’s also really fun. You get to see a lot of places you probably wouldn’t get the chance to see. Just being given the opportunity to [play for] people who want to hear you play, I feel incredibly lucky and I don’t take it for granted. So yeah, I really enjoy touring.

Your debut album is one of the most deeply personal, emotionally charged records we’ve heard in a long time. It’s tempting to read autobiographical influences into it. To what degree would you say songs such as Blackout come from experiences you have been through yourself?
It’s very personal. Blackout was written as a result of an experience that I had which I felt would be a great thing to make a song about. For me I need it to be personal because I need to feel a lot about it to make it into a song.

Our personal favourites include No More Words and Love Won’t Be Leaving. Is there one you’re particularly proud of, or enjoy playing the most – and why?
Playing live, Love Won’t Be Leaving is my favourite. It’s nice because there’s a lot of improvisation in that song which is great to have. When you’re playing live every night, it’s great to have a moment where you never know where it’s going to go.

In the song The Devil, which holds a lot of dread and fear, you don’t identify the devilish force in the title – were you deliberately keeping it open to interpretation or is the Devil a metaphor for harrowing experiences such as heartbreak?
I think for me I use the Devil… it’s basically a metaphor for being out of control. In the sense that sometimes it can feel really amazing, whatever it is that’s making you feel like you’re losing control. But it can be really terrifying, and it’s whether you let yourself go and let yourself get into it or whether you try and keep the control. But I wanted it to feel ambiguous because I thought it would be a more interesting way of addressing the topic.

There’s a persistent theme of romantic possession in your songs – almost like a hijacking, where you’re seeking to capture the object of desire. In his lecture The Secret Life of the Love Song, Nick Cave (who you’ve toured with) talks of love songs as having ‘the insidious power to imprison one’s beloved, to bind their hands with love lines… in a bondage of poetry’. Are these ideas you relate to as an artist?
Yeah, definitely. For me I really wanted to make a romantic, passionate record. I wanted it to be beautiful in some way even if it was painful or ugly but it still had a sense of wanting to reach something better. That’s partly through the fact that love can be really ugly – but can be really inspirational as well.

Once I became familiar with your powerful singing voice, I found it hard to believe your speaking voice is so much softer and your personality so placid. To me, your music often suggests other artforms – theatre, opera, poetry. To what extent would you say you’re taking on a different persona or role-playing?
For me it’s really important that my music is expressing a truth in me and that it feels like it’s coming from somewhere honest. So I don’t feel at all like I’m becoming a different persona. It’s a different side of me because I find music is such a natural way for me to express myself that I can get in touch with a really strong part of my personality in a way that I can’t in other situations.

Finally, have you started writing the next album – and can you imagine diverging widely from the template of the first album on your future recordings?
Yeah, I’m thinking about it all the time. And when I have time, I work on it and I’m writing whenever I can. It’s something that this year, when I come home, I’ll get stuck into properly. It’s too soon for me to talk about in what way it’ll be different or similar. But I’m really excited and looking forward to getting to work on it. 

Anna Calvi plays Grappa's Cellar on February 15. Tickets: at the door.