‘Right now - more than ever - we need music’

After all, it took the West End musical leading light, model, soap star and film actress ten years to land a record contract with big-hitters BMG.

“I feel very excited and it’s come around really quickly since I released my first EP [Better When I’m Drunk] last March,” says Twinnie, 32, who first took to the stage as Twinnie-Lee Moore at the age of four.

“Given the current situation with the coronavirus pandemic, it’s a weird time, but I’m a new artist, I’ve waited so long to make an album, and right now, more than ever, I feel I need music, we need music.

“It would be easy to panic, but I’ve found I’ve connected more than ever with my fans on Instagram Live.”

Twinnie was to have played a sold-out home-city gig at The Crescent on March 22 to showcase Hollywood Gypsy, but the coronavirus pandemic put paid to her debut headline tour, now re-arranged for the autumn. Glasgow, London, Manchester, Birmingham and Bristol await, before a Crescent crescendo on November 29, with tickets remaining valid.

Twinnie did perform, however, at the prestigious Country2Country (C2C) Festival in Berlin on March 7 and 8, and coming next was a C2C show at the O2 Arena, London, on March 14. “That would have been a really big deal for me, being able to promote my album and tour, so it’s a real downer, but I’m just really grateful that there’s still light at the end of the tunnel, and it’s good that we’ve managed to re-schedule the tour,” she says.

As chance would have it, the C2C cancellation led to a prompt invitation to fill the void in Twinnie’s diary with a live set on BBC Radio 2’s The Country Show with Bob Harris on March 12. “Bob has been a really big supporter of mine,” she says. “He was the first DJ to support me on the radio, even before I had a recording contract. I just sent him a track and he played it!”

Twinnie first trod the boards in York when attending the late Miss Isobel Dunn’s dance school, started playing a keyboard at seven and then performed in the Grand Opera House pantomime dance ensemble. She progressed from roles of Bet in Oliver! in 2001 and Lilly in Annie in 2002 in the Grand Opera House Youth Project to playing Dorothy in The Wizard Of Oz in 2003.

“I was 16 and I thought I might have been too tall for Dorothy but the director, Simon Barry, said I was the right choice,” she recalls.

A month later, the former Joseph Rowntree School pupil was leaving behind her Haxby Road home for three years of dance and musical theatre studies at Phil Winston’s Theatre Works in Blackpool.

West End roles ensued in We Will Rock You and the short-lived Desperately Seeking Susan, and in April 2009 she returned home to the Grand Opera House at 21 as Velma in the national tour of Chicago.

Her face graced the London Underground posters for Chicago too and she had a year as the Latino character Jazmin in Flashdance in the original London cast at the Shaftesbury Theatre from autumn 2010.

She sang Miley Cyrus’s The Climb when competing on BBC One talent show The Voice in March 2012, and after film roles in Iron Clad 2 and Strangelove in 2014, she made her soap debut as Porsche McQueen in Hollyoaks in November that year.

A further screen role followed in The Wife, the Oscar-nominated Glenn Close film, but all the while, she was drawn to making music. “To be honest, music was probably the first thing I started out wanting to do, which people don’t know about. But people pay their dues to pay their mortgage,” she says.

“Even when I was doing We Will Rock You at 19 with Brian May, doing eight shows a week, I was playing country songs in dive bars too at the weekend.”

Now dividing her time between London and Nashville, Twinnie is living out that wish to put her song-writing to the fore. “I’ve been on stage since I was four years old, and my dad introduced me to the music of some of the best songwriters. Like my first gig was Gilbert O’Sullivan, and I always loved musicals too,” she says. “I grew up watching Hollywood musicals, especially Judy Garland, which is one of the reasons I’ve called the album Hollywood Gypsy.

“Even at eight, I wrote down the addresses of the Sony Music and Universal record company labels. Then one of my poems got published at school. I always wanted to tell stories.”

Country music might not have been an obvious outlet for a York singer and songwriter, but Twinnie says: “For me, country music was always big. Johnny Cash; Dolly Parton, one of the great songwriters; Shania Twain and now Taylor Swift,” she says.

Twinnie has been travelling to Nashville, Tennessee, for the past six or seven years, leading to her co-writing in the capital of country with Grammy Award-winning writers Nathan Chapman, Liz Rose and Dave Barns.

“I also wrote with Ben Earle before he formed The Shires with Crissie Rhodes and two of my songs with him, Black And White and First Flight Out, ended up on their first album, Brave,” she says.

Now, after winning Best Breakthrough Act at the 2019 British Country Music Association awards and a support slot on Kiefer Sutherland’s tour, everything comes to fruition for Twinnie on Hollywood Gypsy.

This is a thoroughly modern country album recorded in Nashville, London and Sweden, with such song titles as Better When I’m Drunk, Type Of Girl, Whiplash, Lie To Me and I Love You, Now Change.

“Every genre changes and country music is now so diverse, but everyone appreciates a good melody, strong lyrics, and that’s why people really respect country music,” says Twinnie, who loves the candour of country songs.

“I have no shame in highlighting my flaws and being vulnerable: there’s a strength in vulnerability when we can all connect with it. Each song shows a different side of my personality: I either want to break someone’s heart or make them dance.”

Returning to the album title, Twinnie says: “It pretty much sums me up. As well as my love of Hollywood musicals, I’m a traveller by nature and by heritage, so I’m quite free. Hollywood Gypsy is about me, my life, my artistry.

“I’m representing my dad’s heritage, my mum’s heritage, and I’m very proud of that heritage. It’s who I am and why I’m free spirited.

“Whether I’m acting, dancing, modelling or singing, I’m just not afraid to push my boundaries because, when you feel you’re getting out of your depth, that’s when the magic happens.”

Charles Hutchinson