Meet a Lancashire girl whose voice and sound will stop you dead in your tracks. Her name is Ren Harvieu. Her hair is heavy and shaggy, her eyes lined with kohl, her manner as down-to-earth as the streets of Broughton in Salford, which is where she was born, just over twenty-one years ago. Schooled in dusty youth club contests rather than star-spangled pop schools, she has had quite a life already; she’s also had quite a year. A terrifying accident nearly ended everything for her this summer, but now, only four months after she thought she would never walk again, she is walking back to us.
So here she still is – and how she sings. Ren opens her mouth, and her voice transports us to a place where youthfulness becomes yearning, where dreams become dramas, and music aches longingly, full of beauty and power.
Ren Harvieu was born in 1991, the youngest by far of three girls. She was shy as a child, observing everyone while the world whirled around her, soaking up the music she loved like a sponge. Her dad was a singer, touring the area’s pubs, singing Irish folk songs, James Taylor and Simon and Garfunkel songs; he’d tell stories to his daughter about the locals who would carry him from his stool, and pop him in the Ladies’ toilets, still singing and playing.