I hadn’t heard of Gemma Ray when her latest CD, Lights Out, Zoltar!, crossed my desk, but the title made me want to listen to it at least once. It reminded me of the kind of campy, overheated dialogue you’d read in a 1930s comic book or hear in Universal Studios’ Flash Gordon serials from the same era. I quickly learned, however, that Ray’s music is neither camp nor overheated. Lights Out, Zoltar! is more about British cool and spring-loaded tension, and three months after I first got the album I’m still marveling at the way Ray has synthesized a whole slew of retro references into a cinematic psychedelic sound. Ray’s sound is like one of those Willy Wonka Gobstoppers: it’s massive and composed of layer upon layer of aural tastes and colors. I hear Dick Dale-style surf guitar, bottle-slide blues, old gold soul, sci-fi and spaghetti-western soundtracks, and Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound, and, yet, unlike so many CDs that cross my path, there’s nothing derivative about the results.

Given the ambitiousness of her sound, I expected Ray to be backed by an extremely large band when she came to New York to play a show at the Mercury Lounge in lower Manhattan recently. But it turns out she’s capable of creating quite a wall of sound all by her lonesome using a series of effects pedals and, at one point, a large kitchen knife that she rubbed across her guitar’s strings like Girl Scout trying to spark a campfire. But with her retro clothes and Euro-beehive, Ray looked more like a 60s-era Claudia Cardinale than a campfire girl. During much of the show, she kept the knife tucked beneath the tailpiece of her guitar, but, at one point, she expertly flicked the utensil towards the floor, where it landed point-first but didn’t stick. At that moment, she reminded me of Anna Magnani.

The day after Ray’s show, I sat down to talk with her at Cake Shop on the Lower East Side, where I learned that she can be as hard to pin down as her music. The daughter of a car mechanic, Ray acquired her do-it-yourself spirit during her youth in Essex, England, where she fell in with a group of friends who converted a couple of demountables—British parlance for a portable shack or workspace—into a makeshift music studio where they learned how to play rock ‘n’ roll. Ray lives in London now, and though she describes her youth in Essex as culturally deficient, she has certainly made up for lost time.

Stream Gemma Ray’s “100 mph (in 2nd Gear)” below.

This text will be replaced var so = new SWFObject('/mp3/ontheweb/player.swf','mpl','500','20','9'); so.addParam('allowscriptaccess','always'); so.addParam('allowfullscreen','true'); so.addParam('flashvars','&file=http://downloads.vanityfair.com/downloads/music/100mph.mp3&backcolor=2e2b1e&frontcolor=FFFFFF'); so.write('player'); DiGiacomo: I love the title of your album, Lights Out, Zoltar. It got me to listen to the CD. And then I was blown away by what I heard.

Ray: That’s good, because I think it’s a deal maker or a deal breaker, that title. People either love it or they just don’t get it.

I believe you’ve said in past interviews that it’s essentially about science winning out over superstition.

Yeah, that’s how I feel.

When I saw you play the Mercury Lounge the other night, I initially thought, I’d love to see her play with Dick Dale—

Yeah!

But, by the end of the show, I’d decided that you didn’t need any accompaniment. You’re a one-woman band.

Part of me prefers to be part of a big band. In London, I have a regular band of about six people. There are lots of harmonies, and a girl who does backing vocals and lots of percussion and really nice mallets on an old kit—you know, trying for that sound that’s really big and old. But on my own, I love the feeling of being able to choose what I want to do that day. I love doing both really, but at the moment, I’m quite enjoying doing my own thing.

At the Mercury, you told the audience that you had planned to play a lot of psychedelic pop songs, but then because you couldn’t see anybody in the audience, you took another route.

I was being a bit dry there. I couldn’t see what I was doing, so I ended up changing the set.

You sure get some interesting sounds out of your guitar. You’ve got the bottle slide on your finger and then, the knife. When you moved it across the strings, your guitar sounded like a rock ‘n’ roll cello.

That’s what I like about using the knife: it’s responsive to the tiniest tweak, and it’s never the same twice. Sometimes you get a resonating squeal, and sometimes you hear a low cello drone. I quite like the spontaneity of it.

I love the way you stick the knife in the tailpiece of your guitar when you’re not using it.

That was a recent discovery. Wherever I play, I borrow a kitchen knife for my performances, and the guitar was actually given to me by my friend Matt Verta-Ray from Heavy Trash. He’s got a really amazing analog studio in a basement a few doors away from here, and I’ve been recording an album there. Matt lent the guitar to me for my last gig, and I grew so attached to it. It just gives off perfect guitar harmony, and then midway through recording he gave it to me as a sign of respect. He said, “We’re like Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan.” So, I don’t know if that’s [laughing] a reflection of our egos, but it’s the nicest thing anyone’s ever done for me.

He said you’re like Johnny Cash, or Bob Dylan?

I don’t know who was who.

Who would you want to be?

Johnny Cash, I think. I love them both, but they’re so different.

Your usual guitar is a Harmony Rocket?

The one I’ve been using over here is the lovely one that Matt gave me. I think it’s a 60s Hagstrom with Gretsch pick-ups and a Gretsch whammy bar. But I usually use Harmony Rockets at home. I accidentally bought three on eBay. They come up really cheap, and I suddenly got scared that they would become really expensive. I had a glass of wine and got a bit reckless, and I’ve actually got three now. But they’re great guitars.

I’ve read a lot of descriptions of your music by critics, but I’d love to hear you describe your sound?

Overall, it’s really honest. That’s the way I write songs, and that’s the way I wear my influences as well. I certainly mix a whole lot of influences, but I guess I try and rein them all into the best pop song I can.

One track I’d love you to tell me about is “100 MPH (In Second Gear).”

I actually wrote that song in Cannes. I was playing at the film festival there a few years ago. I somehow ended up there for four days, but I was in the hotel the whole time. Lyrically, there is that feeling of trying to push through something and get beyond it. Hopefully, it’s also about pulling stuck people out a bit—giving them a branch to hold onto to yank them out. I went through a period where I was ill for a couple years, and lot of those limits come from that place. I recently shot a video for the song that I’m really excited about.

At the show, you said that, in the video, you sing the song backwards?

Yeah, I had to lip-synch it backwards because they shot the song backwards and then played it forwards, which makes everything appear quite odd. It’s not obvious. It’s very subtle, but it doesn’t look quite right. That was really interesting, and it sounds amazing—like some sort of Gregorian British Christmas carol.

How do you sing something backwards?

I played the song backwards on my computer, wrote out what I heard phonetically and learned the phonetics. It took me a couple of days. I went to play the song at a show in Brussels recently. I know the song so well that I don’t really think about practicing it, but when I went to start, I’ve never felt such a strange disjointed confusion. I couldn’t remember how the hell to sing the song. Everyone was staring at me. But yeah, that video will be out soon on my MySpace and Facebook pages.

At the risk of really annoying you, I’d like to ask you to name five songs that you like or that influenced you. They don’t have to be your absolute favorite songs, just the first five songs that pop into your head.

I really can’t get enough of Roman Polanski and this guy Krzysztof Komeda, who composed the scores for most of his movies. The atmosphere of his music has haunted me for the last few years.

Do you have a favorite?

The Fearless Vampire Killers: I love that soundtrack in terms of atmospherics and production. Also, I just recently discovered John Barry. His “Persuaders” theme song—I’d never seen the program or heard the theme before—just blew my mind. If you hear it with fresh ears, it’s insane.

I think I read an interview in which you said that anything released after 1975 doesn’t move you.

[Laughs] Yeah, I knew as I said it that it was one of those sweeping I-need-to-have-a-coffee kind of comments: a bit overdramatic and probably not entirely true. Some of Nick Cave’s songwriting and the dynamic of his band blows my mind. I really like “No More Shall We Part” as an album and, in particular, the track “God Is In The House.” I really love that song because, lyrically, it’s got a story that’s moving and emotional, and it just drives.

Since this establishment has been playing nothing but Rolling Stones tunes since we got here, do you like anything by them?

I don’t like Mick Jagger. I don’t know if that’s going to make the world hate me. But, as a singer, it’s your job to portray either who you are or where you come from, and when singers sing in an accent that’s not their own, I don’t understand that. And I don’t have any faith in that. I’ve been sitting here getting riled up for the last hour thinking: You’re singing in an American accent, and you’re a posh white London boy! But again, on another day, a Rolling Stones song will come along and I’ll be blown away. I think he’s got a great band. Who else do I love? I really like “Lights Out, Ibiza” by Sparks, which inspired, in part, my album title. I love the way the song builds and builds and builds. That’s amazing. There are so many songwriters that I adore that I find it hard to pick, but Leonard Cohen, obviously—

Tell me a little bit about your early life. You grew up in Essex. I read that you and your friends built a studio where you learned to play.

It wasn’t that glamorous. It was sort of a gypsy camp where you’d get car mechanics and where people had little lock-ups. They call them demountables where I’m from. We hired two of those between a big group of friends and tried to soundproof them and kit them out with junky instruments. And we taught each other to play, I guess. Well, they taught me. For the first few years, me and my girlfriends just sat there watching. And then eventually me and another girl started a band. But yeah, there was nowhere to go and hang out. It’s not a cultural place. At most of the pubs, you’d just get beaten up by the chaps. So, we spent all of our spare time in there listening to music and making music. We were always saying, “Oh God, this is horrible. We’ve got to get out of this shithole Essex”—but in hindsight that probably made us more focused on creating our own world.

Gemma sounds like an Italian name. What’s your background?

It could be actually, but, um, I’m not that bothered about finding out. The only thing I know about my family’s history is that there’s a woman back in the like the 1600s who was a cook and a servant in this guy’s house. And she tried to poison him for some reason. So she made this cake with poison in it, but accidentally, her children ate the cake. So her children died. And then she was hung. So, that’s one I’m quite proud of. I know that, but I don’t know where I come from. I come from her—a murderess. [Laughs]

What’s next for you?

I’ve just done a covers album in three days. I kept it live, with a minimum of overdubs, the opposite of my last album.

Can you tell me any of the songs on it?

I’m not sure which ones I’m going to choose, but I took music from Krzysztof Komeda’s soundtrack to Rosemary’s Baby, and I used lyrics from Sonic Youth’s “Drunken Butterfly” to make it a medley—a cheery medley. It was an accident really. The lyrics just seemed to fit with the song. I’ve also recorded a Yiddish song called “Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen.” In the Second World War, the Nazis thought it was a German song. So, they invited it to be sung by the Andrews Sisters and then they realized that it was actually Jewish. I’ve also done “Touch Me I’m Sick,” by Mudhoney, and “Hey, Big Spender,” but not in the way you’d imagine.

That’s an interesting collection of songs.

We’ll see. It’s not mixed yet, but I’m pretty sure that I’m going to release it, maybe in March or April. I just wanted to record an album without an agenda to really see where things are going.

You opened for one of Mott The Hoople’s reunion shows in London, didn’t you?

I opened for them at the Hammersmith Apollo in London. They were really cool. Jimmy Page came to see them as well.

If I had to name my top five favorite singer/songwriters, Ian Hunter would definitely be at or near the top.

It was quite an introduction to their music for me. And we went to the aftershow! It was quite funny. It was just a tiny room. Me and my friend were the only girls in there. It was a total cock forest. They were really a funny bunch of people. And Jimmy Page came out as well.

Did you get to meet Jimmy Page?

Yeah, loads. He was going to do a guitar solo for me on a cover of The Shangri-La’s “Walking in the Sand” that I recorded for my new album. I’ve done quite a psychedelic version of it. I was really excited about that.

Was? Does that mean it’s not going to happen?

We set a date and a place to do it. And then he went to see Jeff Beck, who invited a singer/songwriter named Imelda May onto the stage. They did a cover of “Walkin’ In the Sand,” with Jeff Beck doing a big solo for it. And Jimmy literally put his head in his hands. He called me and said, ‘I can’t do it’, because he and Jeff have a history. They’ve been friends, but always in competition. I cried when I got the phone call, but I couldn’t help thinking it wasn’t meant to happen, because there were just too many odd coincidences. I happen to think Imelda May is this really good rockabilly girl, but she’s got dark hair; the same clothes as me; the same guitar. But, Jimmy did say some encouraging things, which was really nice.

Are you still going to do the song?

Yeah. I prefer my own solo, anyway.

Photo by Simon Webb.