Don't Call Me Rosie

Full passage

Tuscany, 1978. Rosanna MacKail and producer Philip Jones are recording her first solo album. As the songs take shape, Rosanna turns a nickname she dislikes into the chorus of an imaginary Wild West saloon song: ‘Hey, Rosie, Rosie’.

One morning she set the guitar aside and said, almost casually, ‘I’d like to sing a song in French.’

Phil looked up. ‘All right.’

She smiled faintly. ‘Don’t look so alarmed.’

Then she leaned into the microphone and sang, Il y avait des mots que je n’entendais pas…

Her voice changed without quite changing. It was still Rosanna, but more interior, more self-contained. By the time she reached Entre les lignes, entre les heures… Phil had already decided that the arrangement would need restraint.

‘No one gets to overplay on that one,’ he said.

Rosanna nodded. ‘Exactly.’

At the other end of the scale, Still Standing Here arrived with a riff before it had a complete shape. Rosanna took up the electric guitar, struck the opening figure, and the room changed around it. The drums came later, hard and live. She sang, I’m still standing here / Through the break, through the fall, through the years… and when Phil listened back, he said only, ‘That one has to sound like control, not fury.’

Rosanna gave him a quick look of approval.

‘Yes.’

Then there were the stranger turns.

One afternoon she walked in carrying a bouzouki case.

Phil stared. ‘What on earth is that?’

Rosanna set it down carefully and opened it with obvious pleasure. ‘A very good idea. I bought it in Greece. And don’t make that face — I can play it.’

‘Can you?’

She picked out a bright, metallic phrase in answer, then let it run into the opening of Where the Light Stayed.

There was a shore that held the morning
Before the day had found its heat…

The instrument sat beneath the song like sunlight on stone. Later, when they reached the middle section, she played longer and with more confidence, the bouzouki carrying the tune while acoustic guitar and mandolin moved around it. Phil listened from the desk, smiling despite himself.

‘All right,’ he said. ‘I withdraw the question.’

Side two began in a different mood. Rosanna wanted movement, colour, and a sense of release. She sat on a stool with an acoustic guitar and began strumming in a loose Latin rhythm.

‘This one has to dance,’ she said. ‘Otherwise there’s no point.’

She sang the verses in English, then broke effortlessly into, Baila la vida, no mira atrás…

The chorus lifted the room at once.

Phil laughed under his breath. ‘That’s not fair.’

‘What?’

‘You’ve hidden a serious song inside something people can move to.’

‘That’s usually the best place to hide it,’ she said.

Later still came Turning Without Sound, which barely seemed to begin at all. It simply arrived and moved. Phil built that one from the bass upward, careful not to disturb its pulse. Rosanna sang, And it turns without sound / Doesn’t rise, doesn’t fall… and when he suggested something more pronounced on the drums, she shook her head.

‘No. Let it keep its nerve.’

By then the album had begun to feel less like a collection of songs and more like a landscape. There were changes of language, weather, rhythm and distance, but the voice moving through all of it remained unmistakably the same.

One afternoon, Rosanna pushed her chair back and picked up the guitar again with a grin Phil recognised at once.

‘I’ve had an idea.’

‘That look usually means trouble.’

‘Only musically.’

She strummed a bright, infectious rhythm.

‘You know how I hate being called Rosie?’

He nodded. ‘Very strongly.’

‘So imagine this,’ she said. ‘An alternative life. The Wild West. I’m singing in a saloon. Country and western. Everyone’s drinking. The place goes mad when I start to sing.’

She played on, the tune bouncing along, cheerful and irrepressible. Then, without warning, she leaned into the microphone and sang, not as herself, but as the room she was imagining.

Hey, Rosie, Rosie
Come on, give us a song
Hey, Rosie, Rosie
Won’t you sing it all night long

Phil felt himself smiling before he realised it.

She pushed on, louder now, the rhythm tightening as if the whole place were stamping along with her.

Hey, Rosie, Rosie
Let the whole place hear ya
She said I’ll sing you a song
I’ll sing all night long

Then she changed just slightly, and the last line came back at him clear and deliberate.

She said don’t call me Rosie
’Cause my name’s Rosanna

She let the chord ring out and looked at him, waiting.

Phil exhaled. ‘Well,’ he said slowly, ‘that’s going to get people singing.’

She grinned. ‘That’s the idea.’