Bohemian Rhapsody

THE SULTRY SOUNDS OF ANGELA McCLUSKEY

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With her heart-piercing, worldly-wise voice, Angela McCluskey brings to mind Nina Simone or Billie Holiday. But spend a few minutes with this chortling, cussing, room-dominating force of nature and all hints of tragedy disappear. Though she has just come out with her first solo album, MeCluskey has been making music for years—and collecting a group of eerily devoted followers along the way. Born and raised in Glasgow, she moved at age 20 to London, where she met her first devotee, Paul Cantelon, a classical pianist who seems to have stepped off the pages of Wuthering Heights, at an Indian restauRANT. He took over the ivories upon request of the owner, she soon hung over the piano like "an old trollop," and that was that. Next stop Los Angeles, where McCluskey and a bunch of musician friends got their break performing at a Hollywood church that doubles as a gathering spot for A. A. meetings. They called themselves the Wild Colonials and became a fixture at the L.A. cafe Largo, performing each Tuesday evening. It was called Angela's Big Night Out, and Hollywood hipsters, like Winona Ryder, Keanu Reeves, Josh Charles, Harry Dean Stanton, and Daryl Hannah, flocked and became converts. They followed her moves as she dazzled Paris with the electronica band Telepopmusik and settled in New York, injecting it with vintage Bohemia, complete with nonstop dinner parties of impromptu performance and way too much red wine. Finally, at age 36, with all the big nights and big friends under her belt, she got down to something more personal: a little album of her own, called The Things We Do, which she recorded for $2,000 in a cramped room beside a railway track in Sweden, home to Nathan Larson, who produced the album and wrote some of the songs. "Everyone says you're being an egomaniac," she says of going solo. "I just said, 'Look, I just want to do a bunch of really depressing, melancholic, gorgeous songs before I die.'"

EVGENIA PERETZ