Through The Looking Glass

"Sonja [Ter Horst, piano] is into more of the dramatic side of music: she has been a Tori Amos fan, loves Amanda Palmer, she loves the epic ballads. I've always loved Concrete Blonde and Chrissie Hynde – we've got quite different backgrounds really,” Love Like Hate vocalist Heather Cheketri observes, as she casts her mind over the alchemy and opposition that brings herself and pianist Ter Horst together so successfully. “Our different styles seem to create something we both love the sound of.”

Having met long before they began songwriting together, both Ter Horst and Cheketri played in a few other bands before a casual jam became a serendipitous chance for both of them. “We've known each other for ages, but hadn't ever played together at all,” Cheketri explains. “In the end, it just happened, after ten years of a friendship. We had no previous discussion about it, we'd never mentioned it at all before. I'd always played in other bands and I knew she played keys, but one night we just decided to play together for fun, a spur of the moment thing.”

What sealed the deal for Cheketri was the then-novel combination of guitar and piano, something she hadn't tried before. “The first lot of music we worked on together were things I'd already written, but I liked how that sounded with keys, and I realised that working with Sonja could bring in different elements to the music. Sonya seemed to like it as well,” she laughs, understating the case somewhat.

In fact, Cheketri actually goes as far as to say that the pair are their music's own biggest fans. “We have a mutual love of what we're making, and we also seem to be in agreement about how things are sounding, how they should go together, and we've had that since the beginning,” she says. “I'm self-taught and she's classically trained, and even from the beginning this brought a whole new element to our songs, brought something fresh to the sound we're writing.”

As rosy as their sonic garden is, Cheketri admits that playing nicely with others didn't come completely naturally to her – as a musician, that is. “Having to work with other people was a big wake-up call for me,” she admits. “When you write by yourself, you have a rhythm and a melody in your head and it all works. Then, when you write with other people when the sound all comes together there's lots of 'hang on, that's not sitting right' or 'that doesn't go there'. You have to pull back and let go of the ease of playing by yourself. But that's okay, I come from a big family, and I'm used to being the negotiator.”

Both Cheketri and Ter Horst are fans of the more theatrical of songstresses: neither Amos nor Palmer, to pick an infamous two, are anywhere near shy of outrageous hijinks, and Ms Hynde, while a bit more refined perhaps, is renowned as a confident stage performer. Setting them up as influences and examples, a Love Like Hate fan might expect the band's stage show to be a little on the wild side. They might, but they would be more than slightly disappointed.

“We both really do like the theatrical artists, like Amanda Palmer, Kate Bush and all that, but we're not extroverted people,” Cheketri states. “When we put on a show, the theatrics are in the sound, and what is written. The songs we write are lyrically purposeful and meant to be an emotional ride, but we don't dance or wear warpaint or anything like that – we're concentrating on the sounds we're making.”