Despite the Gallic monikor Paris Motel is as English as tuppence and is actually a vehicle for London based Amy May - sometime viola player in various orchestras and quartets as well as with artists as diverse as Circulus and Suggs and arranger and orchestrator for the likes of Jeff Beck and Sean Rowley's Guilty Pleasures live shows.

Her debut album, on which she plays virtually all the instruments, is a haunting collection of tales interwoven with magical and mysterious ladies, from pirates and poets to French erotic novelists and mediaeval witches. The Salpêtrière, once an asylum for the mad and the destitute women of Paris, is here used as a handy metaphor to house and collect these weird and wonderful characters.

It may be a strange concept but it's one that has recently been lapped up by appreciative audiences at Glastonbury, Latitude and SXSW, and musically sits somewhere between the pastoral folk of the Fairports and Robert Kirby's orchestration for Nick Drake.

In the Salpêtrière – Track by Track by Amy May

Three Steps - inspired by Grace O' Malley (aka 'Grace The Bald'), the notorious lady pirate of the last 16th Century, who once had a legendary meeting with Queen Elizabeth I.

My Demeter - about the love affair between Mary Campbell (wife of poet Roy Campbell and one of the famous Garman sisters) and Vita Sackville-West in the Kent countryside.

After Wanda - Wanda was the notorious 'Venus' in Leopold von
Sacher-Masoch's 'Venus in Furs'. The song centres on what happens after the story, when Severin returns to his father's estate to recover from his experience.

Coignet's Trial - the story of a prostitute who was burned at the stake for being a witch when she healed a woman of her headaches.
City of Ladies - named after 'The Book of the City of Ladies' by
Christine de Pizan which offered advice on how to live life as a woman in the fifteenth century.

Baby Diamond - for and about my mother.

Stockholm - written after reading about Patty Hearst.
Catherine by the Sea - a love song to all men and male/female sexuality, dedicated to the writer and art critic Catherine Millet.