Harvieu was discovered on MySpace by a local music manager after uploading demo tracks. After being introduced to Jimmy Hogarth she began working on demos and was signed to Universal Music when she was 18.
Harvieu started recording an album but in May 2011, but before it could be released, she broke her back in what she describes as a ‘freak accident’, “I heard it snap. I couldn’t feel my feet,” the singer recalled. After a 14-hour operation, Harvieu spent months recovering at the Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital.
On 5 December 2011, the BBC announced that she had been nominated for their BBC Sounds of 2012 poll. After releasing the singles “Through the Night” and “Open Up Your Arms”, her first album Through the Night was released on Island Records on 14 May 2012, entering the UK album chart at No 5.
Ren Harvieu: Meet a Lancashire girl whose voice and sound will stop you dead in your tracks. Her name is Ren Harvieu. Her hair is heavy and shaggy, her eyes lined with kohl, her manner as down-to-earth as the streets of Broughton in Salford, which is where she was born, just over twenty-one years ago. Schooled in dusty youth club contests rather than star-spangled pop schools, she has had quite a life already; she’s also had quite a year. A terrifying accident nearly ended everything for her this summer, but now, only four months after she thought she would never walk again, she is walking back to us. So here she still is – and how she sings. Ren opens her mouth, and her voice transports us to a place where youthfulness becomes yearning, where dreams become dramas, and music aches longingly, full of beauty and power. Ren Harvieu was born in 1991, the youngest by far of three girls. She was shy as a child, observing everyone while the world whirled around her, soaking up the music she loved like a sponge. Her dad was a singer, touring the area’s pubs, singing Irish folk songs, James Taylor and Simon and Garfunkel songs; he’d tell stories to his daughter about the locals who would carry him from his stool, and pop him in the Ladies’ toilets, still singing and playing.
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