Speaker 1: Quest Love Supreme is a production of iHeartRadio. Ladies and gentlemen,
Speaker 1: Welcome to another episode of Quetch Love Supreme. I'm you know,
Speaker 1: it's course love and with three of course is the
Speaker 1: ever present Team Supreme. Uh, frantically, what's happening.
Speaker 2: What's happening, what's happening, what's happening?
Speaker 1: Yeah, I was about to say, you gotta tell me
Speaker 1: what's the after effect of the Little Brother documentary?
Speaker 2: Uh, it's been a lot, man.
Speaker 3: I think the first week it came out, like when
Speaker 3: we first put it out during the uh during Black Friday,
Speaker 3: I had one my homie hit me and was like, Yo, man,
Speaker 3: I haven't talked to my sister in three years, and
Speaker 3: I'm gonna give her a call after watching this. So
Speaker 3: it's been it's been stuff like that. Like it hasn't
Speaker 3: even been a lot of music shit. It's been people
Speaker 3: just been hitting me, just talking about personal shit, personal
Speaker 3: shit like yo, ill my man's like yo, I'm about
Speaker 3: to start my own business now being bullshit and this.
Speaker 2: You know, it's been a lot.
Speaker 3: So it's been opened up a lot of conversations that uh,
Speaker 3: I think we're Yeah, it was it was kind of overwhelming.
Speaker 3: At first, just to kind of be getting all that
Speaker 3: at one time, you know what I mean. But uh,
Speaker 3: but people really enjoyed it, and they see the spirit
Speaker 3: of what we made and you know, the love and
Speaker 3: care what we made it, and so I'm just happy
Speaker 3: that people enjoying it.
Speaker 2: Man.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I was going to say that we're kind of
Speaker 1: at the the end of the stretch, like where we
Speaker 1: must turn the record in somewhere, and it's sort of
Speaker 1: like kind of after watching the documentary, I was like, hey,
Speaker 1: do we have to give this to a major label?
Speaker 2: Like come on, come on, come on, come on.
Speaker 1: He preaches this forever. I was going to say that
Speaker 1: we're seriously trying to. I think we're considering, you know,
Speaker 1: taking the training wheels off and see if we can
Speaker 1: do this for depth. I mean, technically, yes, we owe
Speaker 1: def jam another record, but it's also like it's been
Speaker 1: ten years and there's a whole nother ministration there, so
Speaker 1: you know, it's not like I think they're crying, like
Speaker 1: damn it. Yeah. When we were last there working on
Speaker 1: How I Got Over, there was an executive in the
Speaker 1: studio with us, and he was talking shit about us,
Speaker 1: thinking that Tarik was like one of the staff at
Speaker 1: Electric Ladies Studios. I don't know what they look like.
Speaker 1: I don't know the album, just fucking hearing Ship Manek's like, Yo,
Speaker 1: I'm in this studio with you. He oh, I'm sorry.
Speaker 1: I thought. Oh damn, I thought he worked here.
Speaker 2: So y'all institution, man, I love to see it. That'll
Speaker 2: be dope.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so I'll say that you definitely planned to see
Speaker 1: in that to see if we can do this on
Speaker 1: our own bill. What's up man? All of our lives?
Speaker 4: Like, I'm great. I was just thinking about what I
Speaker 4: learned from the Little Brother documentary is do whatever the
Speaker 4: fuck you want and be.
Speaker 1: Really good at it.
Speaker 4: Like that's the best piece of advice, Like, don't succume
Speaker 4: to anybody else's wants. Just do you and be true
Speaker 4: to your art, like no Ship and I. We all
Speaker 4: make art here, but like to be that true to
Speaker 4: it and like honest about it is really cool. And
Speaker 4: that's what I learned, amongst other things about other certain people.
Speaker 4: That's what I learned from the Little Brother documentary.
Speaker 1: I loved it. I would love to say that you're
Speaker 1: like your JMI Jazz recording offices, Steve, but that's how
Speaker 1: that's how official it looks right now. So I don't
Speaker 1: know what's going on. Like you got your own merch
Speaker 1: now your own bags.
Speaker 2: Like, oh you saw that.
Speaker 5: Yeah, we're doing well JMI Recordings dot com. Yeah, little
Speaker 5: jazz label here, and Yo, Steve, I want to tell you.
Speaker 3: Too, Bro, I bought I finally broke down and bought
Speaker 3: a turntable and I listened to like all like the
Speaker 3: records that you've given, Bro, they sound amazing, man, like amazing,
Speaker 3: Like they sound great on vinyl. So now y'all are
Speaker 3: doing a great job. Bro, this ship is the shit
Speaker 3: is dope. The record sole really great.
Speaker 5: Thank you so much. I'll send you I'll fill you
Speaker 5: in on what you don't have.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, for sure. I mean cops, I mean the link.
Speaker 6: You know.
Speaker 2: It takes money.
Speaker 4: He makes, he makes house calls. He came to Hoboken
Speaker 4: and delivered me records. That happens, Damn I have to ask.
Speaker 1: Damn. Meanwhile, Steve, I live in the same building. I
Speaker 1: find myself stealing my own product anyway, So let's get
Speaker 1: to it. I will say I love a good transformation story,
Speaker 1: the artistic metamorphosis or what we call uh departure albums.
Speaker 1: I've even taught about departure albums at NY you were
Speaker 1: a few semesters for those not hip to the term.
Speaker 1: You know, departure album is basically like the one album
Speaker 1: you can and that doesn't sound like what you represented
Speaker 1: when you first came in the door. I mean there's
Speaker 1: there's some legiti metamorphosis, like artists like and grow eventually.
Speaker 1: I guess the most famous departure album would be right
Speaker 1: going on? Well, no, I was going to say Sergeant
Speaker 1: Pepper's was the very first one, because the Beatles wanted
Speaker 1: to kill the Beatles or the idea of the mop
Speaker 1: tops and teeny boppers and never tour again, and then
Speaker 1: that backfired and actually made them more famous and then
Speaker 1: caused them to implode. But even that was inspired by
Speaker 1: a departure record, which I guess you could say pet
Speaker 1: Sounds by the Beach Boys as that, But I mean
Speaker 1: there's millions of them.
Speaker 2: There's Thinker Life of Plants.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Secret Life of Plants, right going on? Kid A
Speaker 1: Grace land Light, Yeah, oh Rave Light, Uh huh? Actually
Speaker 1: was she trend hop? It was that? Really?
Speaker 2: You know, it was it was a departure from what
Speaker 2: came before. I'll say that.
Speaker 1: Right right, she wasn't popped. Okay, you're right, but I mean, well,
Speaker 1: awaken my love, Ata waits and heartbreaks for hip hop,
Speaker 1: Paul's benef there you go, yeah, bitch brewe dirty mind.
Speaker 1: So it's all there.
Speaker 2: Did the roots of a departure album?
Speaker 1: What phrenology or something? It's hard to say. I mean,
Speaker 1: phrenology wasn't more an excuse to do something different than
Speaker 1: I realized, Like how slow I was listening to The Roots
Speaker 1: Come Alive and like shit was like slow, but also
Speaker 1: doing the Roots Come Alive? Like I was at my
Speaker 1: physical heaviest at like four hundred plus pounds, and I
Speaker 1: had lost weight for Phrenology, and suddenly I felt like
Speaker 1: I wanted to be more energetic. So and then it
Speaker 1: became like, let's just do what we're not supposed to do.
Speaker 1: So it's sort of a departure record. But time will
Speaker 1: tell if I was just you know, not willing to
Speaker 1: face the keep the things fall apart thing alive? I
Speaker 1: don't know, but I will say that our Guest Today
Speaker 1: has been a long time favorite of mine since her
Speaker 1: two thousand and six debut, and shortly there after I
Speaker 1: was fortunate enough to I guess. A year later work
Speaker 1: on work with her on Al Green's Laid Down album,
Speaker 1: and then a year after that we worked on her
Speaker 1: sophomore album, to See, And you know, I kind of
Speaker 1: thought I had her completely figure it out, and nothing
Speaker 1: prepared me for her fourth record. I'll just say that
Speaker 1: that much quick backstory. I guess, our guest and I
Speaker 1: reconnected in the summer of twenty twenty three. She give
Speaker 1: me a copy of the record. She did it so
Speaker 1: casually that two days went by before I remember that,
Speaker 1: OHI the record, let me peep and see what's up,
Speaker 1: And you know, it was kind of gobsmack. And again,
Speaker 1: I'm trying to avoid typical questlove hyper bowl when it
Speaker 1: comes to my excitement for something. But you know, it's
Speaker 1: been a minute that I've listened to a complete album
Speaker 1: on repeat over again by an artist not named Salt,
Speaker 1: and I will to say that there's a lot to
Speaker 1: unpack here. Normally I want to go through the whole,
Speaker 1: you know, journey of an artist's life, but I'm so
Speaker 1: obsessed with this record. I have so many questions. I
Speaker 1: might have to do this interview backwards. But yeah, for me,
Speaker 1: Black Rainbows is one of my favorite records of the year,
Speaker 1: and I'm really really excited to have a conversation with
Speaker 1: our guest today, Grinn Belly Ray One Quest Love Supreme.
Speaker 6: Welcome, Heydan, Thanks so much. Thanks for that introduction.
Speaker 1: Wait let me see. Oh god, okay, twelve minutes. We're
Speaker 1: not bad. Normally I don't even get to the guest
Speaker 1: until twenty seven minutes. All right, and it's time to go.
Speaker 1: Thank you very much, Karin, Thank you. So right now
Speaker 1: you are in You're in Connecticut right now?
Speaker 6: Correct, right now, I'm in New York, so I may
Speaker 6: or may not be getting up to Connecticut today. It
Speaker 6: depends as loads of snow on the road. So I
Speaker 6: always try and make a show like I'm happy to
Speaker 6: be there, and if only twenty people come, then we're
Speaker 6: still going to have a good time. But we'll see
Speaker 6: what the he says. I hate cancel shows. It's so disappointing,
Speaker 6: you know. I hate to be a fan and have
Speaker 6: a council show. And I've been to so many shows
Speaker 6: where nobody else could make it. You know, then you
Speaker 6: feel like you're the lucky one hundred people who brave
Speaker 6: the storm or whatever. So yeah, hopefully we'll be.
Speaker 1: Up there and when someone cancels on you, okay, let
Speaker 1: me get out my feelings anyway. Yeah, I hate when
Speaker 1: artists cancel on people. Well, first of all, I'm curious
Speaker 1: for this particular tour, how many musicians are you with
Speaker 1: because this album is so sprawling in terms of its
Speaker 1: I mean, you literally cover every damn near every genre
Speaker 1: of music. And you know, my obsession with it was
Speaker 1: how is she going to pull this off live? What
Speaker 1: is the makeup of the band that you're with on tour?
Speaker 6: The lineup, there's just six of us in the band.
Speaker 6: So there is Melanie Charles who's singing and she's playing
Speaker 6: flute and she's playing percushion, and I'm singing and playing guitar,
Speaker 6: electric guitar and some percussion stuff. Aaron Barnette is playing
Speaker 6: tenor saxophone. Kyle Bolden is playing electric guitar, who I
Speaker 6: absolutely love. I've wanted to work with him for a
Speaker 6: long time. He plays with Stevie Wonder and we're lucky
Speaker 6: that Stevie's in the studio right now, so it's like
Speaker 6: entice Kyle. So yeah, so's he's kind of like three people,
Speaker 6: you know, he plays just one guitar. He showed me
Speaker 6: his guitar the other day. It folds in half and
Speaker 6: packs in a backpack, you know, like some guitars. Really
Speaker 6: it has to be this and it has to be
Speaker 6: this wood that's maple and cherry and seasoned. And he's
Speaker 6: just like it folds and half, he puts it in
Speaker 6: his backpack. He's playing one guitar through the whole show
Speaker 6: the string you know, it falls forward and the strings everything.
Speaker 6: It's a portable guitar that it's playing right now and
Speaker 6: he can cover. He's playing like wailing electric guitar. He's
Speaker 6: playing like really pretty Curtis Mayfield, and he just does
Speaker 6: it all. It's just in the spring, you know. So
Speaker 6: he's amazing. And then I'm playing with Stephen Brown. He's
Speaker 6: my long time collaborator and he has a massive setup.
Speaker 6: So he has a few keyboards. He's playing bass sometimes
Speaker 6: with the with organ pedals that he has underneath the
Speaker 6: underneath the keyboards, he's playing based with his feet a
Speaker 6: lot of times, or sometimes he's playing synth bas sometimes
Speaker 6: he's playing electric bass. Look on New York Transit Queen.
Speaker 6: He gets up from the keyboards and he has a
Speaker 6: whole row on top of we've taken spring tanks, and
Speaker 6: we've taken headles, we've taken modular synths, so everything that
Speaker 6: he's doing on stage sort of all of the sends
Speaker 6: from stage are going into that rig so that he
Speaker 6: can affect it in real time, so that he can,
Speaker 6: you know, if we're singing and we wanted to get
Speaker 6: like trippy and transcendent, he can put in his delays
Speaker 6: and reverbs and backwards things and octavizers and then that's
Speaker 6: going out to front of house. So yeah, we just
Speaker 6: we just put it all on a plane yesterday. I
Speaker 6: think are over oversize or whatever. You know, we have
Speaker 6: to pay over it. She was like like, what, we
Speaker 6: can't leave any of this shit behind. You know, it's
Speaker 6: just like boxes and boxes and stuff. But it's worth
Speaker 6: it because I like to be able to make this
Speaker 6: six more expensive sound.
Speaker 1: Yeah. You know, I'm also known for completely wild outtakes,
Speaker 1: and of which I don't want to get canceled, so
Speaker 1: I'll I'll say the majority of them behind, but I
Speaker 1: will say the safest one of my wild outtakes was
Speaker 1: I think maybe this was ideally the album I thought
Speaker 1: I was making with Electric Circus, where you know, where
Speaker 1: you want to show a wide range of styles but
Speaker 1: not appear to be too you know, over eager or
Speaker 1: enthusiastic with it, like it just sounds natural. And then
Speaker 1: you know, by the third listen, I realized that like
Speaker 1: you're literally covering you're covering so much territory. Like you
Speaker 1: go from literally from this, uh you know, some shit
Speaker 1: goes completely hardcore to you know, then you go after futurists,
Speaker 1: Then you do this nineties Riot Girls throwback thing, and
Speaker 1: then like with the last song before the Throne, like
Speaker 1: it's almost like like you transport it back to an
Speaker 1: Alice Coltrane kind of outtake, and the thing one is
Speaker 1: like I was hoping the song was gonna be seventeen
Speaker 1: minutes like an Alice Coltrane song, and then it cuts
Speaker 1: off and I'm like, what the fuck?
Speaker 3: But that was one of my favorite ones on the
Speaker 3: album too. That's a hard ass. That's a hard that
Speaker 3: it flows the album.
Speaker 1: That Yeah, it's goddamn and it's can you tell me,
Speaker 1: just from soup to nuts how you put it together?
Speaker 1: Because in my mind it's so every song is so unique.
Speaker 1: I think if making it in real time, I wouldn't
Speaker 1: know how you had seen it as cohesive, but yet
Speaker 1: together it feels cohesive. Can can you just describe to
Speaker 1: us the process.
Speaker 6: I'm glad that it feels like one thing, and it
Speaker 6: felt like one thing to me because it was all
Speaker 6: driven by this obsession, and it was driven by this
Speaker 6: subsession with this building. I had been on a friend's board.
Speaker 6: It was like a it was a Pinterest board that
Speaker 6: she had she called Jamala John's and she's kind of
Speaker 6: a arc curator. I think in the early days of Pinterest,
Speaker 6: it wasn't just like this is a cute hairstyle, but
Speaker 6: some people were using it like a magazine, you know.
Speaker 6: So there they were using they would put up a
Speaker 6: picture and then they were just right tons and tons.
Speaker 6: And she had this board called Artists and their Creatives
Speaker 6: and their workplaces. So she had Carra Walker arranging her silhouettes.
Speaker 6: She had a Picasso painting with light, and she had
Speaker 6: this photograph of this artist, this black artist, contemporary artist,
Speaker 6: this man, and he was sort of staring out of
Speaker 6: the frame with this peacefuls of bold expression and behind
Speaker 6: him was this weird contemporary art that I didn't understand,
Speaker 6: you know, A pile of bricks on the floor, this
Speaker 6: shaggy goat. Instead of legs, it had the spindles and
Speaker 6: it was going around on a circular track. And then
Speaker 6: there was a big shop for a big sign for
Speaker 6: a shop, Harold's Chicken Shop in Chicago, with like a
Speaker 6: chef chasing after a chicken with a meat cleaver, and
Speaker 6: he was just looking out like he was represented by
Speaker 6: white Cuban. He was looking at the frame like, yeah,
Speaker 6: this is my art, you know. And I thought, who
Speaker 6: is this? I don't know contemporary art. Who's this man specifically,
Speaker 6: who's this black man who's not working in figurative art?
Speaker 2: Right?
Speaker 6: It's not paintings of people, it's not drawings of people,
Speaker 6: it's not photographs. It's this stuff. And I found out
Speaker 6: he was called theaster Gates. And then when I did
Speaker 6: some research, I found out that part of his practice
Speaker 6: is saving these buildings on the South side of Chicago.
Speaker 6: You know, he lives in the South side of Chicago.
Speaker 6: He's watched many buildings just get torn down by the city,
Speaker 6: you know, on the Stoney Island where this building is
Speaker 6: used to have big theaters, you know, really important theaters
Speaker 6: for black music, and just over the years have been
Speaker 6: torn down, one by one, so I mean Chicago's architectural masterpieces.
Speaker 6: But then when you get to the south side, there's
Speaker 6: these holes, dise these gaps, and it's a kind of
Speaker 6: erasure of the history of the place and of the presence,
Speaker 6: the black presence in the place. And so he saw
Speaker 6: this bank. It's one hundred year old bank and had
Speaker 6: been slated for demolition for a long time. It's going
Speaker 6: to be pulled down by the city. The basement was underwater,
Speaker 6: but it's this beautiful bank with these columns outside, and
Speaker 6: it's like a big square, sort of Greeco Roman building
Speaker 6: on Stoney Island. And he decided he was going to
Speaker 6: save it, and so he bought it for one dollar
Speaker 6: from the government, and he saved four million dollars by
Speaker 6: selling his own art to transform this bank. So it
Speaker 6: doesn't have art in anymore, it doesn't have any money in.
Speaker 6: He's saved it by filling it with art archives and
Speaker 6: historical archives. So it has twenty six thousand books that
Speaker 6: were given to the Johnson Publishing Company, to the Johnson
Speaker 6: Publishing Company who made Ebony magazine, Jet magazine, the Egro Digest.
Speaker 6: So from nineteen forty three, you know, if you wrote
Speaker 6: a book in anything to do with black space, architecture, politics, dance, entertainment,
Speaker 6: recipe books, yearbooks. If you wrote PhDs and you wanted
Speaker 6: the Johnsons to review it and include it in their publication,
Speaker 6: you would send it to the Johnson's. So twenty six
Speaker 6: thousand of these books, you know, some of them we
Speaker 6: know and the familiar, some of them super rare books.
Speaker 6: It's got those. It's got all of Frankie Knuckles records.
Speaker 6: And when Frankie Nuckles passed away, his entire record collection
Speaker 6: was given to the Stony Island Arts Bank, and it
Speaker 6: also has upstairs on the second floor, these problematic objects
Speaker 6: from America's past, the Mammy jars, the postcards depicting racial violence,
Speaker 6: newspaper articles since the eighteen hundreds, advertising copy, signage, objects
Speaker 6: for the home, photographs that were collected by this Black
Speaker 6: and Chinese banker called Ed Williams, who would go to
Speaker 6: these yard sales and flea markets and see these objects
Speaker 6: and think, you know who wants who's collecting these things?
Speaker 6: Who wants to continue to have these things in the home.
Speaker 6: So he would buy them to take them out of
Speaker 6: circulation and put them in boxes in his house and
Speaker 6: Once he had amassed forty thousand of these objects, his
Speaker 6: kids were out, can we get it's kind of intense
Speaker 6: to be around this stuff. Can we get this out?
Speaker 6: So he gave that he donated it to the Rebuilt Foundation.
Speaker 6: So the Arts Bank is contemporary art on the walls,
Speaker 6: it has exhibitions. Then it's these historic objects, the Frankie Knuckles,
Speaker 6: it's all the slides from the University of Chicago, the
Speaker 6: glass slides from when people give talk, so you know,
Speaker 6: or all of history that had been photographed for the
Speaker 6: University of Chicago. And then these twenty six thousand books.
Speaker 6: So when I saw the work that THEASTA was doing,
Speaker 6: I thought, I want to get in that bank. I
Speaker 6: just want to be there. I just want to look around.
Speaker 6: I want to And we managed to connect with him.
Speaker 6: I was on tour, he came to the show. He
Speaker 6: met up with me afterwards, and I was just like, Ah,
Speaker 6: I'm so excited to meet you. Because you're a visual artist,
Speaker 6: because you also have a band called the Black Months
Speaker 6: of Mississippi, because you're a saramacist, which I love ceramics,
Speaker 6: because he trained in Japan, and because he's collecting these objects,
Speaker 6: and because he's saving all these buildings in the South
Speaker 6: side of Chicago. He has a social practice. I just
Speaker 6: I was really excited to meet him, and I said,
Speaker 6: I really wish i'd come to the bank, but I'm
Speaker 6: leaving town at like eight am tomorrow morning. And he said,
Speaker 6: I'm also leaving town tomorrow because I'm going to President
Speaker 6: Obama's fiftieth birthday party. And I was like, Oh, okay,
Speaker 6: this is this is this guy is. So we opened
Speaker 6: the bank early for us and I went to it
Speaker 6: and once I opened those doors, I've just sort of
Speaker 6: blown away by the building, the side of the building,
Speaker 6: the library, the double height yoube, the just the amount
Speaker 6: of you know, every single drawer you opened it just
Speaker 6: like songs from slavery times, newspapers, curling newspapers from eighteen forties,
Speaker 6: print adverts from the thirties, tins of beauty products, you know,
Speaker 6: just stuff and stuff and every corner and every just
Speaker 6: the arrangement of it. And the ASTA said, oh, you
Speaker 6: know you have to you have to do a show
Speaker 6: in it, And straight away I sort of flashed on
Speaker 6: the music that I had made to this point and
Speaker 6: felt like this is a new vessel. Nothing that I
Speaker 6: have made sort of fits in this space. It's a
Speaker 6: different kind of response that's needed. But then when I left,
Speaker 6: all I could think about was the things that I
Speaker 6: had seen. You know, he had this sculpture in the corner,
Speaker 6: and I said, oh, who did that? He said, it's
Speaker 6: one of mine. And it looked like it had been
Speaker 6: made from wood that had maybe had the paint stripped off.
Speaker 6: There was a certain amount of violence to it. And
Speaker 6: I said, oh, you know, what is it? And he said,
Speaker 6: it's a sculpture I made. It's from the floorboards from
Speaker 6: an abandoned police station in Chicago. And as soon as
Speaker 6: he said that, I immediately was thinking about the floorboards.
Speaker 6: What are the floorboards seen? You know, so often in
Speaker 6: history the objects are the witnesses to what's happened. They're
Speaker 6: the things that can't speak, but they're the things that
Speaker 6: see everything. The floor in the police station, the telephone
Speaker 6: in the police station, the car, the rearview mirror. They
Speaker 6: are the things that really are holding the truth. And
Speaker 6: so when I was on tour, you know, I mean,
Speaker 6: my head was in the tour, but at the same time,
Speaker 6: I'd be lying on my tour bos bed and I'd
Speaker 6: be just writing poems about things that I've seen. You know,
Speaker 6: I wrote this poem called you who have walked These
Speaker 6: floors in fear. I was thinking about this floorboard. It
Speaker 6: was after the death of Sandra Bland, So I was
Speaker 6: thinking about, you know, who knows truth? In some cases
Speaker 6: it's a person. In some cases that person is unwilling
Speaker 6: to to to express what has really happened in the situation.
Speaker 6: But all that not all the physical objects they know.
Speaker 6: And I just thought, I want to get back to
Speaker 6: that bank. I want to open murderers. I want to
Speaker 6: touch more stuff. And every time I touched something, I
Speaker 6: felt like it was it's old stuff, but it's fisiing
Speaker 6: with a kind of contemporary, real life things happening in
Speaker 6: the Molecule's story. So really with the writing of the record,
Speaker 6: you know, I went back for a two week residency.
Speaker 6: Was stayed in the South Side of Chicago. I mean,
Speaker 6: I'm from the UK, but you guys know Chicago, Chicago
Speaker 6: has its huge challenges, you know. Yeah, so so that
Speaker 6: was an eye opener. You know, we didn't have a
Speaker 6: car there, and we said, oh, we'll just you know,
Speaker 6: we're staying so nearby, we'll just walk around. They're like, oh, no,
Speaker 6: you can't walk around. You can't walk around, you know.
Speaker 6: So we walked to the place where we hide the car,
Speaker 6: and on a bus shelter there was an advert for
Speaker 6: for what you could do if you wanted to needed
Speaker 6: to give up your child in the first thirty days
Speaker 6: of it life, you know, it was a list of things.
Speaker 6: It said, all you need to do is wrap it
Speaker 6: in a clean towel. It has to be in the
Speaker 6: first thirty days of its life. You could take it
Speaker 6: to a fire station where you could drop it at
Speaker 6: this particular school or that particular hospital. You can give
Speaker 6: information or you can have no questions asked. And it
Speaker 6: was particularly poignant that it was a bushshelter because of
Speaker 6: course that's where so many children that couldn't be looked
Speaker 6: after have been left by parents that couldn't look after
Speaker 6: the children. So, you know, just sort of walking, I thought,
Speaker 6: this is what this area, this is what this area is.
Speaker 6: And I thought about the importance of a building like
Speaker 6: this which talks about the history of the area and
Speaker 6: just about the history of the people and how the
Speaker 6: situation is as it is now and it hasn't always
Speaker 6: been the way it is, and it won't always be
Speaker 6: the way it is. But how art is a place
Speaker 6: of it's a new space, it's a physical space. It's
Speaker 6: a place where people have the opportunity to imagine something different.
Speaker 6: So I was ever two weeks. I wrote some songs there,
Speaker 6: I was, I was home, I was back and forth.
Speaker 6: I mean, this record was sort of seven years coming together,
Speaker 6: you know. So sometimes I was making music in the
Speaker 6: place we set up a studio and one of the
Speaker 6: buildings next the bank, and all the songs on the
Speaker 6: record are inspired inspired by particular objects in the bank,
Speaker 6: or groups of objects or events in the bank. And
Speaker 6: that to me wasn't my sort of golden thread when
Speaker 6: I was making it. And then to me, whatever the
Speaker 6: style was, it didn't matter. It just whatever the music was,
Speaker 6: it just kind of bounced off the objects. So it's
Speaker 6: all about the objects, and that the tight remit was
Speaker 6: it has to be in response to these objects. And
Speaker 6: it just became my obsession. I felt like everywhere I
Speaker 6: looked there was a story or a photo or something
Speaker 6: about Chicago, something about the South Side.
Speaker 1: What comes to you first? Do the words come first
Speaker 1: or does the music come first? Because there's some songs
Speaker 1: in which he will follow me with his eyes, which
Speaker 1: like specifically melodically and your words are depending on whatever
Speaker 1: chords being played. And it's not a circular song that
Speaker 1: it's looping. It's just kind of gone linear into and
Speaker 1: it wors into a whole nother song by the end
Speaker 1: of it. So like what comes first for you? Like
Speaker 1: are the words hitting you first and then you find
Speaker 1: music to it? Or does the music come first?
Speaker 6: I think in that situation, and he will follow you
Speaker 6: with his eyes. I had found this tin of a
Speaker 6: beauty product. It was by this company called Valmar and
Speaker 6: it was set up in Chicago in nineteen twenty six.
Speaker 6: And all the illustrations I found to be really beautiful,
Speaker 6: really elegant, and they were done by this artist, this
Speaker 6: black artist called Charles Dawson who came who was a
Speaker 6: very well known artist in his time, and they were
Speaker 6: elegant and they were beautiful. And there was also all
Speaker 6: this romance surrounding Valmore. You know the copy in the adverts.
Speaker 6: So if you saw an advert for valve Or it
Speaker 6: might see things like his eyes will follow you across
Speaker 6: the room, or the perfume. The perfumes were called things
Speaker 6: like follow me boy, or look me over everything had
Speaker 6: this romance and this glamour. So I was kind of interested,
Speaker 6: what's this beauty? You know, what's his company? And I
Speaker 6: found out that it was sold door to door, you know,
Speaker 6: so like Avon, they were knocking on the door with
Speaker 6: this big basket of stuff. And I found that there
Speaker 6: was targeted mostly at black men and women of course
Speaker 6: the era. Looking through the products, there's lots of perfumes,
Speaker 6: there's lots of moisturizers and shampoos and stuff. But there's
Speaker 6: a lot of hair straightening products, skin lightning products, you know,
Speaker 6: white rose cold cream, and you know, worked straight away
Speaker 6: the adverts to say things like, don't you want to
Speaker 6: help yourself to love unhappiness? You know, all of this
Speaker 6: is just away from you if you don't just take
Speaker 6: if you take your skin a few shades lighter.
Speaker 1: That's right, they ran at the end. Okay, yeah, I
Speaker 1: was going to say, because upon first listening, I was like,
Speaker 1: I was like, Wow, this might be her best vocal
Speaker 1: performance because and then the second time I was like, oh,
Speaker 1: maybe she's singing in a character. And then I realized
Speaker 1: by the end, I mean, I don't know if it's
Speaker 1: if it's more of an angry rent or more just
Speaker 1: a defiant thing about it. But I realized that that
Speaker 1: must be the start. I didn't know the history behind
Speaker 1: the song, but I love the way that you singing
Speaker 1: character in the beginning, And yeah.
Speaker 6: I wanted to get into that sort of fifty space,
Speaker 6: and I was thinking about fifties medicated domestic femininity in America. Okay,
Speaker 6: so you've got all the things you meant to need.
Speaker 6: You've got your vacuum cleaner, and you've got your washing machine,
Speaker 6: you've got your refrigerator. So as a woman, your life
Speaker 6: is not difficult anymore. You know, you've got these appliances
Speaker 6: and you shouldn't complain, and you're in the home, and
Speaker 6: if things feel difficult, there's always a touple that you
Speaker 6: can take from the doctors just to take the edge
Speaker 6: of things. And then but then, you know, imagining someone
Speaker 6: coming to your door with these products, there's a kind
Speaker 6: of femininity is already this narrow, and then for black
Speaker 6: women it's it's even more narrow because the beauty is
Speaker 6: white aligned at this point. You know, so you've got
Speaker 6: to do all the women's stuff, and then you've got
Speaker 6: to do the stuff to make your natural self augmented.
Speaker 6: To be accepted, and so in the first half of
Speaker 6: the song, the person is definitely under the spell of
Speaker 6: how more I did that. I wrote that song in
Speaker 6: the in the bank, and I just played I played
Speaker 6: it on guitar, you know, I sort of do my
Speaker 6: best of my guitar, like I'm not a trained guitar rist.
Speaker 6: But I wanted to make it sort of you know,
Speaker 6: fifties and dream like, like those kind of chords that
Speaker 6: would be in you know, those movies that start, whether
Speaker 6: the car's winding around the side of a mountain or whatever,
Speaker 6: the open top car and it's like there's a glamour
Speaker 6: and then halfway through. I wanted to have this kind
Speaker 6: of sonic arresting, you know. So when I first wrote that,
Speaker 6: that was just like me playing one string, dumb, dumb, dumb,
Speaker 6: you know, my plum red lipstick, my black hair, kinkin,
Speaker 6: my black skin, gleaming.
Speaker 7: You know.
Speaker 6: I wanted it to be, as you say, sort of defiant.
Speaker 6: You know, I don't it says at the end, I
Speaker 6: don't want to leave myself behind, vanishing into a girl
Speaker 6: I don't recognize and went after you know, because the
Speaker 6: record took me a long time. So one time I
Speaker 6: was listening to vocals, I feel like I could bring
Speaker 6: more character into this, you know.
Speaker 7: I was thinking of like her as a kid, you know,
Speaker 7: with her incredbled diction and poise and the movement of
Speaker 7: the words and everything so dramatic and elegant and control
Speaker 7: that I.
Speaker 6: Went to bring some men.
Speaker 1: And so in my excitement, I was making h a
Speaker 1: quiet sleep playlist the David the album came out, and
Speaker 1: so not even thinking about it, I just rushed that
Speaker 1: on the list first. It went to sleep.
Speaker 6: Anyway up.
Speaker 1: It was like, what the hell of Mira? And I
Speaker 1: was like huh. And I was like, oh, I forgot
Speaker 1: that sometimes coders and because you know, in my mind
Speaker 1: when you're listening to it, I'm thinking like, okay, might
Speaker 1: have a new ID track, and that's the next song.
Speaker 1: I didn't realize it was the same song until that
Speaker 1: person told me, like, dog, you woke us up in
Speaker 1: the middle of the night, Like, yeah, it was it
Speaker 1: wasn't there.
Speaker 6: It wasn't what you thought. Yeah, it's the worst record
Speaker 6: for DJs. But I just think my stuf's a bit
Speaker 6: like that anyway, sort of like it's bumpy, like you're
Speaker 6: just getting into one thing. And then there's another thing,
Speaker 6: and I don't know if that's my background. It's like
Speaker 6: I was a classically trained violinist and then I was
Speaker 6: in an indie band when I was fifteen. That was
Speaker 6: the music that I loved, you know. I had grown
Speaker 6: up with soul music, but India was like my thing
Speaker 6: that I found, you know, Rucasol and l seven and
Speaker 6: Belly and and I liked. I guess I liked, you know,
Speaker 6: women in that music. I like seeing women play guitars.
Speaker 6: And I don't know if they weren't shaving their armpits
Speaker 6: or they weren't having to wear certain things. They're just
Speaker 6: wearing T shirts and the jeans and they're just doing
Speaker 6: the thing, and there was a lot of freedom in that.
Speaker 1: Of course, I understand that a lot of your albums
Speaker 1: are also confessional diaries because of lost love and what
Speaker 1: you've gone through in mourning and all that stuff. But
Speaker 1: would you say that this album is more closer to
Speaker 1: your creative heart then say what your debut record was.
Speaker 6: Yes, I think this is really close to my creative heart.
Speaker 6: And the irony is that I thought it was always
Speaker 6: a side project. You know, when I made it, I
Speaker 6: was like it's not going to be My name's not
Speaker 6: going to be on it. It's an independent record. It's
Speaker 6: not going to be a major label.
Speaker 1: Weren't you. No, Mariah's sort of do you know the
Speaker 1: history of the Chick record?
Speaker 6: No, I mean, and not until you mentioned you mentioned
Speaker 6: it the other day, but I still, I mean, I
Speaker 6: haven't heard that record. You sent me some pictures and
Speaker 6: I thought, wow, she looks different, but yeah, I think
Speaker 6: she's amazing.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Mariah did the same thing, like she was this
Speaker 1: recording her real record, but just to have some fun,
Speaker 1: you would, you know, play around, fuck around, doing dinner
Speaker 1: breaks and all that stuff, and then they had enough
Speaker 1: material to make a record. But it was always just
Speaker 1: supposed to be like a joke amongst the band makes
Speaker 1: and you know, and I still maintained that that's Mariah
Speaker 1: Carry's best record because she doesn't care about the outward
Speaker 1: gaze of critics and the record label and keep keeping
Speaker 1: the machinery going, because you know, all the time artists
Speaker 1: tell me, like, especially like in the first ten years
Speaker 1: of my career, it was like, man, y'all gotta label
Speaker 1: that supports y'all. Like, and at first I was like
Speaker 1: a little insulted. He's like, yeah, man, because y'all could
Speaker 1: just do any o shit in your label, never drop y'all.
Speaker 1: Like I was like, what was that supposed to be? He's,
Speaker 1: you know, like, you know, like y'all don't care about
Speaker 1: hit singles and making money and because success.
Speaker 2: I'm like, what the fucker?
Speaker 1: I was like, No, I just don't know what an
Speaker 1: effective hook. Kids. I feel like I'm doing too much
Speaker 1: inside baseball. But you gotta let me know what was
Speaker 1: your inspiration behind Earthlings? Because I'm obsessed with the eff
Speaker 1: of futurism and all that stuff, and like I am too.
Speaker 6: You know, I feel my dad had Funk you know,
Speaker 6: like p Funk Records when I was little, and Parliament Records,
Speaker 6: and I'd look on the back and see these weird cartoons,
Speaker 6: you know, I like the women in the booby tops
Speaker 6: and the booty shirts and this, and there was all
Speaker 6: these stuff about space, and I remember just thinking like
Speaker 6: what is this? And definitely when I was a teenager,
Speaker 6: I just sort of thought I sort of thought of
Speaker 6: it as kind of a bit silly or escapist. And
Speaker 6: it was only when I got into my well, probably
Speaker 6: you know, ten fifteen years ago that the penny dropped,
Speaker 6: you know, and the expansive thing of if someone wants
Speaker 6: a pigeonhole as being from here, you have to be
Speaker 6: within the system of what it means to be black
Speaker 6: in America, and like Sunral, the only way to explain
Speaker 6: its actually, I'm not from here, or you think I'm
Speaker 6: from here? Do you think I'm like that? Now, I'm
Speaker 6: not even from this planet, you know. And I loved
Speaker 6: that when I went back to that music, the idea
Speaker 6: that there's another space and alternative space that lives outside
Speaker 6: of catalysm and white supremacy, and that this band is
Speaker 6: from there and they're going to take you there and
Speaker 6: all you have to do is get on board the mothership.
Speaker 6: And so the philosophy of it, which I had missed
Speaker 6: because I was too busy just sort of enjoying the
Speaker 6: groove of the music, you know, that was right there.
Speaker 6: And so I mean, there's a really good affort futuristic
Speaker 6: film showing in the bank when I was there, and
Speaker 6: you know, I was thinking trying all these things together,
Speaker 6: that the main thing was the inspiration behind that was
Speaker 6: the these different searches for utopia that I read about
Speaker 6: in the bank. You know, there was a conversation bouncing
Speaker 6: back and forwards between the black thinkers from I guess that,
Speaker 6: you know, eighteen tens onwards the classic two positions. You
Speaker 6: could call it a Martin Luther King versus early Malcolm X,
Speaker 6: you know, integrationist versus separatist position. You know, we find
Speaker 6: ourselves to be here outside of Africa, in this country,
Speaker 6: in these places which are intolerant of us. What do
Speaker 6: we do? Do we find allies and make a new community.
Speaker 6: Do we become part of everyone, we all each other's
Speaker 6: brothers and sisters like a Martin Luther King position? Or
Speaker 6: is there do we recognize the aggression and turn inwards
Speaker 6: and turn away from the place where we find ourselves
Speaker 6: to be. And whether it's a Marcus Garvey going back
Speaker 6: to Africa, or whether it's a more of a spiritual
Speaker 6: separatist community where you're still in America, but you have
Speaker 6: your own commune and you have your own rules and laws,
Speaker 6: or whether it's a community of that's exclusive in terms
Speaker 6: of who you're socialized with.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 6: So I would see these ideas going back and forth
Speaker 6: in the bank all the way through history, people trying
Speaker 6: to work it out how do we live now outside
Speaker 6: of Africa, in this place which is not entirely welcoming.
Speaker 6: And so I've thought a lot about these utopias that
Speaker 6: have been attempted. You know that all black towns of
Speaker 6: the West, and those of them that were successful, and
Speaker 6: those of those that weren't successful or were like a
Speaker 6: green Wood that was eventually firebombed, you know, the first
Speaker 6: incidence of fire bombing on American soil. So I thought
Speaker 6: about those, like, what is it to yearn for utopia?
Speaker 6: Try for perfection? It always will fail, And yet that's
Speaker 6: the direction, that's what all communities are looking for. Peace, love, freedom.
Speaker 6: And I was blown away by Missus Johnson using the
Speaker 6: Ebony fashion fair, and the Black panthers would say to her,
Speaker 6: why are you bringing it clothes? You know this is
Speaker 6: a bourgeoise thing. You're bringing clothes from France to put
Speaker 6: on the back of black models to parade around the
Speaker 6: town halls and the city halls for local black maids
Speaker 6: to see. Like what you're doing. Apart from the fact
Speaker 6: they were raising millions of dollars for the historical black
Speaker 6: universities and colleges. Missus Johnson was saying, it's important for
Speaker 6: people to see themselves reflected on this cat walk. It's
Speaker 6: important for women to see this elegance, see this dream,
Speaker 6: see this art, see this creativity. It's like, what do
Speaker 6: we want on the other side of the struggle? Struggles
Speaker 6: meant to end at some point, and then you're meant
Speaker 6: to be, you know, eating pineapple in the sun, digging
Speaker 6: your garden to live and finding work, but also time
Speaker 6: to enjoy yourself. You know, that's the world we're trying
Speaker 6: to build. We're not constantly so much in a struggle
Speaker 6: that we're imagining will never end. And so I guess
Speaker 6: the song Earth Things is about a non human person
Speaker 6: sort of looking in on us and seeing how easy
Speaker 6: it would be to reset our world, which causes a
Speaker 6: super naive position. But that was the position that I
Speaker 6: took from looking at these attempts at utopious of the effort,
Speaker 6: the attempt, the hope, the audacity of it is the
Speaker 6: only place to start.
Speaker 1: Or I'm curious to how the outside of America, like
Speaker 1: the British press, has received this record. And you know,
Speaker 1: I think it's really curious that you and interesting that
Speaker 1: you chose Chicago as your base creative hub. You know,
Speaker 1: I think if anything even Americans and myself I might
Speaker 1: be guilty of this as well. Like there's so much
Speaker 1: propaganda talk about Chicago, like right now, you know, the
Speaker 1: hashtag what about Chicago is a kind of go to
Speaker 1: right wing yeah term of you know, they're so violent
Speaker 1: and uncultured over there that most people I know are
Speaker 1: definitely afraid to even visit Chicago just because of what
Speaker 1: they heard, you know, propaganda wise. But is there not
Speaker 1: any place in the UK that has their own rich
Speaker 1: cultural stories that you could have pulled from? Because I
Speaker 1: find it very interesting that that you had to come,
Speaker 1: you know, five thousand miles across the Pound, you know,
Speaker 1: to find this wealth of inspiration.
Speaker 6: I think it's a really good point. I think the
Speaker 6: holders of archive is a really interesting thing in America
Speaker 6: versus the UK. So I'd say American history and archive
Speaker 6: seems to be I mean, you have obviously the Smithsonian,
Speaker 6: which is a reasonably new museum that holds all this
Speaker 6: black history and archive. But it seems like a lot
Speaker 6: of black archive in this country is held by private
Speaker 6: individuals or private foundations that have come from corporations. America
Speaker 6: is still in its move of you know, you've got
Speaker 6: the Mellon Foundation. You've got the Ford Foundation, organizations that
Speaker 6: made lots of wealth through capitalism that are now sort
Speaker 6: of giving back, and it shows their brains and it
Speaker 6: sort of legitimizes them to a certain extent, and they
Speaker 6: it shows that they are invested in people's history and
Speaker 6: holding history. I think in the UK that period certainly
Speaker 6: happened during the Industrial Revolution, where we had massively wealthy
Speaker 6: industrialists in the eighteen thirties, eighteen forties, eighteen fifties, and
Speaker 6: they then invested in people in our you know, they
Speaker 6: made their own towns, they had fair comparatively fair places
Speaker 6: and safe places for workers. But then the state took
Speaker 6: over in looking after history and archive, which is probably
Speaker 6: the right place for these things if the state is interested.
Speaker 6: But at the moment the conservative government that we have now,
Speaker 6: which is more of a right wing government, there just
Speaker 6: hasn't been the investment in black stories and black archives.
Speaker 6: So there are black archives that aren't open to the
Speaker 6: public and that you would need maybe a research a
Speaker 6: qualification or sort of invitation to go and look at.
Speaker 6: But also so much of the work is not valued
Speaker 6: or lost or it's lost. I mean, I think specifically
Speaker 6: of the wind Rush incident that happened a few years
Speaker 6: ago where people like my dad's generation. The black people
Speaker 6: in England are either from Africa and have come in
Speaker 6: the last ten twenty thirty forty years, or their Caribbeans,
Speaker 6: and they were invited by the government after the Second
Speaker 6: World War because so many men had died, so the
Speaker 6: UK needed people on the trains, people on the buses,
Speaker 6: they needed women in the hospitals as nurses, so an
Speaker 6: invitation went out to the colonies, you know, they're still
Speaker 6: owned by Britain, like Saint KITT's where my dad's from,
Speaker 6: you know, please come and help the motherland. And these
Speaker 6: people felt like England was their home. You know, my
Speaker 6: dad knew more about the counties and rivers of England,
Speaker 6: you know then he even knew about Saint Kitts. It
Speaker 6: was taught. This information was taught in tandem. So the
Speaker 6: Caribbeans came, and a lot of them came as children.
Speaker 6: You know, they had that passport and you would think
Speaker 6: the government's held records on who was in the country
Speaker 6: and who wasn't. But a few years ago there was
Speaker 6: this big scandal where Caribbeans were leaving their country that
Speaker 6: they'd lived in for fifty years, sixty years moved for
Speaker 6: a family wedding, trying to get back in the country,
Speaker 6: and the UK said, sorry, we don't have any record
Speaker 6: of you.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 6: And it turned out they'd just lost all these people's passports.
Speaker 6: People had come to UK's children. So you've got people
Speaker 6: who are trying to get cancer care and they say, oh,
Speaker 6: you're not registered to live here. They say, I've lived
Speaker 6: here for fifty years, I've been married here, have raised
Speaker 6: my children, I've got grandchildren in the UK. They say, sorry,
Speaker 6: you have to go back to Jamaica. So I think
Speaker 6: the UK government is not good at holding even the
Speaker 6: the citizenship and passports of these black people that they
Speaker 6: just lost. There was just no other explanation. It was
Speaker 6: just like, sorry, we last year passports. But I don't
Speaker 6: think there was even a wide public apology. So I
Speaker 6: think in terms of the Black stories, I think they
Speaker 6: live in literature. You know, I live in Leeds with
Speaker 6: people Tree Press, that's the biggest publisher of Caribbean literature
Speaker 6: outside the Caribbean, so I know these Caribbean stories. I
Speaker 6: think what I felt in encountering the bank was just
Speaker 6: this is me with my own lens and my own
Speaker 6: prejudices as a woman from the UK, as someone who
Speaker 6: has African heritage through my dad's Caribbean side, but also
Speaker 6: you know, my mum is white as well, like all
Speaker 6: these I was just arriving as myself viewing all this
Speaker 6: historical stuff. So the record is definitely not me trying
Speaker 6: to tell an American story. It's just me responding to
Speaker 6: all this stuff like this is what the stuff did
Speaker 6: to me. That's what the record is, rather than I'm
Speaker 6: now some kind of you know, historian or journalist on
Speaker 6: the American story.
Speaker 1: Oh no, Look, just to hear an artist with a
Speaker 1: point of view is fucking refreshing, refreshing because what we're
Speaker 1: doing with now, well, yeah, what the fuck?
Speaker 2: Well I want to ask you.
Speaker 3: You've collaborated with, uh been frequent, collaborated with very good friends,
Speaker 3: my parents and Amber Strolder.
Speaker 2: What is it like collaborating with them? How do y'all
Speaker 2: start seing ideas?
Speaker 1: What is it like?
Speaker 6: I got introduced to Paris and Amber through Esperanza Spaulding.
Speaker 6: I was working on my third record, and you know,
Speaker 6: speaking of record companies, my third record was the one
Speaker 6: with all the pressure on. It was like first record,
Speaker 6: big success, so grateful. My second album was a kind
Speaker 6: of response to that. You know, everybody was saying, oh,
Speaker 6: you 'sed to been an indie band, but you've made
Speaker 6: this pop soul record, and I thought, right, I'm going
Speaker 6: to play more guitar on this record. But also, you know,
Speaker 6: halfway through that record, I lost my husband and so
Speaker 6: there was this big break. And when I started again
Speaker 6: and I made the record that, you know, the label
Speaker 6: would say, You've made the record you needed to make,
Speaker 6: but it wasn't full of you know, smash hit sunshine songs.
Speaker 6: And so the third record I really felt from the
Speaker 6: label was like, okay, right, let's get back in it.
Speaker 6: You're just a sort of sleeping giant, you know, like
Speaker 6: you've got this, you've had this big hits, these and
Speaker 6: this is the record where you're going to sort of
Speaker 6: come back. And so that was really really difficult for me.
Speaker 6: And I was working one time in Los Angeles with
Speaker 6: a very very well known producer and artist who of
Speaker 6: course I won't know, and he was very busy. He
Speaker 6: was working with several artists at the same time, which
Speaker 6: sometimes people do, right, so it's like, oh, hi, thanks
Speaker 6: for coming right, let's work on this song for forty
Speaker 6: minutes and then like, yeah, if you got some ideas,
Speaker 6: you call like Jerome my assistant, right, he's going to
Speaker 6: be in the room with you. I'm going down the
Speaker 6: hall because you know, five other people are in the
Speaker 6: studio complex and I'm just like sprinkling my sort of
Speaker 6: genius hip power everywhere. So I don't know, I just
Speaker 6: I wish I had that ability to sort of perform
Speaker 6: under that kind of setup, but I just don't. So
Speaker 6: it's like the inspiration just kind of left me. And
Speaker 6: I left the session and I can't remember how So
Speaker 6: responds that will. We met up and I was like,
Speaker 6: She's like, how's it going with superstar producer that everyone
Speaker 6: else has had massive hits with? And I said, Oh,
Speaker 6: it's going terribly. You know, it makes you feel like
Speaker 6: you're you're the one that's kind of flunking, you know,
Speaker 6: they're they're the superstar and the other one. And she
Speaker 6: just said, have you met these guys? And she brought
Speaker 6: out the CD of the EP Kings King and I
Speaker 6: was like, God, I said, someone just played me this
Speaker 6: two days ago. It's so amazing. She said, I loved them.
Speaker 6: I went to school with them. You should work with them.
Speaker 6: She picks, you should work with them tonight. I'm calling
Speaker 6: them right now, you should go will go around tonight,
Speaker 6: And she picked up the phone and she's like, hey, Paris,
Speaker 6: you know with Kreine. I was like, I don't know
Speaker 6: if they I don't know if they ever heard of me,
Speaker 6: And they knew me. And we went over to the
Speaker 6: house and I just instantly loved them because aside from
Speaker 6: being the musical geniuses that they are, they just have
Speaker 6: this like still well you know them, still calm, beautiful presence.
Speaker 6: And we just sat and we just had a jam.
Speaker 6: My s friends was playing bass, Paris was playing keyboards,
Speaker 6: me and Ambo was singing, and I just thought, oh,
Speaker 6: I've sort of found a harbor here. You know, this
Speaker 6: is so different to being in the room with all
Speaker 6: these dudes, you know, like I've been told they're a songwriter,
Speaker 6: but they're just tapping out the beats, like where's your tune?
Speaker 6: Like tell me when your tracks finished, I can put
Speaker 6: my superstar beats to it. And I'd be like, haven't
Speaker 6: We're just starting from scratch. I thought, you know, I
Speaker 6: kind of naive going into those those settings. So it
Speaker 6: was just a dream to it with them. And worked
Speaker 6: together with on my third record, and then yeah, for
Speaker 6: this one, I would just drift in. So Red Red
Speaker 6: Horse came about at their place. You know, Paris is
Speaker 6: just like an amazing producer. You know what she hears
Speaker 6: and the lines and the weaves and the denseness of
Speaker 6: the production, you know, the amount of tracks and all
Speaker 6: the things that's going on, one thing feeding another and
Speaker 6: other lines, and so it's just kind of like a
Speaker 6: dream space. And we just got this beat going and
Speaker 6: Pass was playing forwards. I was playing bass since bass.
Speaker 6: I had my I remember, I had my little baby.
Speaker 6: I'd just had a baby, and she was strapped onto
Speaker 6: me and it was like playing. So it felt really
Speaker 6: kind of like it was working. You know, it's like
Speaker 6: here I am and my kids asleep and I'm doing
Speaker 6: this song. And then yeah, the Red Horse came out
Speaker 6: of that where. Because I'd read so much of the
Speaker 6: Bank and so much was in my head, I find
Speaker 6: it really easy to what came out was was the
Speaker 6: tales of the things that I'd read about, or i'd
Speaker 6: seen a photograph. I've seen this photograph of this young
Speaker 6: black girl who was going west with a white family,
Speaker 6: and I just couldn't work out what she was doing.
Speaker 6: She's ten eleven, twelve, and it turned out, I mean,
Speaker 6: she was an enslaved girl, but she was going to
Speaker 6: be the nanny for this baby. And I was sort
Speaker 6: of thinking, you know, who's looking after this child, this
Speaker 6: black child in the you know, going to this west
Speaker 6: town in the west there's been newly established, and what's
Speaker 6: going to happen to her when they don't need her anymore?
Speaker 6: And you know, I couldn't find any more information in
Speaker 6: this book, and so I just imagined for her a
Speaker 6: stranger riding into town on a red horse. But it
Speaker 6: all it sort of came out when I was there,
Speaker 6: because they just make this amazing dream space. So yeah,
Speaker 6: I mean, I love I love working with parasital.
Speaker 2: I was really happy to see our Glabrary.
Speaker 1: I want to know more about your childhood and your upbringing.
Speaker 1: Where were you born.
Speaker 6: I was born in Leeds and that's where I still live.
Speaker 6: So Leeds is two hundred miles north of London and
Speaker 6: it's two hundred miles south of Edinburgh. Like at the
Speaker 6: bottom of our street where we live, there's an old
Speaker 6: way post and it says, you know, London this way
Speaker 6: two hundred miles. You know, Edinburgh this.
Speaker 1: Way right on the border.
Speaker 6: We're right between, yeah, the capital of Scotland and the
Speaker 6: capital of England. So as much as I feel, you know,
Speaker 6: I feel myself to you know, be English, but the
Speaker 6: north is really different to the South. It's not as wealthy,
Speaker 6: it's more it was industrial, but then the industry sort
Speaker 6: of went away, so there's that kind of a feeling.
Speaker 6: I mean, Leeds is a big university town, you know, Scots.
Speaker 6: I think more than one hundred thousand students between the
Speaker 6: different universities, so it's a big place where people come
Speaker 6: to learn. Lots of thinkers come, but then lots of
Speaker 6: people leave at the end of it, right because like
Speaker 6: they go to London, they go, they go somewhere else
Speaker 6: where the jobs are. So it's a creative place, but
Speaker 6: sometimes it's hard to get things going because there's not
Speaker 6: necessarily people don't necessarily come and stay. They kind of
Speaker 6: passed through.
Speaker 1: Well, you have three siblings.
Speaker 6: Correct or they're three of us. Yeah, there's two sisters.
Speaker 6: So my sister, my middle sister works in politics and
Speaker 6: she worked in social justice, and then my younger sister
Speaker 6: acts and then yeah, then there's me too.
Speaker 1: So He described the household, like, how were your parents
Speaker 1: artistically inclined or musically inclined or anything.
Speaker 6: I think my mom really liked singing. My mum used
Speaker 6: to sing around the house all the time, so she
Speaker 6: and she would sing at church. And then my dad
Speaker 6: collected music, so that was his thing. He had just
Speaker 6: sort of piles of records. He was really fastidious. There
Speaker 6: was a really good record shop in these called Jumbo
Speaker 6: Records that would import us records, so my parents would
Speaker 6: go there all the time. They met on the dance floor,
Speaker 6: you know, when they were teenagers. And my dad's family
Speaker 6: is from Saint Kitts and the Caribbean. But yeah, he's
Speaker 6: a big collector of music, and so I think sometimes
Speaker 6: I would just look through these forty five you know,
Speaker 6: they were just in paper. They didn't have any covers,
Speaker 6: so you could just maybe get a bit of an
Speaker 6: idea from the name on the label, but mostly you
Speaker 6: had to actually put the record on, you know, and
Speaker 6: just like put the needle on. And so he had
Speaker 6: his pile, and then I had my pile out of
Speaker 6: his pile of things that I liked to listen to
Speaker 6: that I kind of kept separately. So I don't know
Speaker 6: what it was, and you know, I just I grew
Speaker 6: up with music definitely, But then I got into music
Speaker 6: at school, but not even if my parents played instruments.
Speaker 6: I started playing violin at school and I really really
Speaker 6: loved that, and at first I found it easy. I mean,
Speaker 6: later on I found it really hard, because I do
Speaker 6: find reading music really hard. But I liked the thing
Speaker 6: of listening and picking up stuff. I really liked being
Speaker 6: in orchestras. You know, I was often the only person
Speaker 6: of color in the whole orchestra that was or at
Speaker 6: ballet or whatever it was. But I think our parents
Speaker 6: and especially my mum just encourage us to do express,
Speaker 6: express ourselves things. So we did, you know, we did
Speaker 6: do ballet, We did play instruments, We did go to
Speaker 6: watch concerts and went to theater when we could. I mean,
Speaker 6: my mum was cleaning houses when I was younger, and
Speaker 6: then she started she started working with kids from school
Speaker 6: from the school that was at you know, reading to
Speaker 6: them in the lessons, the kids who were struggling. Then
Speaker 6: she did some qualification so that she could be a
Speaker 6: learning mentor in the school. And my dad, my dad's
Speaker 6: kind of visically had a shop kind of picture framing
Speaker 6: and candles and clocks shop. But he was always you know,
Speaker 6: he's got a big math's brain, which is the opposite
Speaker 6: of my brain. So he would teach. There was a
Speaker 6: school for kids who didn't get on well at school,
Speaker 6: and it was mostly Black and Asian children in England.
Speaker 6: That's like Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi and Black children. And that
Speaker 6: was in the sort of concentration of black area, Chapeltown,
Speaker 6: where his family came. So he would teach these kids,
Speaker 6: you know, he'd teach the maths mostly math's a bit
Speaker 6: of English. But so all the boys and girls in
Speaker 6: our school that were maybe had a reputation of being
Speaker 6: more sort of tough or like they didn't get on
Speaker 6: with the teachers. They didn't get on with the teachers
Speaker 6: at our school. They would know me because my dad
Speaker 6: would teach them maths, you know, and they'd be like,
Speaker 6: mister Bailey, he's so strict. Yeah, So it was. I
Speaker 6: liked growing up there. It had a big Caribbean community leagues.
Speaker 6: I mean it still does, so I would be I
Speaker 6: guess I grew up between these two worlds. Where we
Speaker 6: lived was a white area and a big Jewish area
Speaker 6: as well. My high school was a big jewsh high school,
Speaker 6: lots of the Jewish teachers and children, so when it
Speaker 6: was Jewish holidays, like a third of the kids wouldn't
Speaker 6: be there, so our calendar was kind of worked around
Speaker 6: the Jewish holiday. And then my grandparents lived in the
Speaker 6: Caribbean area of Leeds, so I would always be like,
Speaker 6: between these two worlds. Do I fit in these worlds?
Speaker 6: I do. I do fit in them, but I feel different,
Speaker 6: you know, in both places. I feel a bit of different.
Speaker 6: You know. It's like I'm black, but I'm sort of
Speaker 6: not black in the same way my cousins are. And
Speaker 6: then I'm definitely not white, but I am my mum's daughter,
Speaker 6: you know. So it's always just like finding identity. And
Speaker 6: I think I think that's why I really pulled towards
Speaker 6: I don't know, Indie sort of you know, riot girl,
Speaker 6: like all of that stuff, you know, feeling like I
Speaker 6: feel like an outsider. I have something to say. I
Speaker 6: am underweight, I'm riding to school on a bike balancing
Speaker 6: my violin. I'm a nerd, but I'm also not from
Speaker 6: a wealthy background, so I'm fitting in, you know, like
Speaker 6: a lot of my peers might not be going to
Speaker 6: play in the orchestra or reading Jane Austin and you know,
Speaker 6: Charlotte Bronte, But at the same time, that's just what
Speaker 6: I'm doing. So yeah, I felt like an outsider.
Speaker 1: I guess were you born in the early eighties.
Speaker 6: I believe I was born in nineteen seventy nine.
Speaker 1: Okay, So who did you gravity towards musically? Like who
Speaker 1: was the first like moment of I.
Speaker 6: Mean, I guess Michael Jackson was the biggest thing in
Speaker 6: our world. Just that's the age that I had. Yeah,
Speaker 6: could avoid him, and so I remember there was a
Speaker 6: concert in Leeds. We used to live near this park
Speaker 6: called Ruante Park and there was a big park that
Speaker 6: used to have concerts, so like Madonna played there or
Speaker 6: you know, but but Michael Jackson played there, and I
Speaker 6: remember it was like a sort of pilgrimage to go
Speaker 6: to this concert, Like we couldn't afford tickets for the concert,
Speaker 6: but I remember it was it was a bank holiday
Speaker 6: in August that we went to the concert. Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 6: Mychael Jackson's stuff was so interesting because obviously there was
Speaker 6: the music itself, then there was all the mystery around
Speaker 6: the man. But remember how they used to film the concerts,
Speaker 6: is I feel like nearly half of the concept wasn't
Speaker 6: showing him, it was showing the audience. So it was
Speaker 6: just showing these people having these responses to him. And
Speaker 6: I remember feeling that feeling that they had this kind
Speaker 6: of like melting sort of spiritual feeling. I mean, I
Speaker 6: think the music has what that music is doing in
Speaker 6: sort of jazz and harmony because I'm not trained, I
Speaker 6: just don't understand what it's doing, but it still does
Speaker 6: the same thing to my brain where it's like I
Speaker 6: don't know what's happening here, and this this thing is
Speaker 6: transitioning into this thing, and there's this lushness and then
Speaker 6: there's this tension and then it goes away. And so
Speaker 6: his music had that complex of beauty, but it was
Speaker 6: being absorbed by all of us, including you know, five
Speaker 6: year olds, ten year olds, and so I think, I mean,
Speaker 6: aside from of course, all the separate things about Michael
Speaker 6: Jackson which we learned about in that time when those
Speaker 6: those issues weren't swirling, I just, yeah, I just Michael
Speaker 6: Jackson's music was kind of the pinnacle. But I grewup
Speaker 6: with Stevie Wonder as well, because it's what my parents liked.
Speaker 6: I really liked Secret Life of Plants. That was the
Speaker 6: record I remember having. I remember touching the braille. I
Speaker 6: remember the sort of weirdness and mystery of it, and
Speaker 6: the way the synth sounded, and the photograph of him
Speaker 6: inside and the way you could see, you know, you
Speaker 6: can see his eyes. And so I sort of loved Stevie.
Speaker 6: I thought, oh, like, I just felt in my heart
Speaker 6: like I want to meet Stevie. I'm sure that all
Speaker 6: kids feel that, right, So but then when I did
Speaker 6: get to meet it, I was like, this is like
Speaker 6: my dream that I had, and here I you know,
Speaker 6: I wrote Stevie Wonder a letter and as a teenager
Speaker 6: saying about how much I love I never dreamed you'd leave.
Speaker 6: I never dreamed you'd leave in summer. I remember writing
Speaker 6: his passionate letter about it. And then I thought, why
Speaker 6: am I writing a letter. I should be writing it
Speaker 6: in Braille, And you know, I never got around to.
Speaker 1: I was about to say he learned braille, just yeah, yeah.
Speaker 6: He is a you know, he obviously reached brail.
Speaker 1: There's there's a funny story where, you know, producer Narda
Speaker 1: Michael Walden. He produced Whitney Houston's I Want to I
Speaker 1: Will I Know, and I Want to Dance with Somebody.
Speaker 1: And he also did like starships, like nothing's going to
Speaker 1: stop us now or not. Like he was like Clive
Speaker 1: Davis's go to guy. But he tells the story that
Speaker 1: he was so inspired after seeing Stevie do fingertips when
Speaker 1: he was a kid. Somewhere in the mid sixties was
Speaker 1: a kind of solar eclipse in which you know, they
Speaker 1: warned parents, do not let your child look in the
Speaker 1: sun or else you're going to go blind. And you know,
Speaker 1: they were giving out free glasses and you're supposed to
Speaker 1: wear glasses all day and whatever. And Narda was like,
Speaker 1: if I take these glasses off, then I too can
Speaker 1: be a genius like Stevie wonder He told me about
Speaker 1: the first time he got in trouble with his mom,
Speaker 1: like she said, like you know, like yeah, punished him,
Speaker 1: but yeah, he was he wanted to be blind like
Speaker 1: Stevie Wonders so that he could be a genius. Do
Speaker 1: you do you remember the first concert that you went.
Speaker 6: To the first concert I went to. I mean, I
Speaker 6: think I didn't go to concerts when I was little, because,
Speaker 6: like I said, well, my parents got divorced, so you know,
Speaker 6: we didn't have a car, we didn't have a telephone,
Speaker 6: we didn't my mum was cleaned houses and then she
Speaker 6: worked at this school, so we didn't have to spare
Speaker 6: money at all. You know. We used to get our
Speaker 6: clothes in a binliner from unless it was Christmas or birthdays,
Speaker 6: but we used to get our clothes from people from church,
Speaker 6: you know, with their names still selling it, you know,
Speaker 6: and yeah, I love this, like if they had trainers,
Speaker 6: we always had the trainers then Nick's not the nikes
Speaker 6: and all of that sort of stuff, you know, right,
Speaker 6: But so we didn't we didn't go to gigs when
Speaker 6: we were little, but I remember I probably went to
Speaker 6: something like I probably would have gone to the Cockpit,
Speaker 6: which was a sort of indie venue, and I would
Speaker 6: have gone to see a band like some small bands
Speaker 6: like Shed seven or the Charlatan's, the band called the
Speaker 6: Charlatans that I really like. I definitely got.
Speaker 1: I've heard the Charlatans. Yeah, yeah, you saw them in
Speaker 1: their early stages.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I saw them. I mean I think there's still
Speaker 6: been Yeah, they've been going a little while, but obviously
Speaker 6: that I was still still going ahead. But yeah, I
Speaker 6: remember seeing a band called Kaniki, which had a female's
Speaker 6: lead singer, and I remember seeing Belly, who I thought
Speaker 6: were amazing. So yeah, just but so before i'd gone
Speaker 6: to gigs, I was doing gigs, you know, like it
Speaker 6: was it's just a thing because it was the nineties
Speaker 6: and everybody I knew was that abound, and I was.
Speaker 6: I had. I was part of this church group and
Speaker 6: we had a youth leader who was called Simon Hall,
Speaker 6: and he was really into music. He was kind of
Speaker 6: like a like a music snob, you know. So one
Speaker 6: time I turn up at church and he's like, here's
Speaker 6: a guitar, and I was just, you know, you couldn't
Speaker 6: believe it. And so I had to pay him back
Speaker 6: like ten pounds every month, you know, like I'd said,
Speaker 6: I've got my seven pounds, Oh thank you, and you
Speaker 6: know sometimes you just said, oh, just buy me a pizza,
Speaker 6: you know, and but I might, you know, I managed
Speaker 6: to pay back, and he is, you know, still a
Speaker 6: dear friend of mine. But that that was really great.
Speaker 6: And I used to play my guitar through the stereo
Speaker 6: because I didn't have an amp, and but I just
Speaker 6: loved I loved learning songs. I sort of could learn
Speaker 6: songs wrong. I liked Lena Fiedbe, I liked Buuck. You know,
Speaker 6: try and learn a b York song but not quite
Speaker 6: get the chords right. But then I had some chords
Speaker 6: I liked, and then I could write a different song
Speaker 6: over And I liked that time of music for especially
Speaker 6: for women. It was really confessional. I loved Julian Hatfield
Speaker 6: and she had this song called My Sister. The song
Speaker 6: was like, I hate my sister. She's such a bitch.
Speaker 6: She acts like she doesn't even know that I exist.
Speaker 6: But I'd give her anything to let her know I care.
Speaker 6: But I'm only talking to myself because she's not there.
Speaker 6: I remember thinking, you can write a song about that.
Speaker 6: You can write a song about how you feel about
Speaker 6: your siblings. You can write a song about your walk
Speaker 6: to school. You can write a song about how a
Speaker 6: boy laughed at your hair, like you know. So it's
Speaker 6: just it was different to pop music, which was more
Speaker 6: like universal. Everyone's included, you know, big messages, and this
Speaker 6: was just the every day And that was my entry
Speaker 6: into songwriting because I thought, oh, you can write about anything.
Speaker 1: Hey, are you aware of Nandy Bushell? So she's she's
Speaker 1: a kid from the UK. She is notable when she
Speaker 1: was like six or seven years old playing the drums
Speaker 1: on Instagram. Since then, I.
Speaker 6: Think I've seen a play. I think one time we
Speaker 6: were borting Leny Kravitz and she came on the sound
Speaker 6: check and she played. I didn't know she was from
Speaker 6: the UK, and I didn't remember her name, but I've
Speaker 6: seen her. She's played with Dave Grohl, right.
Speaker 1: And yes, yeah, it's scary for her now. So she's
Speaker 1: entering her teens now and already like you know, first
Speaker 1: it was just the drums and singing, but then now
Speaker 1: she's like on her saxophone kick, Like she plays saxophone
Speaker 1: now and keyboards. Like it's the way that she's developing.
Speaker 1: Like it's it's really interesting to see, like who kind
Speaker 1: of rises to the occasion, like when they start off
Speaker 1: as I'm not saying novelty, but like when you're six
Speaker 1: and seven, like your parents are sort of like being
Speaker 1: backstage parents and that sort of thing. And I was
Speaker 1: kind of wondering, like, Okay, well she keep at it,
Speaker 1: you know, at at nine, ten and eleven. Now that
Speaker 1: she's getting up there like she's her chops are, like
Speaker 1: she's not relying on the novelty of like, hey, you
Speaker 1: know cute black girl from the UK and I complete
Speaker 1: drums a little, like she's really kicking ass and getting
Speaker 1: more into songwriting and that sort of thing. It's such
Speaker 1: a rapid piece that, you know, it's mind blowing to me.
Speaker 1: I just wanted to know if you were aware of her,
Speaker 1: how did you start the band and were you guys
Speaker 1: at all like seriously trying to pursue a record deal
Speaker 1: or was it just like, hey, we're a local band.
Speaker 6: We really were trying to get somewhere. I think I
Speaker 6: was very serious when I was a kid. And also
Speaker 6: the band that i'd seen, Kiniki, they were only teenagers
Speaker 6: when they got signed, like they got signed out of
Speaker 6: high school. So I just kind of thought, like it
Speaker 6: is possible, you know, it was possible for it to happen.
Speaker 6: And so my band was my best friend who was
Speaker 6: called Jennifer Pugh, and she me and her used to
Speaker 6: play violins together, so we used to make these tapes
Speaker 6: together of like I don't know if she's singing or
Speaker 6: I'm singing. We're made of a story or like a
Speaker 6: keyboard thing about made a song about monsters, you know,
Speaker 6: like when you're ten or whatever. And then that just
Speaker 6: kind of kept going. And so when I started guitar,
Speaker 6: she started guitar, she got really good and she was
Speaker 6: so she was the lead guitarist, you know, she had
Speaker 6: proper lessons. And then we had a friend who was
Speaker 6: just a bad ass, and she has called Joanne Wilson.
Speaker 6: She played bass, and she had she'd learned a bit
Speaker 6: of flute, she'd learned a bit piano. She didn't really
Speaker 6: know the bass, so we used to have to teach it,
Speaker 6: like you know two two two two two two three
Speaker 6: through three three three three one one mightn't you know,
Speaker 6: but she she picked it up and she just looked
Speaker 6: the part. And it was those days, you know, we
Speaker 6: can smoke indoors and like, so she had just like
Speaker 6: have a cigarette and she had this bleach blonde hair.
Speaker 6: She she was like a regular, real life bad girl.
Speaker 6: And then my boyfriend at the time played drums. He
Speaker 6: was two years older than me and he was in
Speaker 6: a band. And I remember one time his band were
Speaker 6: playing at this pub called Joseph Well, I know it
Speaker 6: was the Duchess. It was the Duchess, and that was
Speaker 6: famous to us because Nirvanna had played there, so we're
Speaker 6: like the Duchess. And that was in those days. You
Speaker 6: could go to a pub even though you were underage.
Speaker 6: As long as she didn't drink, you could be there.
Speaker 6: So you could be there at sort of sixteen seventeen
Speaker 6: as long as you didn't go anywhere in the bar.
Speaker 6: And he called me and he said, our support act
Speaker 6: is not can't can't do our show next week? Do
Speaker 6: you guys want to play? And well, you know, we've
Speaker 6: got three songs. We have to get together and write,
Speaker 6: you know, three more songs so we can see we
Speaker 6: can be in the support band. But I just loved it.
Speaker 6: And I remember being on stage. I love the transition
Speaker 6: of like you write the songs in your bedroom, you're
Speaker 6: practicing someone's living room, you take the equipment with you
Speaker 6: on the bus, you walk into the pub. You know,
Speaker 6: for us, it was like three girls and we're all
Speaker 6: kind of like petite with our instruments, so we just
Speaker 6: like these guys. And then but then you get on
Speaker 6: stage and then and the music was, you know, as
Speaker 6: distorted guitars. And I loved the fact that people weren't
Speaker 6: expecting it of us. That's one thing I loved that.
Speaker 6: I also really loved just being there and thinking, oh,
Speaker 6: you know, I had this idea in my room, and
Speaker 6: now here I am playing it on stage. And you know,
Speaker 6: when you first do shows like that, it's your parents
Speaker 6: and your friend's parents and everyone's saying, oh, that was lovely.
Speaker 6: And then but I remember the first time we did
Speaker 6: a gig where a person I didn't know came up
Speaker 6: to me and they were like, god, that was and
Speaker 6: I thought, like, whose dad is this? But it was
Speaker 6: no one's dad. It was just a guy. And I
Speaker 6: really liked when you were play in a pub and
Speaker 6: people would be drinking at the barn and they just look
Speaker 6: over and then one by one, you know, they would
Speaker 6: come into the room, and then by the end there'd
Speaker 6: be more people there. Then started and I just really
Speaker 6: liked the feeling of it, the excitement, the fear of it,
Speaker 6: and so I just carried on and yeah, we really
Speaker 6: wanted to make it. We had a deal offered from
Speaker 6: road Runner Records, who were a metal label, but we
Speaker 6: were going to be the first indie signing, and the
Speaker 6: manager that we had at a time ended up in
Speaker 6: prison because he was kind of like a dodgy tax
Speaker 6: guy and he was the son of a very very
Speaker 6: well known music manager. But anyway, you know, he took
Speaker 6: us out for lunch to a fancy hotel. You know,
Speaker 6: we'd never we hadn't eaten places like that. He pay
Speaker 6: and it was all going really well. But our bass player,
Speaker 6: who was the you know, the cool girl in the band,
Speaker 6: she she got pregnant. And I remember telling him. I
Speaker 6: was like, you know, Joanne's pregnant, but that's great, right,
Speaker 6: because we'll be able to be on stage she'll have
Speaker 6: a bump. And then so I remember the next time
Speaker 6: we tried to call the phone, he didn't answer the phone.
Speaker 6: And then the next time we tried to call, he
Speaker 6: didn't answer the phone. Then the next time we tried
Speaker 6: to call it. This is before email or anything, you know,
Speaker 6: so you've got Yeah, that was the end, and I
Speaker 6: never saw him again. I saw that. It was like
Speaker 6: literally went to.
Speaker 4: Prison forgot that.
Speaker 6: Yeah, But I mean that's not why I didn't answer
Speaker 6: the phone. I think he just the idea of like
Speaker 6: a pregnant teen bass player wasn't as cool as it
Speaker 6: was to us. Then I had to go back to university.
Speaker 6: I was in my second year and I had to
Speaker 6: go into the third year kind of like tail between
Speaker 6: my legs. I'd been like, yes, you know, we're on
Speaker 6: our way. You know. I had to come back and
Speaker 6: pick up all the bits of literature that no one
Speaker 6: wanted to do, you know, medieval literature. And I finished
Speaker 6: my course and then I waitressed, and then I worked
Speaker 6: on the jewelry counter at this fancy department store, just
Speaker 6: kind of waiting to see what happened with my band.
Speaker 6: And in the meantime, we got another manager and he
Speaker 6: was like, you know, you're writing all the songs, you
Speaker 6: are standing out. Why did you come to London and
Speaker 6: write some songs with these different people and just sort
Speaker 6: of see what happens. And I felt really divided because
Speaker 6: it was all my best friends, you know at the time,
Speaker 6: but my best friend who had a baby, she'd left
Speaker 6: and we had a different person. Then the drummer had left,
Speaker 6: who got a different drummer, so it wasn't really the
Speaker 6: same bad and I just thought, yeah, I'm going to
Speaker 6: try that. I'm gonna try this, and those songs became
Speaker 6: the songs that I had from my first record, So.
Speaker 1: What was what was that first year like to just
Speaker 1: come out the box and instantly I almost feel like
Speaker 1: it's harder to top the charts in the UK than
Speaker 1: it is America. Like I know, for everyone, making it
Speaker 1: in America is the dream, but I'm way more impressed
Speaker 1: because I feel like the hurdles are harder and higher
Speaker 1: to even make some sort of dent or impression in
Speaker 1: the UK because I almost feel like if you're hit
Speaker 1: in the UK, you can work forever because they're not
Speaker 1: as disposable as we are in the States, like I
Speaker 1: know right now, like who's old Boy with one Eye?
Speaker 1: Fante old Boy with one eye? Yeah, Like even when
Speaker 1: Betty Watt was supposed to be the second coming of
Speaker 1: something and I just found out he he's in jail,
Speaker 1: like I didn't even.
Speaker 2: Know, yeah, yeah, yeah. The two records he had, the
Speaker 2: Trap Queen and he had yeah he had like one
Speaker 2: of them.
Speaker 1: He had a moment in which I found out like
Speaker 1: he was going to be a thing, at least a
Speaker 1: second or third album or fourth you know what I mean,
Speaker 1: that sort of thing. But to me, like your album
Speaker 1: Chop topped the charts in the UK, what was that
Speaker 1: feeling like for you?
Speaker 6: It was such a surprise. I remember getting a phone call.
Speaker 6: I was in Switzerland, because I guess Europe so small, right,
Speaker 6: So you do your bit of promotion in the UK,
Speaker 6: then you go to France, then you go to Italy,
Speaker 6: then you go to Spain, then you go to Germany,
Speaker 6: then you go to Holland then and you can do
Speaker 6: all that in about two weeks because it's so small.
Speaker 6: And so I remember being in Switzerland's I got a
Speaker 6: phone call that said, like, the album's gone to number
Speaker 6: one and it just looks like what you know? I
Speaker 6: just because I still didn't know anybody knew about me,
Speaker 6: and it was of course in the days when you
Speaker 6: had to physically go to a record shop and buy
Speaker 6: a record, So I was like, how how has this happened?
Speaker 6: And but I had got a lot of support from
Speaker 6: the BBC really early on. So in two thousand and
Speaker 6: five I had put out Like a Star as a
Speaker 6: just an EP. It was like a limited edition EP,
Speaker 6: but the BBC had kind of picked up on it
Speaker 6: and they put me on this TV show. It was
Speaker 6: got Later with Jules Holland and I remember last week yeah,
Speaker 6: yeah really yeah, so good. We just did one a
Speaker 6: few weeks ago. But I mean, he's such a big
Speaker 6: supporter of music, and it's a fully live show. It's
Speaker 6: five or six bands in a round, you know, and
Speaker 6: you just you just watch everyone do their thing. You'll
Speaker 6: get one or two goes at it. I remember I
Speaker 6: was seeing the showcase in London and maybe the first
Speaker 6: that first Thursday, one hundred people came, and then second Thursday,
Speaker 6: like two hundred people came, and the third Thursday like
Speaker 6: people couldn't get in. And then on the fourth Thursday,
Speaker 6: I'd done Jules Holland like earlier on in the day
Speaker 6: before I went to it, so it felt like it
Speaker 6: had really gone from nobody knows about me too, like
Speaker 6: I just got to play on the first ever TV show,
Speaker 6: you know. I remember once getting into a hotel room
Speaker 6: and I put on the radio through the TV and
Speaker 6: like a Star was playing, and I was looking at
Speaker 6: it thinking is my CD player plugged in here? And
Speaker 6: then I realized it's on the radio, the actual radio.
Speaker 6: Someone else is playing it. So it was just new
Speaker 6: to me. And then everything was so fast, like, oh,
Speaker 6: Stevie Wonder's on the phone, what like we're playing a
Speaker 6: show in America. Oh, Prince has come to the show
Speaker 6: like you've just met Mary J. Blige and she has
Speaker 6: heard of you. You know. It's just like I went
Speaker 6: to read out the nominations and the Grammys and I thought,
Speaker 6: this is amazing. I'm getting to read out the nominations
Speaker 6: and then just In Timberlake was saying, you know, song
Speaker 6: of the Record of the Year and put your records
Speaker 6: on what you know? To me, the nominations were the Grammys,
Speaker 6: Like it was that was the biggest excitement for me.
Speaker 6: Is just like hearing my name read out in a
Speaker 6: few categories, you know. So so yeah, it was.
Speaker 1: Answer one question for me. I don't I don't want
Speaker 1: to interrupt you. But since you mentioned that, I got
Speaker 1: to ask, so, since you were on the Joni Letters,
Speaker 1: do you receive an actual Grammy?
Speaker 6: Yes?
Speaker 1: Yeah, okay, so I get it. See, there's there's so
Speaker 1: much goalpost moving when it comes to you. Who can
Speaker 1: get one? Who can't get one? Yeah, because I'm associated
Speaker 1: with a few records that are albums of the Year.
Speaker 1: But I find out like in some categories, like especially
Speaker 1: with hip hop and soul, because there's so many collaborators
Speaker 1: and sample credits and all that stuff.
Speaker 6: They don't want to trophies.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they'll just give you a little certificate. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: you participated. But then I'll notice, like on in Classical
Speaker 1: and Country and in the main categories, like everyone gets
Speaker 1: like you're an official Grammy winner, where mine is sort
Speaker 1: of like I get it awards, like, yeah, I participate
Speaker 1: in voodoo here, here's my thing, you know. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: always wanted to know.
Speaker 6: Well, you should, you should redress that.
Speaker 1: Man, I got my own other battles to deal with.
Speaker 1: So no, but I do feel like when artists win
Speaker 1: Album of the Year and their respective categories, like we
Speaker 1: too should get awards as well.
Speaker 6: So yeah, but I always wanted.
Speaker 1: To know in the main category, do you get an
Speaker 1: award or do you not get work? Okay?
Speaker 6: Yeah, I remember Herbie saying if we win, I want
Speaker 6: you to come up on stage. But in the moment,
Speaker 6: I didn't go up. I just like, I've contributed one
Speaker 6: song to this. This is Herbie's saying. And he had
Speaker 6: such a he had a lot to say, right, he
Speaker 6: had a speech prepared in his pocket.
Speaker 1: You know, m No, don't don't dismiss that. That was
Speaker 1: your moment, you know, just in wrapping up for me,
Speaker 1: Like I feel like this album is the soundtrack to
Speaker 1: a movie that doesn't exist yet, or like, how do
Speaker 1: you take this further? Because I feel like there's no turning,
Speaker 1: Like you've done to open a door that can't be
Speaker 1: closed now, So like what is your what is your
Speaker 1: next plan? Musically? At least that's a.
Speaker 6: Really good question. I mean, definitely, my engagement with that
Speaker 6: building and those histories definitely doesn't stop. You know, I
Speaker 6: really want to write an essay about the erasure of
Speaker 6: black childhood that I saw in the objects in the
Speaker 6: Arts Bank, because it's a kind of strategic, you know,
Speaker 6: wide ranging kind of assault on childhood. You know, you know,
Speaker 6: hundreds of years long, but you know, it's two hundred
Speaker 6: years of evidence in that in the Arts Bank in
Speaker 6: terms of black children being depicted as not fully innocent,
Speaker 6: they're sexualized, they're seen as labor, you know, people who labor,
Speaker 6: like black childhood doesn't exist for the black children in
Speaker 6: the objects in the Ed Williams collection. And then right
Speaker 6: now next to the Arts Bank is there Tamir rice Pavilion,
Speaker 6: which is going to be torn down. And Timir Rice's
Speaker 6: mother came to Theesta and asked whether that could have
Speaker 6: its place next to the bank so that Tamir Rice
Speaker 6: Pavilion is there. And you know, I think a lot
Speaker 6: about the connection between what is it for a police
Speaker 6: officer to not perceive someone as a child, to think
Speaker 6: of them as a dangerous adult instead of seeing them
Speaker 6: as a child playing with a toy because they've been
Speaker 6: swimming in this culture, lifelong culture that extends back generations
Speaker 6: of not affording black children the same space, innocent, joy
Speaker 6: freedom as other children. You know, how does it? One
Speaker 6: thing is cartoons and stories and silly picture books and
Speaker 6: you know, illustrations in the Black Sambo and postcards saying
Speaker 6: all these coon look alike. But the real world of
Speaker 6: effect is, you know, it's death for some young people.
Speaker 6: And so I definitely want to make some sort of
Speaker 6: I want to do some sort of work around that.
Speaker 6: But at the same time, I know there's people who
Speaker 6: are more gifted in that area. You know, I'm just
Speaker 6: reading Christina Sharp's book. You know, there's some towering academics
Speaker 6: in that world. But at the same time, there's all
Speaker 6: this collection of the stuff that I'm interested in. So,
Speaker 6: I mean, and you wanted to find a way to
Speaker 6: make some sort of commentary and that, but yeah, for
Speaker 6: me musically, I just feel like I came from a
Speaker 6: place on my third album feeling like I am a
Speaker 6: failed pop star who has sort of squandered their chips
Speaker 6: at the you know, the Roulette table of music. You know,
Speaker 6: you had all this and you could have And my
Speaker 6: third record was that. You know, it's me just playing
Speaker 6: what songs to music executives, you know, eight men in
Speaker 6: a room and having them say I just don't think
Speaker 6: that's the first single, you know, and thinking okay, And
Speaker 6: after a while I didn't need them to be in
Speaker 6: the room at all because they were just in my
Speaker 6: head everything I started. What's the point of even finishing
Speaker 6: this song? It's not an international megasmash, you know, it's
Speaker 6: not uptown funk? So why am I even going to
Speaker 6: finish it? To now feeling like I am an artist?
Speaker 6: An artist's job is to exemplify freedom. I this is
Speaker 6: my work. This is what I love to do. It's
Speaker 6: what I've always loved to do. This is what I'll
Speaker 6: always do. That is the position I feel like I'm in.
Speaker 1: Are you pleased with the response that you're getting about
Speaker 1: the record?
Speaker 6: I've overjoyed with the response, definitely, because I feel I mean,
Speaker 6: I don't read it, but I've got someone who's telling me,
Speaker 6: you know, yeah, you know it's a good response.
Speaker 1: And I live between fuck Pitchfork and did you see
Speaker 1: where Pittsfork said? And to me, you know, sometimes they
Speaker 1: get it right. I mean, even when they're this and me,
Speaker 1: they get it right. But sometimes they get it right.
Speaker 3: What's been the difference we were talking about labels earlier,
Speaker 3: Now that you're with thirty Tigers and kind of doing
Speaker 3: it independently, what is that like now?
Speaker 1: What is the difference between you know, being labels? YEA
Speaker 1: put a number before an animal, is.
Speaker 7: Right?
Speaker 6: Yeah, I think, doctor Seuss, I think. But yeah, I
Speaker 6: loved that label straight away when I met them. I mean,
Speaker 6: I made the record independently. I made it with my
Speaker 6: own means, and I made it with you know, from
Speaker 6: our studio, and that gave me all this freedom. One
Speaker 6: I thought of it as a side project too. There
Speaker 6: was no one saying where's the hits or when is
Speaker 6: it finished? Which was really important because I also realized
Speaker 6: I don't respond well to that kind of pressure either.
Speaker 6: And my first record sort of being made like that,
Speaker 6: I made it in the basement of an art studio,
Speaker 6: with someone that I got to know as a friend,
Speaker 6: you know, so, and then we walked it into labels
Speaker 6: and we worked it to Sony and they were like,
Speaker 6: And then we walked at Universal and they were you know.
Speaker 6: So It's like I felt, and I feel like, whatever
Speaker 6: I do in the future, I'm going to make that
Speaker 6: record and see who likes it, because why would you
Speaker 6: want to work with people who don't like it? And
Speaker 6: it's so hard, you know, my third record, it was
Speaker 6: so hard, feeling like I was just disappointing people at
Speaker 6: every turn, you know, and at that point, people are
Speaker 6: getting sacked if you don't make the right record right.
Speaker 6: People are losing their jobs, and the people you've known
Speaker 6: for ten years and you know their kids, and so
Speaker 6: you feel a lot of responsibility. But it's so weird
Speaker 6: being an artist how you can feel trapped by the
Speaker 6: things that you made. You know that it doesn't make
Speaker 6: any sense, does it. But I think you can make
Speaker 6: something and then it makes you this corridor and then
Speaker 6: you think, well that I have to go down that.
Speaker 6: You know. The way that I was able to feel
Speaker 6: free on this was thinking it's not a Corinne Bailey
Speaker 6: Ray record, but that that's just me. So you know,
Speaker 6: it was only when the artist, you know, he's a
Speaker 6: brilliant graph writery writes, it makes amazing things for skateboard.
Speaker 6: Skateboard magazine is where I saw his work. It's only
Speaker 6: when he sent me the cover and I saw my name.
Speaker 6: The first thing I thought was like, I got to
Speaker 6: tell him not to put my name on it. It meant
Speaker 6: to say black rainbows, right, And then I saw my name.
Speaker 6: I thought, there's something about not seeing it as a font.
Speaker 6: I think sometimes when you see your name as a font,
Speaker 6: it becomes a sort of brand that somehow like tears
Speaker 6: away from you and becomes a separate thing. And it's like, oh,
Speaker 6: it's not in that font, it's just freehand, but it's me.
Speaker 6: And I thought, yeah, I never want to be boxed
Speaker 6: in again by my perception of what I think other
Speaker 6: people's perception of me, which, which of course is too
Speaker 6: is too circular anyway, So yeah, I definitely sort of
Speaker 6: can't go back. And then now I'm just trying to
Speaker 6: work out what to do.
Speaker 1: Next tour wise. How many weeks are you doing in
Speaker 1: the stage And we did.
Speaker 6: Five weeks in September. Then we went to Europe and
Speaker 6: did six weeks. I No, it wasn't six weeks. It
Speaker 6: was about four. And then we've come back now and
Speaker 6: we've done some West Coast dates and then we've got
Speaker 6: our Blue Note shows and then we're coming back in
Speaker 6: June and do some US dates as well. And I'm
Speaker 6: playing in Australia and I'm playing. You know, it's like
Speaker 6: it's that's a good thing is you know, just getting
Speaker 6: to play all over the world. It's a dream to me.
Speaker 6: You know, I'm not playing to twenty thousand people. I'm
Speaker 6: playing to two thousand people. But they're scattered all over
Speaker 6: the world, and I'm happy to get on a plane
Speaker 6: and go to them, you know.
Speaker 3: One the last question I wanted to ask Korean. I
Speaker 3: was always curious about your recording process for The Sea.
Speaker 3: You mentioned earlier that you know, that was when your
Speaker 3: husband had died, and so from what I've read, part
Speaker 3: of it was recorded prior, and then the other half was.
Speaker 2: How did you make it through that process?
Speaker 1: I was going to say it happened. I think it
Speaker 1: happened when we were recording Black Lily.
Speaker 6: That's right. We had done some work take and then yeah,
Speaker 6: and we had done I've done this great jam with
Speaker 6: James Poison and it was like, oh this all this
Speaker 6: feels really good and I'm happy in this really happy place,
Speaker 6: and Jason was playing with Mark Ronson and it was
Speaker 6: things were looking so good for us, and then.
Speaker 1: Break and then I just remember the session stopped. And
Speaker 1: at first I was like, well, I guess you didn't
Speaker 1: like where we were going with it. I had no clue,
Speaker 1: and then they explained to me what I can't remember.
Speaker 6: I think something something might have happened while we were
Speaker 6: on while we were there, but then yeah, this all
Speaker 6: happened in the in the March in two thousand and eight.
Speaker 6: And then I guess after that, I just sort of
Speaker 6: stopped making music. It kind of felt like the end
Speaker 6: of my life. And I was twenty nine, and you know,
Speaker 6: when you're twenty nine, you sort of think you're old,
Speaker 6: you know, because you're nearly thirty and thirty is the
Speaker 6: end of your life, right, So I thought, well, you know,
Speaker 6: I've had this great life and I've done this, I've
Speaker 6: had all this great you know, I've really enjoyed my music.
Speaker 6: Stuff that when you have an intense period, sometimes that
Speaker 6: eighteen months feels more expansive than it really is. So
Speaker 6: it felt like I've done a few years of this
Speaker 6: and then yeah, I just thought, okay, that's the end
Speaker 6: of my life. And then and they also it was
Speaker 6: so painful. I kind of couldn't imagine thirty nine, forty nine,
Speaker 6: fifty nine s. I was just thought, how could I
Speaker 6: sort of carry on with this amount of physical pain?
Speaker 6: And then I guess, you know, anyone who's experienced grief
Speaker 6: is just like slowly, slowly, slowly, it's like the sound
Speaker 6: being sort of turned back up again, and you find
Speaker 6: little moments or you find interest, so you find you cease.
Speaker 6: I remember being in New York and seeing this couple
Speaker 6: and she was pregnantly had a little baby, and I
Speaker 6: remember sort of thinking, oh, like I had a little pine
Speaker 6: for that, like, oh, in my future, I want to
Speaker 6: be a parent. I remember feeling that, and that was
Speaker 6: a little sort of crack of hope. And then, you know,
Speaker 6: or I'd sit at the piano and just get like
Speaker 6: two chords and think, oh, I want to finish that.
Speaker 6: There were just little bits of things, but it's a
Speaker 6: really really really really long time, you know. I And
Speaker 6: when I was touring the sea, I was still very
Speaker 6: much in my sort of widowhood. And so, I mean
Speaker 6: it was it was useful to play the songs, but
Speaker 6: it was really difficult to play them as well. And
Speaker 6: also it attracted to me a lot of people who
Speaker 6: were grieving too, which was very beautiful but also had
Speaker 6: its own weight to it. You know. I remember meeting
Speaker 6: a couple after a show and they had lost a
Speaker 6: child before it was born, and they wanted to talk
Speaker 6: to me about that, and they even wanted to show
Speaker 6: me photographs and I remember sort of thinking I am
Speaker 6: not sort of qualified for that, but at the same time,
Speaker 6: here I am in this space, which is I'm standing
Speaker 6: on the stage talking about loss, and not many people
Speaker 6: that are saying that at this moment. And so it
Speaker 6: was just I'd meet people in the street they say,
Speaker 6: I lost my brother, I lost my mother, I lost
Speaker 6: my partner. People would write your letters I lost my husband,
Speaker 6: and I just I felt in my heart were so
Speaker 6: open and bleeding in that time. You know, just just
Speaker 6: like the naivety that you can have if you haven't
Speaker 6: experienced loss, you sort of walk around the world like yeah,
Speaker 6: kind of in control of my life, and you know,
Speaker 6: like I just got to manifest this, and you just
Speaker 6: don't realize how everything can change in a moment. So
Speaker 6: I guess when I came through that grief, the place
Speaker 6: I arrived at was total gratitude at being alive, and
Speaker 6: you know, and then I had my children, and then
Speaker 6: I felt very differently about my life. I thought I
Speaker 6: really wanted to live, you know, I want to make it,
Speaker 6: you know, I want to make it and I want
Speaker 6: to survive for them. So every day that I wake up,
Speaker 6: I'm like an old person. You know, when you talk
Speaker 6: to an eighty year old and they say, you say,
Speaker 6: how are you and they say, well, I woke up today,
Speaker 6: you know, they say that, It's like that's what I'm like.
Speaker 6: Am I here? I am, I'm awake, you know, I'm here.
Speaker 6: Like I just feel this massive gratitude and massive joy
Speaker 6: all the time because I have been so low to
Speaker 6: the point where I felt I don't want this life.
Speaker 6: I don't want my life, and now I really really
Speaker 6: want it, really want it. So I'm really grateful and
Speaker 6: definitely play music help me to articulate those thoughts.
Speaker 1: Well, I thank you for sharing that, and again I
Speaker 1: love No, I fucking love your album, and I you know,
Speaker 1: anyone listening now just please like give your support, like
Speaker 1: this is really really a great record and repeat listens
Speaker 1: over and over again, and you know, I can't wait
Speaker 1: to see this live. I'm going to see you this
Speaker 1: week when you come to Blue Note. Of course, this
Speaker 1: will be on the air way after the fact, so
Speaker 1: if Corinth is in town then you need to support her.
Speaker 1: But thank you for doing this for us, and I
Speaker 1: appreciate you.
Speaker 6: Thanks, I appreciate it. Thanks everybody.
Speaker 1: Uh, this is Quest Love and thank you once again,
Speaker 1: Uh miss Ray for joining us. And we'll see you
Speaker 1: guys on the next go round of Quest Love Supreme.
Speaker 1: All right, West Love Supreme is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1: For more podcasts from iHeart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Speaker 1: Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.