10 minute read
It's a LDN Thing
Words RACHAEL SIGEE Photography EDD HORDER
July 2019. In a warehouse in Peckham, south London, 10 of the UK’s freshest musicians and performers gather for the photoshoot you see here. For four weeks from August 20, they will be part of the first Red Bull Music Festival London, showcasing their boundarypushing talents in venues across the capital. Here, they explain why they‘re involved, what their neighbourhood means to them, and what their own music represents
Lava La Rue & L!baan
Wild, wild west
Twenty-one-year-old rapper and singer Awia Laurel, aka Lava La Rue, hails from Ladbroke Grove, west London. The founder of arts and music collective NiNE8 believes that cultural and gender diversity are pivotal to the area’s unique sound.
“A lot of groups are all one thing – all from Harlem or LA – but that’s not our vibe,” she says. “At NiNE8, we have people who are Indian, Jamaican, Caribbean, Irish, kids who grew up in Spain, Somalia… We’ve got just as many female as male rappers. It’s music where we all come from different backgrounds but coexist on one track.
“That’s west London. It has one of the starkest gaps between superupper-class, multimillion Kensington houses and then estates like Grenfell. But that means you’re exposed to all walks of life. There’s a generation of kids who’ve grown up together. You walk down Portobello and you’ve got the Rastafarians, the Moroccans, the Spanish, all in this area together. That’s what our music is.”
There’s a strong social message in the lyrics of La Rue and NiNE8, but she doesn’t see their music as overtly political. “I don’t think any of us strive to make political music,” she says. “It’s just inherently political because of the lives we live. We’re rapping our perspectives, and if mine is, ‘I’m from London, I’m gay, I’m of colour, I’m working class,’ then there’s going to be politics in there.
“I love the idea of catchy music and it being quite politically strong and people singing it like a mantra. What you say every day, you speak into existence, so let people say stuff that benefits them, rather than, ‘Yeah, I’m from the south, put my dick in her mouth,’ or that shit, which is what you get in a lot of rap. Let’s have people say something they’re going to speak into existence every day, and positively.”
Twenty-two-year-old MC and producer L!baan hails from north London, but now considers himself “pretty much local to west” after getting to know the NiNE8 Collective through friends.
A drummer while at school, L!baan – real name Libann Hassan – joined the collective after chatting to La Rue in a skate park. “Skating forced me to explore other parts of London. And on the way to all these places, you see and hear a lot of things. That’s relayed into my music, because I try to be as versatile as I can be. And, for real, there are a lot of artists, painters and musicians among skaters.”
Joe Armon-Jones & Nabihah Iqbal
The tag team
Just back from playing at Glastonbury, 26-year-old pianist Joe Armon-Jones seems a little dazed that jazz superstar Kamasi Washington had joined him on stage at his Sunday-night gig alongside Afrobeat band Kokoroko. “[LA trombonist] Ryan Porter rolled through, and Kamasi played on some of my tunes. It was pretty mad,” he says. “I was directing legends that I’ve looked up to for some time.”
Armon-Jones is used to adapting quickly. He plays with different musicians almost every night, either as part of renowned London jazz crew Ezra Collective or in his own projects. But despite the nearconstant attachment of the word ‘jazz’ to anything he does, he’s reluctant to label his music. “I don’t sound like Miles Davis. It’s a mixture of improvisation, dub, hip hop, soul, funk – if I start giving it a stupid name like, ‘Oh, it’s trap-dub-jazz,’ then it’s like I’ve put a stamp on it. It would stop me from making whatever I want to make in the future. I don’t want to be thinking about genres when I make tunes.”
The Oxfordshire-born musician moved to south London to study jazz, and he cites local DJ and producer Maxwell Owin as a key influence. “He opened my mind to dance music. As a jazz musician, it’s easy to be arrogant about other music styles because, say, there might not be as many notes. But when you go to make those styles, you realise how hard it is.”
When 32-year-old Nabihah Iqbal says she has diverse taste in music, she means it. A childhood Michael Jackson fan, she spent her teens dancing to ska-punk at Camden’s Underworld club, and cites her favourite recent gig as jazz legends Sun Ra Arkestra at Dalston’s Cafe OTO. On her fortnightly NTS radio show, she’ll play anything from the US punk-rock of Alkaline Trio to calypso.
“There are no boundaries,” she says; something that has surprised those with narrow ideas about what music a British-Asian woman might listen to and play. “It’s why I’ve chosen to use my real name as an artist,” she says, explaining why she dropped her previous moniker, Throwing Shade. “This is who I am and what I do, and there’s nothing incongruous about it.”
Iqbal’s own sound is dreamy and electronic, as heard on her 2017 album Weighing of the Heart. A multi-instrumentalist – playing guitar, piano, flute and sitar, thanks to a degree in ethnomusicology – she studied to be a human rights lawyer and sat the bar, but a sideline in DJing at friends’ parties led her to music.
If music is her first love, London is a close second: “It’s where I was born and lived my whole life, so it has a profound impact on me as a person and a creative. It’s a very harmonious chaos.” She grew up near Regent’s Park and now lives behind Abbey Road Studios. “I’m channelling the energy. There are legendary studios in that area, so I’ve got good music feng shui. Noel and Liam Gallagher lived nearby when I was a kid – I used to see them on the street and freak out. Once, I walked into a lamppost because Noel, Paul Weller and Alan McGee – Oasis’ manager – were sat outside a café on St John’s Wood High Street. I was 10 years old.”
Lil C & Alicai Harley
Galdem style
West Norwood native Lil C – aka Cesca Ivaldi – credits her corner of London with her interest in music: “It’s synonymous with people playing bashment from cars.” The 23-yearold, who began her DJ career on student radio while studying art in Leeds, is a “kind of self-professed” dancehall expert. She’s proud of the scene’s roots, but conflicted about its mainstream success: “It’s great that people are listening to it more, but only a certain number are eating off it. It annoys me that the money doesn’t feed back into the scene.”
Her top spaces to play are London QTPOC (queer and trans people of colour) nights Pxssy Palace and BBZ. “It’s like playing for family. I’m bi, and the energy of queer people is next level. ‘The oppressed dance the best’ – me and my friend coined that.”
South London rapper/singer Alicai Harley likes to mix up her sound, but, when pushed, describes it as “’90s dancehall pop in its purest form – nostalgic, infectious vibes.”
Born in Kingston, Jamaica, the 23-year-old moved to London in 2002. “South London definitely influences my music,” she says. “Even though I was born in Jamaica and my family is Jamaican and my culture is so strong in me, I’m British, too.”
Anz & Riz La Teef
Sunday drivers
Anna-Marie Odubote, better known as Anz, couldn’t be further from the image of an aloof DJ hiding behind the decks. The London-born 27-yearold rarely stops dancing through her own sets, which she describes as “a mishmash, a taster of music I like, from old-school, breakbeat, hardcore and rave all the way to Afrobeat”. In person, she has the same exuberant energy and a huge smile.
Anz began creating and posting her own music to SoundCloud about four years ago, and someone soon messaged to say they wanted to book her. “I was like, ‘To do what?’ So my partner and I got a ratty mixer and a pair of old £80 CDJ-100S CD players. That’s how I learnt.”
Now, she’s released a debut EP – Invitation 2 Dance (dedicated to “the boys who used to muscle me off the decks at house parties”) – and has just played iconic Berlin nightclub Berghain. “I was worried it would be techno-focused and 4/4 serious music, but they told me to do whatever I wanted. It was 4am to 6am at the Panorama Bar, so I had a nice slot – although I accidentally got drunk at the artists’ dinner and had to have a nap before my set.”
Today, the Manchester resident is optimistic about marginalised voices in the industry. “Dance music is a fairly inclusive space, even if it can sometimes look like it isn’t. At the parties I play, there isn’t a sense of otherness because, whether you go for this one DJ or genre, there’s a common thread that unites everyone in that space. It helps.”
Anz is just as excited to be in the crowd when her friends are on the decks. “I’m looking forward to Afrodeutsche playing with Aphex Twin [at the RBMF finale at Printworks] because she’s a friend in Manchester. Going from us playing together in my living room to seeing her play in that context is unreal.”
South Londoner Riz La Teef started spinning records in 2008 when his university housemate went on a foreign exchange and left his decks behind. His name comes from an unusual source: the BBC news. “We used to watch the news for London every day and the presenter was called Riz Lateef,” he reveals. “I thought it kind of sounded like someone who steals people’s Rizlas.”
La Teef is known for cutting his own dubplates, and this year the 30-year-old started his own record label, South London Press. So, what do people get at a Riz La Teef set? “A bit of everything: dubstep, garage, funk and grime,” he says. “I still play vinyl. I’m pretty analogue. I’ve got about 3,000 records in my front room.”
Here’s a DJ who knows how to move a crowd – no matter the size. “I’ve played Fabric three times. The first was at about 11pm and it was just me and the security guard. He seemed to like it, though.”
Victoria Sin & Shy One
The shape changers
Performance artist and drag queen Victoria Sin doesn’t need to invent a stage name – the 28-year-old Canadian’s real one works just fine for a multi-disciplinary and genderexploratory artist who offers a unique interpretation of drag.
“When I was 17 in Toronto, I used a fake ID to go to drag clubs and saw this empowered embodiment of femininity in a way I never had before,” says Sin. “I was transfixed. I always wanted to be a drag queen, but didn’t know it was something I could do until I moved to London. I’m trying to express that gender and identity are constructed, but it doesn’t mean we can’t take pleasure in those things. Through a process of doing drag and putting on and taking off my gender, I realised I wasn’t a woman and came out as non-binary.”
Sin’s Red Bull performance with Shy One is all about queer spaces, but these opportunities alone don’t mean the world is becoming more open-minded. “Trans rights have so far to go in the UK, and this is why spaces like BBZ and Pxssy Palace are so important, because that’s where I can be myself,” says Sin. “I live in a country that doesn’t recognise nonbinary as a legal gender identity, so what does that do for me?”
Sin also recognises that the way femininity is treated on stage is totally different to how it’s treated on the street. “Femininity is something you can wield to make space for yourself and other people and be loud and proud. Unfortunately that’s not always possible, because of the social context we exist within. My work is about distancing ideas of femininity from ideas of womanhood. They are not necessarily related.”
Given that Shy One’s dad is the DJ Trevor Nelson and her godfather is Soul II Soul’s Jazzie B, people assume they know how the 29-yearold – born Mali Larrington-Nelson – ended up being a DJ. However, her mum was the biggest influence: “She was a raver and big music lover. She introduced me to jungle, garage and broken beat when listening to pirate radio in her car, and also neo-soul like Erykah Badu and Lauryn Hill.”
Having said that, it was Jazzie B gifting her decks on her 13th birthday, combined with a mixing workshop at her local youth club in Harrow, that led Shy to become one of London’s most eclectic underground DJs. “Right now, I’m definitely playing more broken beat and jazz,” she says. “Not to look down on other styles as I play them all, but there’s a heavy jazz presence.”
Influential on London’s queer party scene, Shy is part of the BBZ collective that centres on women and non-binary people of colour, and chooses queer collective Pxssy Palace as her favourite night to be on the bill. But her eclectic taste extends to socialising. “Wetherspoons is somewhere I feel comfortable going and being able to eat and drink for cheap,” she says. “I used to take my laptop and work there. It’s odd that I, as a queer young black woman of immigrant descent, often feel more at ease in spaces you expect to be most hostile. Line your stomach at ’Spoons and then go to Pxssy Palace – it’s a great night.”
