East End Review

Tag: interview

Too late to stop Nao: interview

Nao: “Vocal acrobatics and flair…” Photograph: Jeff Hahn

The story of Nao is not one of overnight success. The 28-year-old East Londoner this year released her debut album For All We Know to some acclaim, with critics hailing her vocal acrobatics and flair in taking the sounds of her old school idols and bringing them up to date. But in contrast to the fame-hungry, manufactured stars of today, the rise to prominence of Nao (née Neo Jessica Joshua) is the result of years of hard work. She has been gigging since the age of 14, studied jazz at music school and been a session vocalist for the likes of Jarvis Cocker and Kwabs. Here she talks about East London sounds, the joy of jamming and ‘wonky funk’…

You grew up and live in East London. How does that come through in your music?

East London has always been a hub for fresh and original music. When I was growing up in my teenage years we were listening to pirate radio stations and grime crews like Heartless Crew and Pay as U Go. They were all people who weren’t signed and were just on the hustle and I think that influenced me in following my own nose. It made me think, ‘I love making music so I’m just going to get on the grind and hope that one day it works out.’ It’s beginning to.

And your recording studio is on Ridley Road, home of the famous market. Do you find inspiration there for your music amongst the market stalls and traders?

I love hustle and bustle and Ridley Road definitely has that. When I’ve been in the studio working without windows or people for a long time I’ve started going out in Dalston, clubbing a little bit just to let my hair down. And I was hearing all these new tunes that people were getting down to and I was like ‘ when did this music come out?’ So it helps me keep up to date with new music that’s for sure.

It’s been a rollercoaster couple of years for you, from your first EP in 2014 to a MOBO nomination, playing Glastonbury twice, coming third in BBC’s Sound of 2016 poll and now a debut album under your belt. How are you coping with the success?

Well I’m not Adele so I don’t get mobbed down the street but it’s definitely a new path for me. I’m realistic though. I understand stuff goes up and stuff comes down and that with the music business you can’t really hold your self-esteem to it because it’s fickle. So I just make music because I love it though obviously I want other people to enjoy it too.

Does the fact you’ve been gigging since you were 14 make you appreciate this all the more?

Yeah, 100 per cent. I’ve been gigging most of my life around London and around the world actually and when I was doing those shows I was a voice of other people’s projects, a singer just floating around. But it did teach me about stage presence, about performing and it taught me about how to be a professional and I learnt my craft trying to be good vocalist. I appreciate that all those years have helped me in my late 20s hopefully be at a good standard.

You worked with some well-respected producers on For All We Know (Grades, A.K. Paul, Loxe, John Calvert) yet there’s something quite homespun about it, like the inclusion of voice memos. What was the rationale there?

You’re right, it’s definitely not all that polished. I recorded all the vocals in my cupboard at home and sometimes you can hear a train going past because I live by the train tracks. There’s a couple of voice memos in there, one in front of a song called Happy and another straight afterwards. And that’s basically an insight into how that song came about. When I make music I leave my phone recording for hours because you never know what you’re going to come up with. So I was recording me and my friends jamming around and we started to form the bass line and then you can hear the chorus developing. I just wanted to show that it’s not about being in the studio with Pharrell, it’s about sitting with people you’re comfortable with, jamming it out and finding a song within that beautiful moment.

You studied vocal jazz at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, which suggests to me you’ve always been very serious about a career in music. When did you realise it was something you wanted to do full-time?

I knew I wanted to be a musician from very young, but not from watching Popstars on TV – there was something about dancing around in a video didn’t click for me. Some of the musicians I love are pretty old school, like Stevie Wonder and Aretha Franklin. They’re amazing musicians and that’s why I went to the Guildhall to study jazz because it was all about musicianship, and I got to compose for orchestras and arrange for like big bands and things like that. Hopefully throughout the album you can hear strong musicianship because that’s what I’ve always wanted to get across.

You’ve described your particular type of music as ‘wonky funk’. What does that mean and why have you felt the need to invent your own genre?

Well a lot of people connect me to R&B and I see R&B as quite a particular thing. It’s quite smooth, it’s quite silky, it’s quite… I don’t know, it’s quite sexual sometimes. But I feel with my music there are so many colours in there: there’s funk, there’s R&B, there’s electronic future music in there. It’s just an amalgamation of all the things I grew up listening to, so for all those people putting me into one bracket because I don’t sound like Usher I just made up my own genre. The funk I take from people like Prince and Michael Jackson who I love and the ‘wonkiness’ is my own interpretation for the moment that we live in. My music doesn’t sound retro, it doesn’t sound like it’s recorded in the 70s, it sounds new I hope, it sounds contemporary.

For All We Know is out now on Little Tokyo Recordings

August 26, 2016
In a Land of Paper Gods author on ‘naughty children who disappeared from history’

Rebecca Mackenzie, author of In a Land of Paper Gods

Rebecca Mackenzie grew up in the jungles of Thailand, where her parents worked as Christian missionaries, but at 12 she and her family moved back to a Scottish fishing village.

Now living in Hackney, MacKenzie has written her debut novel, In a Land of Paper Gods, which steers away from her early experiences to tell the story of a schoolgirl in a boarding school in China at the outbreak of the second Sino-Japanese War.

Rebecca, how long have you lived in Hackney?

I moved to London at 17 when I went to university and I’ve been here ever since. I moved to Dalston over ten years ago. Friends used to be hugely relieved when I’d meet them from the bus stop and walk them back again. Now I live at the top of a vicarage in Stoke Newington. I love it, even though the first thing I see outside my front door is a graveyard.

The thing that seems to have struck a lot of reviewers is that it’s quite personal book – something that had parallels with what you experienced growing up.

What drew me to the lives of missionary kids was my personal experience. I grew up in what was partly an evangelical environment, but I was also surrounded by Thai animism, spirit worship, and the idea that there were spirits and creatures everywhere. But I chose to set the book in a different part of Asia, at a different period in history because I needed that distance to kickstart my imagination.

While there are definitely biographical themes there’s also a truth that comes from my dreamworld that’s not like the truth of your day-to-day reality.

I believe in synchronicity as well and there were synchronous moments in the writing for the book. For example I went to interview an English woman who’d lived in China during the Sino-Japanese war, and like me she was the daughter of missionaries. We were having this nice cup of tea together and I felt something. I couldn’t stop looking at her. It turned out that she’d returned from China to Edinburgh and she’d moved into the same street in Edinburgh I’d lived on, 50 years before me, and her grandparents came from the same tiny village in the north of Scotland my grandparents came from.

I thought that the voice of the lead character, Etta, was very strong. How did you create her?

I saw these formal school photographs at SOAS from a missionary school. Some children, if they weren’t sitting still, became a kind of blur. I became interested in these naughty children, who somehow disappeared from history as a result of fidgeting.

What things as a writer do you find particularly helpful about living in London?

Being near other writers and other creative people is a wonderful resource, but with that comes distraction.

How do you make time for writing, solitude and focus?

I love sitting in Rare Books and Music in the British Library. The concentration in there spurs me on to keep working.

In a Land of Paper Gods
is published by Tinder Press.
RRP: £16.99 ISBN: 9781472224194

April 21, 2016
The real mothers of invention

Gavin Weightman

Inventions aren’t born fully fledged, nor are they the work of a lone genius. In his latest foray into the past, Hackney-based historian and former journalist Gavin Weightman explores the nuances and collaboration that lead inevitably to the all-important ‘eureka!’ moment in the story of invention.

From his own school days as an amateur radio maker, Weightman has always been fascinated by how the impossible becomes possible. It is this fascination that is woven throughout Eureka: How Invention Happens, working backwards from the final product to the initial stages of exploration, the first breakthrough and the moment when it all becomes possible. “My book isn’t prescriptive,” he says. “It doesn’t tell you how to be an inventor, but rather takes a closer look at the pre-histories of inventions that involve all sorts of people.”

Social histories have dominated the genre of late. Weightman’s book may sound industrially focused, yet one of its underlying threads is the impact, even as an afterthought, of great inventions on our society. It’s as much a book about people as it is about products; not just those who dreamed up the things we take for granted today, but those who use them.

“Obviously inventions influence the human condition to some degree,” says Weightman. “Just look at social media as a result of a combination of the personal computer and the mobile phone, for example – but are we better or worse off because of them? Progress improves people’s lives and makes them easier, but I don’t think it fundamentally alters the balance of good and evil.”

This is a question that crops up more and more as we live in an increasingly digital world. There’s no doubt that, in this book, these inventions are thought of as a good thing. Weightman doesn’t subscribe to the idea that necessity is the mother of invention, instead presenting an entertaining and compelling snapshot of everyday innovators who went beyond the bounds of possibility.

“In researching my book, one of the most significant things I discovered is that those who have produced something practical have been largely outside the mainstream of science. It’s not that we don’t need scientists and engineers, it’s just that they don’t seem to think about who might need, or want, the item in question.”

Weightman’s book emphasises the importance of the amateur in the creation of some of the most ubiquitous technologies that surround us today – the aeroplane, the television, the bar code, the personal computer and the mobile phone. Their very status as unknowns meant they had very little to lose, were able to experiment and test without the pressure of commitment to existing techniques and technologies. By focusing on the everyman behind the eureka moment, Weightman is redefining a historical narrative, taking an original approach to the ingenuity of invention that’s at once scientifically revealing and socially intriguing.

It’s often a process of elimination, a hobby that turns into something far more serious as the boundaries are pushed. “There’s definitely an element of chance, of stumbling across things when it comes to invention,” says Weightman. “While some of the people I explore in my book, like the Wright brothers, had an idea of who might be interested in their creation, they usually hadn’t thought too far ahead, and just didn’t know how it would go.”

This pattern emerges throughout this narrative, as time and again industry leaders declared the telephone unlikely to take off in Britain, or dismissed the television as a load of rubbish.

Often, existing technology is what halts progress and creates resistance. Eureka: How Invention Happens explores how innovators have circumvented what seemed like insurmountable obstacles in their pursuit of the limits of reality. So when it comes to the creation of what still seems unimaginable to us today, like the flying car, what’s stopping us?

“Sometimes it’s the failure of imagination, and sometimes it’s the resistance of the very industry who you’d think would produce it. Amateurs will give it a go first, before bigger industry moves in; I believe the working robot will be created by someone totally unexpected. Industries should go on perfecting their products, and leave the inventing to amateurs and outsiders.”

Eureka: How Invention Happens
is published by Yale University Press.
ISBN: 9780300192087 RRP: £20.

August 10, 2015
Asif Kapadia – ‘Something happened with Amy’

Amy Winehouse. Photograph: Alex Lake

Camden, not Hackney, is the place with which the singer Amy Winehouse, who died in 2011 of alcohol poisoning, will always be associated.

But for Hackney-born director Asif Kapadia, whose acclaimed documentary Amy tells the story of the singer’s precarious life and untimely death, Winehouse could have been “a girl from down the road”.

Unlike other films directed by Kapadia, such as the award-winning documentary Senna, Amy is a London film. And like many fellow Londoners, Kapadia was moved by the singer’s life.

“Something happened with Amy Winehouse,” says Kapadia, explaining why he decided to make the film. “I wanted to know how that happened in front of our eyes. How can someone die like that in this day and age?

“For me, she was like a girl from down the road. I grew up in the same part of the world. She could have been someone I knew, someone I was friends with or might have gone to school with. I thought we should investigate.”

Kapadia was born in 1972, the youngest of five children. He went to Homerton House school (now the site of City Academy) and began his film career as a runner on student films.

After undertaking an HND at Newport Film School, Kapadia studied film-making at the University of Westminster before completing a Masters in film and TV direction at the Royal College of Art.

Amy has already broken box office records, and looks set to challenge Senna, Kapadia’s documentary about Brazilian racing driver Ayrton Senna, as the highest grossing British documentary of all time.

Like Amy Winehouse, Ayrton Senna was an icon who died in tragic circumstances. But researching the story and carrying out interviews for Senna proved a more straightforward process.

“With Senna there were a lot of books and a lot of people knew the story. With Amy it became apparent that no one knew the story, or that people were not willing to tell it.”

Many of Winehouse’s closest friends apparently took a ‘vow of silence’ after her funeral, so to complete the 100 plus interviews that make up the film’s narrative, the production team needed to win over their trust, a process that took almost a year.

“It was all quite recent and painful for a lot of people and there was a lot of guilt and a lot of baggage,” adds producer James Gay-Rees.

“The whole experience took an awful lot out of all these people, understandably.

It is hard to imagine what it must be like to see your closest childhood or teenage friend going through the perils of celebrity and mega-fame, knowing that there were underlying issues that would come to the fore.”

Kapadia made the songs and lyrics of Amy Winehouse central to the film. “Once you understand her life and you read the lyrics, they run much deeper than you might have thought,” he says.

“I thought all we have to do is unravel what these lyrics are about. That for me became the big revelation. This is a film about Amy and her writing.”

Amy is on general release in cinemas now.

August 5, 2015
Another string to Craig David’s ‘bo’

“If you just do whatever you’re doing, there is no box to be in.” – Craig David

“The past is a concept. Whenever you experience anything, it’s right now. When we were talking five minutes ago, it’s now. The future is now.” If Craig David used to insist on 9pm dates with “cinnamon queens”, today that is unlikely. These days he wears his philosophy on his sleeve with a watch that simply reads “now”. But while the former golden boy of UK garage is living for today – his fans just want to rewind.

At the turn of the millennium David’s honeyed vocals and catchy lyrics, coating two-step beats with pop sheen, sent the 19-year-old soaring up the charts. When his first album Born To Do It “dropped”, as he calls it, I headed straight to Woolworths for a copy (complete with a B-side disc of him talking to himself). I learnt the words to the whole album, carefully balancing the CD on the spindle of my Sony Discman.

But even by 2002 interest had already waned. “It’s what they call the rise and fall,” he lamented on his second album Slicker Than Your Average, which sold around half as many copies as his debut smash. He next became the victim of a cruel but oddly enduring character on Leigh Francis’ sketch show Bo Selecta which had his trademark facial hair and, inexplicably, a Scottish accent and a pet bird Kes – the kestrel from Ken Loach’s film. It was a swift descent.

Craig David left London for Miami, moved into a hotel and got into bodybuilding. An episode of Cribs revealed life-sized photographs of scantily-clad women, white sofas, impressive audiovisual equipment and a thing for fast cars. Everyone moved on. Yet teenage kicks…so hard to beat.

I jumped at the chance to do a ‘phoner’ with the beanie-toting star of my adolescence.

Guestlist ratio

He was in London for the tour of his DJ show TS5 in which he aims to “bridge the gap” between live performance, DJing and MCing.

Named after the number of his apartment-cum-hotel penthouse, TS5 is modelled on his own “pre-drinks” house parties. These are carefully orchestrated affairs where the man himself “holds it down” on the decks, there are drinks on tap, before everyone goes “out out” (they call it that in Miami too).

Getting the “sexy vibe” is an exact science so David enforces a rigorous 70:30 female to male ratio on the guestlist. “If you overload it with guys, and the girl ratio is lower, in my experience, girls feel intimidated by that,” he explains. “Guys get really confident and try and hit on everyone and the ratio is all off.”

Curiosity piqued, I head down to Hackney’s very own Oslo for the gig, where I find myself surrounded by other sheepish looking folk in their mid-twenties, but no drinks on tap.

There is a reasonably sexy ratio of 60:40, the “vibe” is millennium chic and girls in white TS5 trucker hats hand out leaflets for the next gig. This being Hackney, I am initially concerned everyone is here to parody their younger, less cool selves. But I’m wrong. “You’ve got to love Craig”, two people tell me outside. “He’s the English Drake”.

Upstairs David exaggeratedly presses buttons and drags faders, his biceps bulging under his oversized white T-shirt. After an underwhelming opening song he gently brings in ‘Fill Me In’ and the crowd goes wild. Girls at the front flap white A4 sheets of paper with his name written on in biro, and there is much grinding.

But even the most diehard fan would be forced to admit he is simply not the best DJ, and his soft-as-butter voice just sounds plain weird when warbling over aggressive house bangers.

Thinking is the box

I ask about the transition from singersongwriter to DJ. “It’s crazy to think the cycle has come full circle”, he says. “DJing is what I started off doing. When the first album blew up, I put that on the side burner. I just do what ever I want to do, there’s no boundaries.

We’ve taken the box, and removed all the lines from it. It’s all open now.” I manage to anchor a memory of this ‘box’ in David’s sea of axioms.

Along with 75 thousand others I am an avid follower of his Instagram account, a luxury flick book of Miami sunsets (#blessed), workout selfies (#eatcleantraindirty) and tautologies set against a backdrop of his own face.

One of my favourites (genuinely), I tell him, is a picture of a cosmic night sky with a white square and “thinking is the box” written inside it…

I can hear him nodding down the phone: “You got it. It is the box. If you just do whatever you’re doing, there is no box to be in, but as soon as you say ‘there’s the box and I’m trying to think outside of it’, you’re saying the box is there.”

David comes across as intensely and at times robotically upbeat. I ask about his Instagram, where his posts often receive mixed responses, and how he manages to stay so positive in the face of jokes at his expense. “It’s transient”, he says. “It’s not to be taken seriously.

The beauty of Instagram and Twitter is there is a follow and an unfollow button.”

His puppyish optimism is likable and there is definitely a sense of humour under his earnest theories. I ask him if his rumoured new studio album has now been put on the “side burner.” He acknowledges the dig: “We’re taking the burner off. There’s no side burner, back burner, up burner, Bunsen burner. All the burners are out. We’re making the record.”

Craig David Presents TS5 has announced a second date at Shapes in Hackney on 16 October 2015. For tickets see ts5.com/shapes

July 31, 2015