East End Review

Tag: Ridley Road

  • Too late to stop Nao: interview

    Too late to stop Nao: interview

    Nao: "Vocal acrobatics and flair..." Photograph: Jeff Hahn
    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.

    Nao

    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

  • Scoffing offal – an East End history

    Scoffing offal – an East End history

    ‘The Meat Stall’ by Peter Aertsen (circa 1508–1575). Image: Wikimedia Commons
    ‘The Meat Stall’ by Peter Aertsen (circa 1508–1575). Image: Wikimedia Commons

    Hackney citizens who love offal can enjoy everything here. There’s the posh stuff, like devilled kidneys or luscious roast bone marrow, available at St John Bread and Wine, or the braised ducks’ tongues at Sichuan Folk. Whilst for home cooks there is Ridley Road Market, where the array of things you might not want to look at twice are in fact a joy to behold.

    It all depends on how you define offal: everything that isn’t muscle-meat can be in our line-up, from tail to toe as Fergus Henderson has it. So: tails, trotters, feet, claws and heads, including  jaws, tongues, snouts, cheeks, ears, not forgetting brains and eyeballs.

    Then swallow hard and go down the throat to the windpipe and oesophagus, to which are attached the ‘pluck’, a gloriously coloured grouping of lungs, heart, liver, spleen and pancreas, so often the eye-catching focus of Dutch still life painting (above right).

    Then tangle with stomach, bladder (which blown up makes a nice football), kidneys and into the long and winding road through the intestines, gathering up testicles  and  bits of backbone on the way. Which is not to mention the gizzards, hearts and livers of poultry, and piles of their blanched and palid feet, like the hands of drowned corpses – and all of this is not just edible but seriously delicious.

    Historical delicacies

    In the past these were not just the unmentionable bits the poor were glad to get hold of cheaply, but delicacies in their own right.

    When Thomas Cromwell, hero of Wolf Hall,  was seeking his fortune in commerce and diplomacy in Europe, he must have charmed his way into sumptuous aristocratic banquets which included sophisticated dishes made from various offal parts, and brought these gastronomic delights back to his country house in Hackney.

    He would have known Bartolomeo Scappi’s influential cookery book, published in 1570, which had a section on menus served at posh dinners in Rome, and a surprising number of dishes were of offal, and not just the nice items like sweetbreads and brains, but weird bits as well.

    A kid’s head, roasted or stewed, then coated in egg and breadcrumbs and deep fried to get a lovely golden yellow, decorated with slices of lemon. Calves’ intestines and pluck get as much care and attention as veal liver and the prestigious roasts.

    Local offal offerings

    So we can go back to Ridley Road and look with fresh eyes at its offerings of offal – wholesome and delicious, and above all honest; what you see is what you get, whilst heaven knows what awful slaughterhouse slurry and unwanted body parts go into the cheap sausages and burgers on offer.

    Kingsland Butchers explained to me how to cook their calves’ feet, chopped up and simmered long and slowly in water with your preferred spice mixture to achieve an unctuous broth to which vegetables and herbs can be added to make an invigorating and restorative soup.

    Renaissance banquets offered lambs and kids’ heads cooked with care and served up as delicacies, decorated with a golden sauce and blue borage flowers or bright red pomegranate seeds.

    Ridley Road has plenty of heads, and customers for them. The Turkish supermarket at the far end of Ridley Road has a fascinating meat counter, with everything from lambs’ trotters to sweetbreads and intestines.

    Dietary restictions keep pork away from Ridley Road, but it’s not far to the Ginger Pig in Lauriston Road for a whole new world of offal and pig parts.

    Home made pies and faggots can include offal, and the delicious brawn depends on all the unctuous parts of a pig’s head and trotters.

    The Ginger Pig website has some delicous recipes for pig’s head, ears and tail, easy to follow and well worth a try.

    Maybe our ubiquitous legionary stopped off to get a trotter or two to munch on as he trudged up Stamford Hill, remembering an early tour of duty in Tunisia where he admired a mosaic pavement with a plate of trotters decorated with bay leaves?

    The English tradition of ‘keeping a pig’ lasted well until World War Two, fattened on household scraps and its own rations.

    Back then it seemed we had all reverted to medieval habits, salting and curing hams and bacon, melting down the fat to make lard, enjoying the lovely crunchy bits left in the pan and eating up the liver and kidneys with relish, whilst cutting up the rest into joints for family and friends.

    This was when a jar of home-made lard was a true mark of friendship.