No. 33: Eska

Profundity in the everyday with the Lewisham renaissance woman

Let’s keep the intro short this time. 1) I’m on holiday, I’d meant to upload and schedule this before leaving but you know, life – and 2) some of Brian’s greatest pics and the interview can pretty much speak for themselves. I’ll just say: Eska Mtungwazi might well be the greatest singer in the UK. To see her on stage is beyond, beyond, beyond… I’ve seen her with UNKLE¹, with the Matthew Herbert Big Band, helped hook up a Boiler Room performance during my brief time there when her folky, rootsy, souly, spectacular solo debut album ESKA came out in 2015 – and most intensely recently saw her perform the songs of Joni Mitchell’s Hejira and Mingus with the Tomorrow’s Warriors project’s Nu Civilisation Orchestra, truly one of the musical experiences of my life, as I spelled out here.

Even if you don’t know any of that stuff, you have almost certainly heard Mtungwazi’s voice. She’s worked across jazz, broken beat and UK garage scenes, with Zero 7 and Cinematic Orchestra and many, many more besides. She’d had literally hundreds of releases before that solo debut, and she’s been continually busy in the decade since. Now she’s got a new album, dropping at the end of this month, called The Ordinary Life of a Magic Woman – which, though it’s utterly and unmistakably her, is radically different from ESKA, being packed with big, shiny energy and, among a complex web of influences, lots of big, shiny, 80s style production which nods particularly towards her huge love of Kate Bush. The thing is, it’s not hyperbole to say that Mtungwazi is an artist who exists in a similar zone to Bush or Joni Mitchell. She not only has the wild vocal range and expressiveness of both, but the storyelling, the sense of magic, the totalising creative vision and the renaissance-woman ability to realise that vision. If you want a preview, you can exclusively get a preview of the album’s dreamier moments in, ahem ahem, this set I played in the minuscule but beautiful Shibuya bar, Tangle this weekend just gone. (My earlier set from the same evening, which ALSO features an exclusive, this time from the upcoming wild new Jamie Lidell album, is here).

Despite superstar talent, though, in person she’s extremely easy-going. Disarmingly so! I interviewed her on a WhatsApp call from her car as she was stuck in traffic, then eventually she parked up in front of her ex’s house as we chatted. I’d never met her before, but before I realised it initial small talk had rolled into 15 minutes of chat about parenting, and at the point I remembered we were supposed to be recording the conversation for this mailout, we were deep into the pros and cons of the little village schools where I live.

Aaaaaanyway, enough about my life, we're here to talk about you Eska!

But this is it... For me, it was in part exploring just that: where my very everyday life and my creativity, what that intersection is. What this record for me is about is demonstrating that life happens and we make and we create and it's all part of the same thing in many ways. And actually for me, the magic, the Magic Woman is Mum, you know, it's my ability to do those ordinary everyday things that enable Eska to be the creative that she is, you know what I mean? Like, it has to work together, there has to be a good symbiosis, there has to be a way... Otherwise, I mean, I'd literally go mad, like, how else? It was also when I, in making the music, am saying to myself, do you want to... How much of your personal life do you want to conceal? Or is there a way in which you can reveal some of that… that is actually true to just how these things are being made? True to the process?

Or do you want to make it sound all arty-farty and really artistic and, like, not include the fact that you have to... like, for example it might not go according to plan because the kid’s suddenly got ills. So half a week's gone because I've got to deal with that and I've got to help with this and that, and I'm going to the studio at nine o'clock at night after she's gone to bed and I'm working till 3am and then I've got to get up and, you know, it's just all of that and I still make and I still create and actually this is... The backdrop to these sounds is me right now in a traffic jam trying to get to the kid who's having a lovely day with her dad and they're making music and she just sent me a beat that she's done in Logic and... All the resistances are part of the story and actually I don't want to... I just wanted that... I just wanted that wall to... I wanted it to come down.

It’s about the texture of real life, right? This is this is something I've been thinking about so much lately, because it's, it's what creative act gets the texture of real life? The actual texture of what it's like what it feels like when you grab it or it grabs you or you get your teeth into it. Because so much of that gets lost in the virtual and obviously in AI and everything else that can overwhelm us. And people are competing with phantasmal, phantasmagorical versions of each other.

Haaaaa, yes! I can't compete with that, you know, the irony is what I want to... what I've realised… yeah, this is an album that for me is a project, and the project of The Ordinary Life of a Magic Woman is about how I bring those textures into the process for anyone who wants to connect with me. And there are some happenings where it’s about: how do I connect with this concept beyond just the sounds and the music making and an album? Yes, there's a record, but actually the story of the magic woman and her life and how do I make human connection whether it be through artwork or through being in a space with people... There's a, there's a... something I'm trying to organise the next month, calling it a Restival where I just want people to come and sleep for four hours…

Yes please!

Haha yes please, exactly, we all need that. There's, there are so many stories and intentions and thoughts behind this body of work and what was going on and what is going on in my life and that – I feel that actually there are many ways in which to challenge, like you said, the whole digital medium where I feel like, okay, I can keep going on about the record, keep on going on about the record, but actually if I were to think about this, these platforms as a way to show my life creation, my life as art creation, curation, what is it that I want people to know about who I am and my intention artistically? Which is something I feel that for many years it's been very difficult to be understood because I sort of hop about in terms of the kind of music that I involve myself in...

And that’s not by accident, even though sometimes I feel it's led by... I don't know, one minute I'm doing some sort of jazz thing or I'm doing this and then I'm doing an electronic thing or whatever – but it's all me, it's genuinely me, you know, and how do I... sometimes it feels like there are limitations in the way in which, then the interface of journalism or the interface of presentation, that ends up, at times I felt like I get distilled into just being one thing – and so somehow I feel like actually perhaps I just need to expand on what it is that I'm offering, ways in which people to interact with my world, for them to gain a bit more understanding as to why the music sounds like how it is and why I present or produce in the way that I do or why I perform in the way I do. But look, last night I was supporting Abel, I can't say his name, I’m terrible with names, do you know, the cellist, South African cellist…

Remembering from when he did a Radio 3 show a while back² I think it’s “SEL-a-coe?”

OK we’ll go with that. So I was with Abel last night at Troxy, East London and I've been asked to do this, and the gig came like a month before I've even thought about how I'm performing this particular record. So I didn't have a band, I didn't have time to organise something and also I said to the promoter, have you checked out what I'm doing lately? They're like a classical kind of folk promoter, it's not really the kind of music I'm doing at the moment but I could put something bespoke together that I think would work for your audience.

And so I put an ensemble together, a cellist, a pianist and a string player, a violinist and we improvised a 40 minute set so I just like completely improvised and something that I've been experimenting with which is singing the news which you might find interesting actually. So I just get news articles and then I improvise on it, right? And the band has no idea what I'm about to say so that the idea is basically kind of led by story, right? So you basically have to play to the story as the story hits you. It's also nice because generally speaking, non singers, even when they play with singers, they don't actually listen to what singers are doing. So in order to actually perform to a news article you kind of do actually have to listen to the words. and play off of the words. And a really interesting thing happened when you do that and you experiment with that. But anyway, we did this whole completely improvised set which was quite punk and quite avant-garde and quite ambitious. But for me, as it's just alongside me having this quite polished album at the moment, and it's all for me it's the same thing because it's the same person. And I've never, I've yet to feel that that's understood somehow in the ether, unless there's an awareness of kind of like the back catalogue and its variations, the variety within that. So it's very difficult.

Yeah but the world does – or the machine that presents music to people at least – it does want someone who will do the same thing repeatedly.

Weird, isn't it? That's not very human. It's very odd. It's just very, very odd. And I mean, I feel particularly for younger artists, because I see that they struggle with that, particularly ones that get sort of funneled into the machine very quickly, into big sort of juggernauts and major labels and whatnot. And, you know, even one who I won't name, but she happened to be in my studio complex working with someone on her stuff. And I heard her stuff and I thought myself, gosh, this is so dull. But when I was actually having a conversation with her and she was getting me hip to stuff that I was just... mind-blowing stuff really, and thinking, there's a complete incongruity with your brain and your imagination and this pile of shite that you're making, I don't know what's happened. You're really interesting. But you've been put in the pretty machine, whatever, so you've got to sort of look and sound a way, I don't know... weird.

And I'm thinking, you're like 20 times more interesting than people will ever know. And I feel sorry that they will never know. They're not privileged. They've never had a wonderful music session with you like I have. I mean, turning me onto stuff, like, you know, my roots are Zimbabwean? But I didn't know about the Chicken Run Band³. Amazing Zimbabwean group from the 70s. And thanks to this young girl, this is my favorite band now. I would never have known that in a million years, listening to your wonderfully curated, manufactured kind of quasi Amy Winehouse type thing that you're doing. It's unbelievable, doesn't even... the incongruity, it's startling because yet I feel that and I guess why I still feel like I'm still gonna forge ahead with the road less travel travelled that I'm on, because I really do believe it will speak to... it does speak to our humanity when we encounter it. I mean, I had an audience in front of me last night, and I'm singing this song about... literally all I'm singing is “010110101” for 10 minutes, you know, I wanted to keep doing it until it got painful, like I can feel like people thinking “That is... she really... she's…. oh my goodness!” And yet, and yet, the smiles and the people getting it, people getting what I'm trying to say by just using these just binary coding and just reading this out make it reassures me when I encounter an audience, but that's the thing, Joe, it needs human interaction.

Oh yes. And interaction can be at its realest or most revealing when you’re doing something like that, something that makes people go “what the fuck?” I keep thinking that a crack opened up where we sort of almost saw each other in our underwear a bit during Covid, right? Like everyone let the guard of sanity slip.

[hoots] Yes, and I love that.

Like, despite the separation you kept seeing all these glimpses into people's houses and their hobbies and the weird things that they got into because of Covid. And that was lots of little creative activities, knitting and kneading and people were doing bonkers things like, you know, wearing party hats on Zoom calls and whatever it might be. And you just saw the cracks... but we’ve memory holed all that.

It's so true. Also, what I loved as well was, you know, even though obviously everyone wanted to shame up Dominic Cummings for going out and sneaking out to get COVID, like we weren't all doing it. But… I used to live opposite Peckham Rye. So, I mean, my goodness, you’d just see young people congregate, ten o’clock, 11 o’clock at night, you're like... We just want connection. We're desperate. We can't. We don't care… just “I'm a human. I need other humans. I'm desperate.” There was something so, so interesting in seeing that, like, wow, it's against our better nature to lock us up like this. And there's nothing that's going to make us adhere to these rules. that we will eventually break this, as compliant as we can try to be, something there's a defiance in us or a need, a compulsion – we need to connect.

But in such strange ways, because when the rules are loosened we become strange, right, so... I was talking to this club owner just recently and he was just telling me this story about lockdown era... And it just sent this torrent of memories coming back to me of all the stuff that we've stuffed away about how weird the time was. He had all this beer in the cellar, and no-one could lift the barrels out the way their cellar was. It was like you could put the barrels down there, but you could only get them out again when they were empty because they were light enough, right? So he had full barrels of beer that were rapidly approaching their sell-by date. And he was like, what the fuck am I going to do with this beer that's about to go off? This is a huge amount of money. And he was like, right, I'm going to bottle it. OK, who's got a bottling machine? No-one's got a bottling machine. And then he found someone in Mid Wales, who had a shed full of Grolsch bottles. Because Grolsch bottles are resealable, with the flip tops, right? And so he did this like semi-legal commando run in a Transit van to Wales during lockdown. The whole country, the countryside's empty. He goes across the spooky drive from East London into Wales, comes back with all these bottles, like has to work out a bottling technique to get the beer into the bottles without losing the fizz, and then sells it through a hatch in the wall to a queue of people standing six foot apart, all who will then get drunk and fall over in the street.

Brilliant.

Like, what time it was.

[she collapses laughing for about a minute] Wow. Wow. It's gorgeous.

Actually, I think the reason I was thinking about lockdown this week in particular was someone you must have crossed paths with, Jamie Lidell⁴.

Only enough, only once, many, many, many years ago. Um, yeah. OK. We know, we know of each other, but I don't, I don't know him, really.

Oh, I just assumed that you sort of, like, had been in similar circles – I guess it’s the Herbert connection – but...

The funny thing is, lots of mutual friends and many people who have said, similar thing is like, you should know Jamie, I mean how do you not know?

Anyway it’s not super relevant that it’s him specifically haha – just that he’s been through so much music industry nonsense then moved to Nashville to settle down and start a family… so he’s made a new album, like so many people it was conceived in lockdown, and as so many people did in that time the focus necessarily went to domesticity and introspection, and as we were talking a lot of it was about, kind of like you’re saying, finding inspiration in the small things.

Inspiration in the small things, I love that. That's definitely where I'm at, and you know… also kids. When you have a kid, I mean kids are just like, well of inspiration being a parent. I mean certainly for me, my interactions. And as a home educator, I spend a lot of time with the kid and it's not, it's beyond teaching, it's learning together. I mean that's kind of the process of learning who my child is and learning more about myself. And in that, so many songs are birthed, I mean, even as we've been having the conversation, she's just sent me a beat, she's just done a beat with her dad. And yep, it's those small details, those overlooked, mundane, everyday things that are just worth celebrating, those little moments, they're just as powerful as all the razzamatazzy things. And also, to remind myself if I get caught, getting caught up in that, what does it mean? What is, what does any of that mean? The best thing I ever did was have this kid. That's the best thing I've ever done. That's the truth, hands down, when, when all of this finishes, so what? So this record’s been about trying to find a way of acknowledging that and celebrating that, celebrating it, and, and noting the resistances that I still hear, the resistances of the past, and using that as inspiration, using that as the impetus for, for making and not feeling like I'm having to fight a fight against it.