MUSIC:Mercury prize nominee Katy B is the latest pop sensation from the Brit School. She talks grime, dubstep and mixing underground and overground with JIM CARROLL
SHE'S AN UNASSUMING pop star, this London-Irish girl born Kathleen Brien. The 22-year-old is receiving plenty of plaudits and praise from the gallery for her fantastic Mercury music prize-nominated debut album On a Mission, but none of this has gone to her head. She's just Katy B. No airs or graces here, just one smart cookie with her feet firmly on the ground.
What she does is simply make music which makes you go boom. “I still consider myself to be part of the underground scene,” she says. “I’ve sung on funky tracks, dubstep, hip-hop, drum’n’bass and now pop on the album. I’m not one thing or the other, I’m a bit of all these sounds. It’s the most natural thing for me because that’s how I listen to music.”
The story of how Brien – she says she really should be Katy O as her dad’s name was originally O’Brien but he dropped the “O” along the way – went from the underground to the mainstream is another chapter in how the British urban scene became a serious commercial player. Brien’s ties to that scene began with Rinse FM, the hugely influential London pirate station, which now provides her with management and a label. The station is also where she began to earn her spurs as a singer and performer.
"I'd already sang on a couple of garage and grime tracks before and then Rinse heard Tell Me(the track she'd done with DJ NG) and they got in touch. I was 18 at the time so it was three or four years ago. They wanted to do an album with me singing over the top of beats by all the DJs and producers from the station. But then we realised that it needed to be a different kind of album and so we worked on it last year at the Rinse studio."
But long before Rinse came calling, Brien seemed destined for a career at the microphone. She grew up in Peckham listening to pop, r’n’b and soul: “I was a big fan of Destiny’s Child and Beyoncé and Erykah Badu and Jill Scott so it’s not strange to end up making pop, I always wanted to be a pop star. That was the daydream. I didn’t spend my childhood listening to grime, you know!”
In between some stabs at acting (there were unsuccessful auditions for a West End production of Annieand the role of Hermione in the Harry Potter movies), Brien spent a couple of years at the BRIT School. The Croydon performance school is one favoured by many current pop stars – Adele and Jessie J were in the year ahead of Brien.
“It just gave me so much confidence to pursue making music and think of it as a way of making a living,” she says. “I made some great friends and was very inspired. I took away the confidence to take a risk and the experience about what doing music all the time was all about.”
She went on to Goldsmiths university where she did a degree in popular music, though the practical was already beginning to take over from the theoretical. “I was making tunes and going to clubs and doing PAs at that stage. I’d done that for ages, even when I wasn’t old enough to be in clubs.
“I really loved clubbing and the best thing about working with Rinse was that they put on lots of raves and I could get my mates into them for free.”
When you listen to On A Mission, you can hear how Brien has brought the sounds of the clubs she loved as a teen raver into the recording studio with her. It's a superb mish-mash of styles which cosy up to one another in the context of some expertly crafted pop tunes. "Geeneus and Zinc produced the album and they've made grime, jungle, house, funky and dubstep tracks, so it's a real mash-up hybrid of all those genres with my songwriting over the top. I wrote it while I was at Goldsmiths, so it involves everything that was going on in my life at the time."
She’s quick to point out that calling it simply a dubstep album just ain’t going to wash. “People call what I’ve done dubstep, but I was never just about dubstep. I never set out to be just a dubstep artist. When I was writing the album, I was going out and clubbing and that was a huge part of my life. And clubbing meant funky and garage and other underground sounds.
"You have to move on, you can't keep doing the same thing over and over again. People were going on about Britney Spears doing dubstep, but if she just repeated Baby One More Time, people would be, like, 'what are you are doing?' You have to get inspired by what's going on and what you are hearing."
The mainstream, however, doesn't seem to care two hoots about what people call Brien's music or where she comes in any dubstep debate. She's had a string of hits already (she's also featured on banging tracks by Magnetic Man and The Count Sinden last year as her profile rose) and sales for On A Missionhave far surpassed what Brien or his Rinse FM team expected. It seems that many are willing to embrace Brien's mix of overground and underground with great gusto. "I think there has been a huge change with British music," she says. "When I used to listen to Choice FM when I was a kid, they would play a lot of American r'n'b but it always sounded off when a British singer tried to do it.
“Now, the music sounds British, it’s not like all these musicians are trying to copy something which comes from the other side of the world. It’s a really strong scene at the moment and I think it can keep getting bigger.”
Belsonic BELTERS
Dublin’s Forbidden Fruit may have put the focus on urban festivals this year, but Belsonic has been doing that and more for quite a while.
Belsonic reminds you that festivals don’t have to be about mud, camping and mad-out-of-it singing of Mumford Sons’ songs in the tent next door at 6am.
In terms of acts not to miss, PRIMAL SCREAMis top of our list. They play their 20-year young classic album Screamadelicain full at Custom House Square tonight (Friday August 19) and it's sure to attract plenty of Sugarsweet veterans to relive the good old days.
ELBOW make their third trip to Ireland in 2011 to introduce us to the wonders of new album Build A Rocket Boys. They play on August 24th with support from Villagers, who must surely be coming to the end of their Becoming A Jackal tour by now.
We’ve also got a feeling that TINIE TEMPAH will be one to catch. In the space of a year, he’s gone from down-the-bill to headliner and plays Belsonic on August 22nd with support from the excellent Maverick Sabre.
Katy B plays Belsonic, Belfast on August 25 as support to Plan B. Belsonic starts today and continues until August 27
