![Tanita Tikaram: 'Why wouldn’t you say something [about Gaza]? There are some things that are so obviously unjust.'](https://www.irishtimes.com/resizer/v2/4TDUZDJNFZGFPMIYNQLWKHSN3E.jpg?auth=df5acae5dc3198e3ec0c3a6cfbe2e780b46a2755edae171554076d7104de1dac&smart=true&width=1024&height=683)
Singer-songwriter Tanita Tikaram wrote her huge hit Twist In My Sobriety, when she was only 16 years old. It was released when she was 19.
She thinks it originated from her love of music and literature. Her family thought she was just studying for her A-levels up in her bedroom, but she was also writing music. “I was also very introverted, but then I would suddenly be very opinionated. I feel like there was something brewing when I was a teenager … I was really interested in culture and learning, but I wasn’t really good at school until I got older … I was terrible at sciences. I was really bad at mathematics. And the only thing that interested me was humanities.”
Tikaram is now in her mid-fifties and living in north London. She’s lived there on and off since she was 20, but as a child she travelled a lot as her father was in the military.
“Not exotic travel, but a lot of different postings. Mostly in Germany,” she says.
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Tikaram says she finds it interesting to reflect on how normal she considered the constant moving around versus a modern-day focus on the need for stability for children. “You just went to the school that was next door. I think it’s different now. People are much more concerned about where your children go to, and having a particular kind of education. When I was growing it, it was a bit more free range,” she says.
Tikaram’s mother’s family live in Malaysia. Her dad is Indian-Fijian. “There was a big Fijian community in the army,” she explains. “That was a really loving community and a very musical one.”
So was this when Tikaram discovered she could sing? “I don’t think I ever realised that,” she says. “When I was a kid we used to just sing … But I can’t harmonise or sing properly. I just sing my own songs. It’s not like I could get up and sing a song from a musical, which I envy.”
“I remember once having a drink with someone who is a music teacher and they said something really funny, that ‘a woman shouldn’t really learn by singing The Beatles or something’, and I just thought, ‘That’s how I learned’. I emailed her and I said, ‘What did you mean?’ and she said ‘They’re all in the wrong range for a woman’.”
Tikaram, who sings in a distinctively low voice, adds: “I imagine I was singing from a young age, maybe lower than I should have been singing, because I was listening to a lot of men.”
“When I was younger I didn’t think that you could change the key of a song that you wrote. I was so innocent”.
As a younger woman, Tikaram coped with her success by viewing it as part of her job.
“When you have that kind of success, you are working a lot. In a way you kind of intellectualise it as part of your job. Maybe that makes it more manageable but you kind of go ‘Okay, I’ve made a record and now it’s a big hit and so this I guess this is part of what I do now.’
She’s very glad, nonetheless, that she was dealing with it then rather than now. “You really are under a microscope now. I think it must be very hard to have success when the attention is constant. And at quite a vulnerable age you have to be knowing about so many things, which I think are unknowable.
“And I think that’s a lot of pressure on a young person … I feel lucky that I wouldn’t be having the pressure of social media or trying to present what kind of person you are all the time. I don’t think that’s healthy.”
Tikaram holds some strong political views. She believes in the artists using their voices to speak out about current affairs. Referring to the situation in Gaza, she says: “I think, why wouldn’t you say something? I don’t see how you can’t say anything. There are some things that are so obviously unjust.”
Of British prime minister Keir Starmer, she says: “A lot of his demonisation of immigrants and migrants, it’s absolutely abhorrent. He represents my constituency. And it’s a really diverse, wonderful constituency. I just can’t understand why he’s trying to align himself with the values of Reform. That doesn’t make sense to me. It’s shocking.” Starmer has branded Reform UK’s policy of scrapping indefinite leave to remain “racist” and “immoral”.
Tikaram says: “My father is from Fiji and my mother is from Borneo, East Malaysia. They were both British colonies. So they are British from the moment they were born. It’s just this constant questioning of whether a person is legitimate that is very scary. And it’s happening all the time. Whether you can prove somehow that you belong. And that’s not an accident. It’s creating such a precarious existence for so many people. Who is legitimate now? Do you just belong if you’re really, really rich? Is that the sense of belonging that we’re supposed to admire, or aspire to?
“And it’s not just about race. It’s about disability. It’s about age. It’s about so many things. It’s about the welfare system. And you just wanted from a Labour government for them to be different, because they were voted in on a great feeling of anger about what the Tory government was doing. That was an opportunity to really address the inequalities in our society and that’s not what this government seems to be doing. It seems as beholden to corporate interests as the last government.”
Tikaram’s has a new album LIAR was produced, she says, at an age when “you really wonder about your place in the world”. There are also some “banging tunes”, she adds.
Tanita Tikaram will be playing The National Concert Hall on Monday November 10th at 8pm
