Joiners Promotions presents...
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Mon May 21, 2012 at 19:30
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At Joiners Southampton
KYLA LA GRANGE
Electronica |
Pop |
Folk
Kyla La Grange
+ Columbia
+ Charlotte Campbell
More about Kyla La Grange
Kyla
La Grange has a startling voice and the ability to write songs that convey, in
their own torrid, tumultuous way, the unpredictability of the human heart. They
are songs that capture what it is like to be young and in (and out of) love,
delivered through music that is rock, only without the bludgeoning crassness of
that genre, and pop in the sense that it is destined, but not designed, for
mainstream consumption.
Kyla
only released her first single in 2011 but has already accrued a devoted
following who hang on her every word and have been drawn into her world, a
highly imagistic one that matches the dark mystery of her music. It is music at
once thoroughly modern and deeply classic.
Her
forthcoming debut album, Ashes, will include her three singles so far - Been
Better, Heavy Stone/Lambs and Vampire Smile (all released on Chess Club) - and
forthcoming single Walk Through Walls (ioki records/Sony). On the album, Kyla
sings about serious matters, of lives lived and secrets hidden, but the way she
presents them is utterly conducive to popular success, using keen melody to
make it all seem so easy on the ear. She makes music the way she wants to, and
sings it in a way that is uniquely her, in a voice (classically trained) that
veers between huskily low and high, but always conveys emotion.
Kyla's
Zimbabwean father and South African mother moved to the UK just before she was
born, not wanting their first child to be brought up under apartheid. Their
first home was a council flat in South Oxhey, Herts where they shared a
mattress on the floor, before moving to Watford when Kyla was one.
Reclusive
at primary school, she recalls that she “wasn’t a very happy child, which led
me to write songs and draw pictures - stuff you can do on your own.” She was drawn to the darker side of life.
“I’ve always written songs about miserable things,” she laughs. “I have so many
booklets of songs from when I was 12 or 13, and they’re so depressing!”
She
had “great parents”: arty, bohemian types who would fill the house with all
manner of magical paraphernalia. Her dad, responsible for the photos on
all four of her single sleeves, taught photography at Rickmansworth School,
also attended by fellow fast-rising types The Staves and Daughter.
“We had trees and plants growing over the walls, nude
figurines, monsters’ heads... They loved collecting things. I was mortified.
But as I got older I thought, ‘This is amazing!’”
Onstage, Kyla uses some of these artefacts from her
childhood to create a sort of mobile enchanted gothic forest, which provides a
backdrop to songs that range from folkily intimate to gloriously loud and
intense. “Some of my songs are sad and introverted,” she explains, “but others
need big driving drums and shouting because sometimes when I write my nerves
are shredded and I feel as though my head’s going to explode.”
Every song, she explains, self-deprecating to a fault,
“starts with me and acoustic guitar, the folky shell of what becomes a loud,
bombastic song.” She says her love of bombast comes from Bonnie Tyler’s famous
hit single. “I loved Total Eclipse Of The Heart - I brought it when I was
11,” she says. “Some songs on the album are just guitar and voice. But if I’m
writing and my head feels like it’s going to explode, I need to shout about how
I’m feeling.”
What is likely to shred her nerves?
“Lots of things,” she says. “I’m a worrier. Death?
That’s the biggest one! Every night I get this vision of eternal blackness in
my head, about how one day everyone alive on the planet will be gone. Then I
might drop off to sleep, only to suddenly wake up shaking.” Not that she
is kowtowing to a trend for the gothic and strange. This just happens to be
what Kyla La Grange is like.
"Ever since I was a teenager I just felt
drawn to writing songs on my own in my bedroom and pretty much every song on
the album has started its life that way", she says.
After studying Philosophy at Cambridge
University, where she performed her songs locally,
she returned to London and, while doing various jobs - including bar work and
“charity mugging” - she attended open-mic nights and posted her music online,
messaging other musicians, promoters and anyone who might be able to offer an
entree into the music business. Eventually, she was led to the people that
became her managers: her team also look after everyone from Radiohead and Nick
Cave to Kate Nash, Eliza Doolittle and The Staves.
Kyla, who signed to Sony in early 2012 via her own
ioki records, also found her producer, Brett Shaw, with whom she has been
working in a studio in East London on her debut album (with two tracks produced
by Marky Bates). The album will feature a radically re-worked version of recent
single Heavy Stone that is more representative of the songs as they are
performed by her band. “After playing them live for a while, we know how to do
them better now,” she smiles, explaining that each band member is involved in
the creative process, even if she is the songwriter, in charge of music and
lyrics.
The album delves into Kyla’s psyche as she entered,
endured then exited from four particular affairs. “It’s not a
chronological story or anything,” she says of the album. “It undulates!” She
admits to preferring her own company, an introvert who is “happier bumbling
around at home than being at a party”. She would rather, she says, sit on her
own in a darkened room, writing songs.
But ironically she also has an uncanny knack of
connecting with large numbers of people via those songs, hardly surprising
considering their extraordinary power and ability to insinuate. They’re
earworms that get inside your head. It just so happens that they’re about,
well, the dark side of the human condition, or, in the case of Vampire Smile,
“an all-consuming crush” that she had on “an entirely inappropriate person”.
About fans who approach her at gigs, she says “I
generally just have people that want to chat, and they’re usually very nice.”
Although she’s having to grow accustomed to more extreme responses as well. “I
had someone flash at me,” she says with a wary smile, “a woman, obviously,
started rubbing her breasts on the monitors and had to be escorted out by
security.”
And that's before they hear the debut album, a series
of surging angst-pop anthems that will surely elicit stronger reactions still.
Darkness never sounded so sweet.
Kyla La Grange
releases her debut album, Ashes, on 30th July 2012 on ioki records/Sony.
Kyla La Grange detail page
Kyla La Grange's Official Facebook Page
Kyla La Grange's Official Website
Columbia's Official Facebook Page
Charlotte Campbell's Official Facebook Page
