WHEN Yola heard she had four Grammy nominations, a lifetime of pent-up emotion spilled out.
“I was pretty much crying for 24 hours,” admits the singer with a glorious voice somewhere between Aretha Franklin and Dusty Springfield. “Some of that crying was pure elation but there was a big element of relief,” she adds.
8
For 36-year-old Yola has one of the most incredible stories of triumph over adversity you’re likely to hear. Raised in poverty by a single mother in the coastal town of Portishead, near Bristol, and bruised by relentless racism, she spent her early adulthood struggling to make it in the cut-throat music business.
Her lowest point came when she had to sleep rough under a bush in London’s Hoxton Square because she couldn’t afford her rented accommodation and her friends had deserted her. Times were so bad that when she accidentally set herself on fire in 2015, just as her life was beginning to turn around, she found herself laughing uncontrollably.
“I’d prefer to be on fire again than go back to my old life,” she says of the horrific incident while wrapping Christmas presents.
“I bought a lovely little table centrepiece with a candle for some friends. I put some bioethanol in with it but unfortunately the canister went up. There was bioethanol on my hands and my dress, so I went up. I was burning and because it was so quick, I was like a bunny in the headlights and went into static shock. I was frozen and panicking.”
8
Then Yola thought about all she’d been through, including being told by a major music label they didn’t want a black woman doing rock ’n’ roll, and she realised: “Compared to all my dramas, fire seemed like an easy option. I survived. I put out the fire and went outside in the buff, wrapped in a rug, and started laughing. I thought, ‘This is fine! I’ve been homeless before’.”
Though she was in bandages for three weeks and had her home badly damaged, Yola is able to put this seemingly harrowing event into perspective. Now, against all odds, her determination and self-belief to pursue a solo career is gaining the recognition she deserves.
Despite encountering prejudice along the way, she eschews stereotypical music associated with black artists such as rap and R&B for an intoxicating blend of retro pop, rock, gospel and country. One of her Grammy nominations is for the coveted title of best new artist, previously won by stellar Brits Amy Winehouse, Adele, Sam Smith and Dua Lipa.
Yola’s debut album, Walk Through Fire, the title track inspired by that frightening accident, was produced in Nashville by one of the darlings of American indie music, The Black Keys’ Dan Auerbach, at his Easy Eye Studio.
8
The songs, beginning with Dusty-styled Faraway Look, are inspired by Yola’s escape from the life she was desperate to leave behind.
“Every penny I managed to acquire, I threw at developing this project,” she says. “I went round the world, to the US, Canada and Europe, hoping people would see enough to get me signed. No one else was going to invest in me apart from me. My life savings were on the line and if it didn’t go right, I was screwed.”
I’m talking to the irrepressible Yola the morning after her barnstorming London show this week, performed with a typical blend of gusto and grace despite her battling a horrible bout of bronchitis. Meeting her is a bit like her songs . . . a rollercoaster ride of euphoric highs and shattering lows delivered with unerring openness.
She says: “I went to Harley Street and they told me, ‘Your lungs are in good nick but your bronchus has about a third of its capacity’.”
8
Yola’s relieved the show at least contained moments of what she calls vocal triumph. “I was telling myself, ‘Ride with this!’” To tell her remarkable story, though, we must start at the beginning, with her tough childhood on the outskirts of Bristol in a predominantly white area.
“Most of my memories are of being a latchkey kid,” she says. “Other times, because my mum was a nurse and couldn’t afford childcare, I’d be sleeping on the floors of mental institutions and nursing homes.”
Although Yola discovered her love of singing at a very early age, “the idea of a luxuriant life in music seemed so far away, so unrealistic. We could hardly afford to eat and would get food out of bins at the back of the supermarket, out-of-date stuff”.
Christmas could be especially challenging, as she explains: “There was an in joke that we knew what we were getting every year. It was always a little bath products set . . . a little lavender soap, a little bubble bath and a bath bomb. It was incurably boring!”
8
Through it all, Yola’s mother took on extra jobs to supplement her income . . . “working for victim support, at a charity, on the tills at the Co-Op and as an Avon lady”. At just four, Yola told her mum she wanted to sing and write songs. “She just went, ‘Ha ha ha ha ha’, and said, ‘This life is hard, you’ve got to be having a laugh’.”
Though she was told she was fantasising, “just a phase you’re going through”, she kept on dreaming. “When I was nine or ten, my mum said, ‘OK, you’re going to secondary school next year, I’m putting a blanket ban on all this. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but your life hasn’t been easy’.
“She told me, ‘At what point do you think that you’re going to have enough privilege to waltz into a record company, get a deal and compete with the people who have rich daddies to support their development? We can’t do that’.”
As if things weren’t difficult enough, Yola had to cope with extreme racist behaviour on a regular basis. “I felt very much like an outsider,” she recalls. “There was a lot of National Front presence in the area. I got my a**e handed to me (beaten up) on many occasions. I had the N-word thrown plentifully in my direction. Fighting was just a thing you had to do. That’s why we eventually moved to Bristol, to get away from it.”
8
Solace would always arrive in the form of music and the teenage Yola discovered classic soul artists Aretha Franklin and Otis Redding, rock bands from Queen to Nirvana, then Britpop and hip hop (“when it was good in the Nineties”).
Yola got into Elton John, who is now a fan of hers, early Bee Gees, Crosby Stills & Nash. She developed a love of The Kinks and the evocative songs about ordinary lives by the band’s leader Ray Davies.
Even though her mum objected to her music ambitions, she eventually sang in a band called Phantom Limb, did live shows with Massive Attack and got a few high-profile writing credits.
Small triumphs only came after she hit rock bottom in her early twenties, a time she remembers with a mixture of genuine horror and gallows humour. “I went to London to check out universities, do a few weeks, see if a degree was for me,” she says.
8
She quickly realised she wouldn’t be using “a modicum of my skill set so it seemed like a real waste”. Instead, music renewed its hold on Yola and she began looking for session work or live gigs. She also applied for a job singing with the band Bugz In The Attic.
“It was quite late in the year and I’d burned through my student loan,” she says. “Jobs got cancelled, things got waylaid, then my housemate needed to go to hospital and my other housemate had to go abroad for the third year of a degree. I couldn’t pay the rent.
“So I found myself homeless for a month. I was really stuck and on the street and no one would believe there was a world in which a black woman would be vulnerable because all black women are supposed to be strong and will survive, or some s**t.”
Yola says: “A big hole appeared in a bush in Hoxton Square. That was me. I was sleeping in it. I wanted to be surrounded by people so if I needed help I could leg it to the 333 Club and there would always be some drunk tossers who would at least say, ‘Hello!’
8
“I also wanted to be completely out of sight so I was in a massive, bright red hold-all. I smeared mud on it and zipped it up so just my head was popping out and I could actually breathe. I was quite hard to see in the night time.”
Today, with her career assured and album No2 on the way, Yola remembers clawing her way back from homelessness.
“I was so dependent on Jobseeker’s Allowance. Without it, I would have been dead in the water. In fact, I wouldn’t have got to this point if it hadn’t been for a functional benefits system.”
She puts some of her success down to the belief shown in her by ace guitarist Kit Hawes, which led to her first solo record, an EP, Orphan Offering.
And let’s hope there’s a big Yola smile on January 26 when she scoops a Grammy or four at the world’s biggest music awards in Los Angeles.
