time, she was let down. “They were like, ‘Sorry,
babes...’ And I’m like, ‘But you’ve known me since
I was 15!?’ ‘Yeah, sorry babes, it’s not convenient,’”
she recalls, the anger still understandably bubbling
up. “And so I found myself on the streets for a short
amount of time.”
While she wasn’t sleeping rough for long, Yola
was homeless for the best part of six months, storing
her stuff at friends’ houses, while sleeping on their
couches and old discarded mattresses back in Bristol.
“When you’re in your 20s, your back doesn’t give a
fuck, so it’s fine!” she says sardonically. “Homelessness
is weird, because you constantly have that sense of
burden, you know? You feel like you owe people so
much. And it’s really hard to ask people for support
when you know they kind of don’t give a crap.”
Despite the unbelievably tough personal situation,
professionally, things were starting to happen, and
Yola’s unique voice was being noticed by producers
in the pop and EDM worlds. Around the same time,
she also began fronting Phantom Limb, which initially
seemed as though it would be a setup in which Yola
could be creatively fulfilled.
“I was quite thankful for those session jobs, but
I was very aware that they were jobs and it wasn’t
really me being me,” she admits. “Around that time,
the band started up, and I thought maybe I could
put some of my kind of energy into this...”OUT ON A LIMB
On paper, Phantom Limb’s country-soul crossover
sound seemed like the ideal fit for a singer who
idolised Elton, Shania Twain, Dolly Parton and
CSN as a child. But the longer she was in it, the
more she realised that it wasn’t a healthy situation...
“It was maybe a bit too ‘bro’ an environment for
me to truly permeate and self-actualise,” she explains.
“Having people 10 years my senior, some of which
had known me since I was 15 years old and who had
a lot of control over my view of the world... it was
always going to be impossible to exert your ‘self’.”
The negativity that came to define Yola’s life in
the band was typified by her bandmates’ attitude
when she first picked up a guitar around 2010.
“I was in an environment that was really threatened
by the concept of me both having the top line and
the chords!” she exclaims. “It was just like, ‘Uh, no,
we don’t like this, because then what do we do?’
Which wasn’t remotely healthy at all.”
Conversely, she was getting plenty of session and
writing work in the EDM scene, where she was being
encouraged to express herself creatively, but it just
didn’t inspire her.
“I got to the point where it was like, I can either
work with great people in the music I don’t want to
do, or with awful people in the music I do want to
do,” she reflects. “And so I leave the band and then
all of a sudden, the oppressive weight is off and I feellife?’ It was like, ‘You better have a plan! You have a
plan yesterday!’
“But if I’d had that kind environment where my
friends and family were like, ‘You go do your dream!’,
that’s really all I would have needed. You don’t need
to be rich... though obviously, being rich gets you
there quicker – that’s why the music industry looks
like ruddy Eton!”STREET SPIRIT
Yola initially headed to London for university, though
it wasn’t her priority. She ended up using her student
loan to keep her afloat while she tried to get work
as a professional musician, but at the age of 21,
circumstances collided in a most serious way.
“I became a university drop-out, because I’d spent
so much time looking for work and then I found
myself on the sharp end of an eviction,” she recalls.
“I couldn’t pay the rent, because someone that I was
living with had to leave as well. They got sick and
so they had to go home, and I was like, ‘I’m really
sorry for what you’re going through... but also, I’m
now screwed!’’
Yola hoped the the friends she’d made through
music would come to her aid, but not for the lastABOVE Yola’s Fender
Paramount PM-4CE
Auditorium acoustic
perfectly suits her
rhythmic playing style
YOLA
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