“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”
like I can write. And I can do all this stuff! And so
I have like one song I write that charts in the Top 10.
And then all the blinkers disappear and I think,
‘I can do what I bloody like!’
“I was just reprogramming my brain... It dawned
on me that I had to learn to lead – and I’d never
led anything before. And so that was the big
transition, really – going from being chosen to
doing the choosing.”
GET YOUR PRIVILEGE
The tipping point came when Yola contributed
an (uncredited) vocal line for the song Won’t Look
Back for DJ and producer Duke Dumont – the song
had huge success in the charts on both sides of the
Atlantic and gave her a level of financial security
she could only have dreamed of a few years hence.
“On the PPL alone, I was golden!” she laughs.
“So I was like, ‘Do I buy a house or something, or
get a mortgage?’ Or... I could just throw it all at
building a career, like all the frickin’ middle-class
rich kids get to do because they’ve got all this time
and all this frickin’ bankroll...
“So I was like, ‘I’m going to buy my own privilege!’
And that’s kind of how I got to starting out solo.
It was me using the model of privilege and then
pretending to be my own rich daddy!”
A key part of this next phase in Yola’s career
was going back to the instrument that she’d
been discouraged from experimenting with in the
past and using it to start to carve out her own identity
as a solo artist.
“I just picked guitar up as a means to an end,
because I didn’t really have anyone to collaborate
with,” she explains. “I had songs in my head fully
fledged and so I had to try and find a way to get
them out. Because that’s the thing, you can always
hear chords in your head. You can always hear
progressions. But when you look down at your
hands, you’re like, ‘But what can you do, though!?’
“Picking up a guitar was just this way of getting
songs out of my head. And then it dawned on me
that once you get over your hand feeling like a crab
claw and it starts feeling like a hand again, the humpYOLAGUITAR MAGAZINE 45