Gwreiddiau 006
Asha Jane || Multi-Disciplinary Artist
Introduce yourself…
I’m Asha Jane, I’m a multi-disciplinary artist, and I started out as a singer. At the moment I do a lot of, I really hate the word urban, but that’s what people use. I do a lot of hip-hop, sort of grime-esque collaborations. I’ve been getting into that for the last couple of years. I think my stuff is generally regarded as R&B-pop-ballad stuff? Anything I like really, I’ve done it all, but that’s where I seem to naturally float at the moment.
I remember being small and all of my Indian aunties standing over me, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I answered ‘ I want to be a model, an actress, a singer, a presenter, and a writer, and I want to do all of it.’ They replied ‘oh no, you’ll either be a lawyer or a doctor.’ I put those things out into the universe when I was 6 years old and I realised a month or so ago that I’ve ticked off everything on that list. And what’s so funny to me is that I’ve ticked off lawyer and doctor too, because I’ve played both in TV programmes. So I have technically done those things...but in my own way.
What would you say has caused you to gravitate towards hip-hop and grime at the moment?
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I think Cardiff is a beautiful musical palette of different colours and I’m just greedy. Every time I was on Womanby Street I saw everyone doing really cool things and I wanted to do that too. I just love songwriting, I love lyrics, it doesn’t matter what kind of music it is as long as it makes you feel something. I think that’s how I ended up there.
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But I also think it’s a palatable corner for me. I started out as an opera singer and did musicals and things too, but when I was a kid there weren’t any people of colour that I could see doing those things too. No one I could identify with to look up to. So nothing really to base yourself off. Shirley Bassey because she’d done Climb Every Mountain and I’d been Mother Abbess in a school play, but that was it. Maybe there was one black opera singer too? But one person isn’t enough. Whereas in hip-hop you can see so many amazing women like Queen Latifa and Lauren Hill, and that’s who I really wanted to be like.
It also comes from watching my friends do it and thinking ‘that’s so cool, let me try that.’ I literally couldn’t rap two years ago, I’m better at it now, but I still don’t think I’m an amazing one. It literally stemmed from other people being so excited for me to just try it out.
​Where do you consider to be your home town, or do you feel like you don’t have one? Or do your main influences come from elsewhere?
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Because I’m mixed race, of a mixed background, and because my birth story isn’t straightforward, Cowbridge is somewhere I grew up but I’m not sure it’s my hometown. I would definitely consider that to be Cardiff now despite having only moved there in recent years, and despite spending the earliest years of my life in London.
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There was an element of, I don’t want to say tokenism because that’s not quite what it was, but when you’re the only face you see doing certain things it can feel like that. It’s not that I hate Cowbridge at all, people weren’t horrible to me and it wasn’t a horrible place to grow up, but I lacked confidence due to only being exposed to one type of person and one type of thing. Classical music seemed like the only option, actually, I was in a samba band at one point, but that’s about as spicy as it got. It’s a very binary place, and I wasn’t born a binary person.
Growing up, my dad and my mum’s father were a huge influence in how I feel music. And my mum too actually. They would take me to the theatre as a kid, they’d put ‘The King and I’ on the record player followed by a reggae album. Or I’d be walking around listening to Christina Aguilera, then I’d put on my ‘Annie’ or ‘Oliver’ videotape. I grew up listening to everything. I think my dad’s missed out on a cracking career as a DJ, he’s such an eclectic man and I know I can take him to a gig I want to go to and no matter what it is he’ll probably enjoy himself.
My grandpa, my mother’s father who was Indian, shaped maybe the biggest part of my music though. He could pick up any instrument and play it and he thought I was really interesting. He used to sing to me and I used to sing back before I could talk. I think he wired my brain up really early to be able to identify pitch and tone, we even found a letter he’d written to a professor of child development asking whether a baby of 6-9 months old could be pitch-perfect.
Both my parents are in the medical profession now, but growing up they ran a small coffee shop, my mum worked for the government for a while, and they’ve both been teachers. So I think those things have probably been an influence too, I never thought I had to stay in one place forever. I’ve watched them do different degrees and different jobs. My grandpa was a preacher and the mayor of Truro for a bit…and a teacher too. In fact, he taught Brian May for a while and they stayed friends afterwards as they were both political people. One of my godmothers is a famous feminist writer that people study in sociology. People like that were around me, and I wanted to be like all of them. The influence of all the different cultures, all the different foods I got to grow up eating, it does make me think ‘yeah I can do that’ about anything I want to put my mind to.
What was your experience like growing up there, in comparison to now?
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People always called me black growing up which was confusing because I didn’t feel very black. All the black people I knew of, Will Smith and Oprah pretty much, were on TV. In real life, apart from my dad I barely saw anyone around me who was black. To be honest I don’t think I grew up feeling very black until now.
Everyone I knew growing up was either into Alt-J or The Maccabees, or were heavily into metal music, and I was searching for something I could see that could show me what I was searching for in myself. I remember discovering a band called ‘Living Colour’ that had people of colour in it and realising that that meant I could do that too. Benji Webb from Skindred as well was mad inspirational to me when I was 14 too, seeing a metal band whose frontman had dreadlocks. So I was in a metal band for a bit and we’d do covers of Jessie J…but with metal guitar. I totally believe in being the person you wanted to see when you were growing up because I now realise that I wanted to be able to look up to the type of person I am now.
I do wish in a way that I’d grown up where I am now. I think I would have been happier as a child…but that’s always a ‘grass is greener’ kind of situation, isn’t it? I look at people who’ve always lived here and think about how lucky they are to have grown up in such a diverse world. It made me less confident to grow up having not seen anyone else who looked like me. Queer culture was something I didn’t see growing up either. I’m still learning about things I’ve felt my entire life and only now finding the words to describe myself.
Coming to Cardiff I was exposed to so much more culture and I learnt so much more, not even just about the world, but so much more about myself and what I come from. I’ve made a lot more friends, people who look like me, people who’ve had the same experiences as me growing up, we’re all searching for the same thing. We all happen to be musicians and we all happen to be queer too. I didn’t get that where I grew up. So I feel like I have a lot more connections to things in Cardiff, and that they’re more meaningful. Within a 20-minute walking radius of where I’m living now I can get to 6 different bedroom studios I know of, whereas where I grew up, 20 minutes of walking meant I would still be with the cows.
But I do love green…the scenery, it was a beautiful place to grow up. It taught me a lot about patience, I have songs from 2 years ago that I’m only just releasing now. Plus I still get excited when I get to go to a gig and I really look forward to meeting up with friends. When you live in the middle of nowhere that kind of thing was an occasion.
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How do you think it’s shaped you and your work?
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I’m good at working in isolation. If you leave me in a room with a piano and some paper I think I could write for months. There were only about 4 channels you could get so we just had a fireplace and board games. I think that’s what pushed me to sit and write songs all the time. I overthink for sure as well, so the process of sitting at a piano and getting it all out is very cathartic for me. Whether that song sees the light of day or not isn’t really the point.
But at the same time I love being with people, I appreciate being able to go into studios and peoples houses…songwriting and connecting with them. I like to think of it like making a baby, these are my children. There’s something very intimate about making songs with people that I actually don’t think I get romantically. ‘That song’s going to be around for the rest of our lives. It might be a good song, might be a bad song, but it’s going to be around for years.’ That’s very hippyish of me. I get why people are obsessed with their children, in the same way that they can get annoying because you’ve heard them so much.
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Sometimes a song is just me jamming out with my friends, I often work with the artist Yazmean and pre-lockdown she would be at my house 2-3 times a week. Sometimes you write a banger and sometimes you just chat shit, and sometimes a line that was gold would come out of that chat. It’s all part of the process. Then when I write with Eleri and that’ll come across as a more country-ballad-pop-ish kind of vibe, the voice that comes out of me is softer. I like being able to express myself in all these different ways because I feel like I’m a very emotive person.
I get nervous about bringing this up because it can come across as cocky and people assume it’s a very nurtured talent, but it’s just my reality. Singing and performing have always come extremely naturally to me. Growing up in Cowbridge I won all of my competitions, I always had lines in school plays and the things other people would practice for weeks to perfect I could do in a couple of days. So although I love art, at that time it felt a bit easy. Choosing to study songwriting at BIMM Bristol was a challenge and I liked that. I knew not everyone was automatically going to like my work and I didn’t know how to do it yet, I wanted something harder and to feel like I’d achieved something. It meant that I didn’t realise that I could do pretty much anything I wanted with my music until much later when I was taught about all the technology that enables you to experiment and record from home. Software like Ableton and Logic open up a thousand opportunities.
I always thought that the songs that you hear were made in huge studios with lots of money, which they are for the most part, but the beginnings of them don’t have to be anymore. You can make a demo in your room, and some people can fully produce in their rooms too. I have a massive amount of respect for Eadyth, I knew her before she ventured into the electronic stuff. She was incredible then, but to watch her growth…now she can master songs and write pieces to theatre. What she does is so inspiring.
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I don’t like having to put female in front of things generally, but I think it’s important to highlight that she is a female producer because it’s such a male-dominated industry. She’s an incredible producer, who also just happens to be female. It’s difficult, isn’t it? Sometimes I want to describe myself as a ‘femcee’ rather than an emcee so people know that it was much more of a struggle to do what I do, even though that shouldn’t be the case. You want people to know that it’s not coming from a place of privilege so you put ‘female’ or ‘person of colour’ in front of what you do.
Growing up in a traditional place and can be monotonous, do you think you look for the kind of spontaneity your work brings to counter growing up in a sleepy town?
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Absolutely. Everyone’s a ‘slash’ something in Cardiff. Especially DJ’s and skateboarders man. Skateboarder/DJ/run my own events/sing in this band/play bass/do the doors at The Moon/photographer/videographer. When I meet someone now I’m never shocked to find out that someone does more than one thing. I guess maybe that’s just the way things are now, you can’t just have one job as a freelancer. And I think the older generation don’t understand it at all, the 9-5 in one place is the norm to them, whereas I’m used to not knowing where I’m going to be tomorrow.
I think this phone conversation I had with Zac last year pretty much sums it up:
Zac: Yo Asha, you excited for this evening? what do you need?
Me: Good morning Zac, I’ve just woken up…what do you need?
Zac: …for your show?
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I thought he meant for a future show I’d forgotten about. I always do that, sometimes I book so many things in that I genuinely forget. But it turned out I was supporting Kae Tempest and I just didn’t know about it yet. This was like 4 or 5 hours before, and I had no idea about it. What he meant was Ladies of Rage.
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Me: I’m in Ladies of Rage…but it might not actually be me who’s playing…
People think we’re a band but we’re not, we’re a massive collective. There’s hundreds of us, there are dj’s, singers…everything you can imagine in the music industry. Women and non-binary people. It was meant to be me though, along with a few others.
One minute I think I have nothing to do and then the next I find out I have a huge gig. My agent will phone me up and say ‘Asha can you get to ______ in an hour’ and I’ll just jump in a taxi and be on the set of Casualty. A few summers ago I went to what was supposed to be a one day job, I spent the whole morning chatting to Asa Butterfield who I hadn’t recognised, got asked back the next day, and Netflix’s Sex Education ended up being two summers of my life. That’s just the industry, everyone I know puts themselves out there as much as possible. We work 14/15 hour days to come home and still rehearse, and that works for me!
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You’ve lived in a couple of different places and have had such a mix of influences and factors, do you feel that’s mirrored in your choice to be a multiple-disciplinary artist spanning many genres, rather than just sticking to one thing?
People assume you’re just one thing based on what you look like. Yes I look Jamaican, but people don’t realise that Jamaica is very mixed race, as they would say it’s ‘many people who become one.’ I also look Indian, and I also look like my mother, and my grandma who’s white. These were all confusing things growing up. I thought it was normal for everyone to celebrate Ramadan as much as they celebrated Christmas, and as much as they celebrated Eid. Then to have a friend next door who was celebrating Hanukkah. My parents are from two completely different cultures; mum is Christian, dad has a Christian mother but a Muslim father, my grandfather was from a Hindu background but was adopted by Christian people. So I got to know all of it. I got to try all the curry, but also have fish and chips and bangers and mash. A Cornish pasty is just as homey to me as the Jamaican patty. It’s all wonderful to me and it would blow my mind when I went to friends houses and they hadn’t tried all of those different things. And all of those experiences from different people and places have made me, me.
Nature is as equal to nurture in my opinion. Sound and words have always been fascinating to me. Colour too, and feeling so emotional about all those things, seeing how they connect people who would otherwise have nothing in common. Those things are the essence of being human. Everyone’s searching for their soul, everyone’s searching for their purpose. And for me that translates to standing at a gig listening to an artist that you love or performing your own music, everyone in that room is connected, and connected to the thousands of millions of people who have or will listen to that song.
What about everything we’ve talked about would you want to distill into a project? ​
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For me, one of my ultimate goals in life that not many people know about, and one of the reasons I think I do all the different things I do, is putting on a festival. Knowing how to do all of these random jobs and love towards a lot of different genres of art is where it’s leading to. I think if you plan an event you have to plan something you know you'd enjoy. Otherwise, how can you expect other people to enjoy it?
Maybe call it…Culture Shock? I’ve manifested this idea in notebooks and with friends, but I’ve never given it a name before. I just know I'd love to be a curator for a festival, put all the knowledge I have about what amazing food is, and an eclectic lineup. There would be a metal band here, a reggae band there, tonnes of Ladies of Rage.
I proper envy Kaptain who runs his own radio station, he’s also a DJ called AAA Bad Boy, and is the head of music for Boomtown. He books something like 1000 acts a year to play and he also plays himself. And basically he’s living his best life that weekend, all of his mates are there, people he’s been speaking to all year are there, all the artists know who he is, he gets to hang out with Lauren Hill backstage. Wu-Tang Clan were meant to play this year. Imagine loving someone for that long and you get to book them to play when you want them to. He is life goals for me.
At Forte Project last year we had to write out our 1, 5 and 10-year plan, and mine was a bit different to everyone else’s answer. I put down ‘director of a big music company.’ I have no idea whether that will actually happen and it felt like this massive goal to even just written down on paper, it’s just where I think things are leading to in my head. I believe that everything happens for a reason and that we are all on a path, whether we know where it’s going or not.
I'm always asking myself why have these things happened and what and why am I learning from them. Maybe I just use that to process when bad things happen? I’ve been through terrible things before; homelessness, extreme illness, abusive relationships that are still affecting me years later. At the time I was thinking ‘why me? there’s probably not even a god because why would they allow someone to go through so much suffering? why is there so much pain in the world?’ So I think it’s partly a calming thought, but also years later a lot of those experiences have shaped how I respond to new things that happen. You can’t upset me these days, people who try to vex me don’t know where I’ve been and they don’t know where I’m going either. I trust that the universe will answer me, even if it’s years later.