Speech Debelle Talks about the UK Recording Industry
If those bike rides literally expanded her horizons, now the south London rapper, 26, suddenly finds herself in a position to explore them. Three years after leaving a hostel in Crystal
Crystal Palace is one of the highest points in London, offering sprawling views over the city. “I’d ride my bike to the top of the hill and see what looked like the whole world,” says Speech Debelle, as she describes her childhood in SE19. “There are people who live in tower blocks where you can’t see anything but another tower, and that’s their whole world. I can understand how you would think your estate is all there is.”
Palace, she released her debut album, Speech Therapy, this June. Last month, it became the only hip-hop recording on the 12-strong shortlist for this year’s Mercury Music Prize. This month, she is in a whirlwind.
When I meet her she is bleary-eyed, having arrived straight off Eurostar from Paris, where she was invited to perform at the first gig in France by Africa Express, Damon Albarn’s epic, improvised live union of African and western musicians. It sounds like she had fun, though as one of about 100 performers, she didn’t know who she was duetting with (Senegalese rapper Sister Fa, it turns out) and refers to Albarn as “David Allborn”.
She also reveals that Ms Dynamite, who in 2002 was the last woman to win the Mercury Prize, was at the Paris show. Her subsequent disappearance as a musician and move into minor reality television should be a warning about how not to capitalise on such early exposure but Debelle told her that her victory was an inspiration all the same. “I said I didn’t know what the Mercury was until she got it,” she says. “It was not a part of my conciousness but when she won, it became more of a reality for me.”
Full of face, dramatic of hair and trainers, with a tattoo that says “Pain is Love” within musical notes that encircle her left wrist, Debelle says she feels like an outsider both on the shortlist she refers to herself as a “token” entry more than once and in pop generally.
She compares the British music industry’s support of black artists unfavourably with the set-up in the US. “I don’t want to be looked at like a UFO. I want to be on the same TV shows, the same stages, as someone like La Roux. But here they’re not used to dealing with black stars. That’s why Estelle ain’t here,” she says, referring to the Hammersmith rapper who found real success only upon relocating to New York.
