Selected Works is a regular newsletter by the Te Whanganui-a-Tara, Aotearoa (Wellington, New Zealand) based freelance music journalist, broadcaster, copywriter, and sometimes DJ Martyn Pepperell. Yes, that’s me. Most weeks, Selected Works consists of a recap of what I’ve been doing lately and some of what I’ve been listening to and reading, paired with film photographs I’ve taken + some bonuses. All of that said, sometimes it takes completely different forms.
This week’s newsletter is an interview I conducted with Katy B and Geeneus for the now-defunct New Zealand music magazine Rip It Up in 2011. At the time, UK Funky was exploding into the UK charts, and the Rinse FM team were looking at Katy as a potential vector to take the underground sounds of grime, dubstep and UK funky into the top40 while rewriting the DNA of pop music.
It’s interesting to think that I wrote this twelve years ago. When I think about it, I really had a whole half-decade run of just writing for physical print media in New Zealand before I started writing online for international music media outlets. At this point, it feels like another lifetime, but it’s something I’m very thankful to have experienced, even if I wish I’d gotten started on working overseas earlier in the piece.
On A Mission: Working alongside the likes of Benga, Geeneus, Magnetic Man and Zinc, singer/songwriter Katy B is helping to take credible underground UK dance music culture overground. Herein she relates her story. (Originally published by Rip It Up, 2011)
A tender 21 years of age, self-described "London Girl" Katy B (Kathleen Brien) and her semi-classical singing voice first reached a global audience in 2010. Brien's entry into the international dance music consciousness occurred through a trinity of singles. Firstly, the dubstep/quasi-pop hybrid numbers 'Katy On A Mission' (as produced by Benga) and 'Perfect Stranger' (produced by dubstep super collective Magnetic Man) and following that, a highly accessible UK Funky song titled 'Lights On'. 'Lights On' saw Brien lyrically sparring with pioneering female UK MC Miss Dynamite over a hypnotic club rhythm, as produced by Geeneus, the mastermind behind hyper-upfront London radio station and record label Rinse FM.
Working with Rinse FM's pool of talented beatmakers and DJs, in what Geeneus (real name unknown) describes as, "a team effort," Brien has just released her debut album On A Mission, a record which sees her lyrically investigating the nature of nightclub culture over a club appropriate mixture of dubstep, UK funky, modern jungle, breakbeat house and beyond. With her vulnerable, yet resilient vocal tones connecting the record song by song, she's crafted a statement of intent which seems to pitch perfectly with Rinse FM's current status as the sound of a stylistically murky underground bubbling swiftly into the mainstream consciousness.
And while in stories like this, the moment where success is crystalized is often a far cry from early beginnings, as with On A Mission, Brien's trajectory of development is just a matter of taking a set of principles and scaling things up. Hailing from the Peckham district of South London, Brien grew up in an environment full of music and colour. As she puts it, speaking with a slightly tomboyish English accent, "I love Peckham, there are all these little stores with strange African gospel music blaring out the windows, or a butcher will be playing a funky house CD. There is so many fresh fruit and vegetable markets and random shoe stores, stuff like that. I guess if you were walking down the street you might think it was a different country." Pausing for a moment, she continues with an infectious giggle, "In Peckham, there are loads and loads of butchers and fisher mongers, so it doesn't smell that great. Hold your nose when you're walking down High Street!"
During her younger years, Brien divided her time between staying with her parents and her aunt. Her father was a singer, who mostly worked in vocal harmony styles ("He did crooning and Beach Boys type things," she says). Her mother was a music lover who, even though she didn't play, kept the stereo on loud; and her aunt was a trumpeter and pianist. As a result, Brien, who, as she puts it, "was always into singing and dancing," realised she wanted to learn a musical instrument - piano. Hooked on the likes of Destiny's Child, Boyz II Men and Alicia Keys, at fourteen, her parents bundled her up and sent her to a Croydon performing arts school called BRIT. Responsible for the early development of the likes of Kate Nash, Amy Winehouse, Jamie Woon and Adele, BRIT had a profound effect on Brien. "It made me realise making a living out of music could be a reality, and it kind of got me on that road," she admits.
On the side, BRIT led Brien into early associations, which saw her recording with fledging grime, house and UK funky producers in their bedrooms, resulting in her contributing vocals to an underground UK Funky anthem called 'Tell Me' in 2008. Produced by DJ NG and also featuring a respected funky MC called Versatile, 'Tell Me' repositioned Brien (then known as Baby Katy) as one to watch. "Grime, house and UK Funky were just the sounds that were around me living in London at the time, " she says." Soon afterwards, Brien began working with Geeneus of Rinse FM and another producer called Zinc. Clueless to the world she was entering, Brien went home, googled Zinc and got quite the shock. "I thought bloody hell, he is pretty big in the game," she admits with a laugh. "You have to understand I was just a sixteen, seventeen-year-old girl doing her thing. I wasn't really a nerdy person into electronic music."
Thinking back on their early encounters, Geeneus relays his view of things. "I'd spent my life working with MCs, I'd worked with guys like Wiley and Dizzee Rascal, and I really wanted to work with a singer. I'd been looking for ages, and I really liked her voice. To be fair, though, her voice is what led me to her, but then I realised that she is quite like us [at Rinse FM]. She's down to earth, she's a normal person like we are. I didn't want to be working on a project with someone who had a massive ego, I don't go for that mentality in music."
As such, Brien gelled perfectly with Rinse FM's team effort/community-driven ethos, serving as the perfect voice to connect a series of stylistic themes and beatmakers into one unified body of work. "If I could get on the track and sing them myself, I would, "Geeneus laughs. "But I just can't, so we got her for that. It is a team effort, we all do it together." With 'Katy on A Mission', 'Lights On' and new single 'Broken Record' (as Brien puts it, "my tune for the ladies") having all penetrated the UK singles chart top ten, Geeneus is understandably feeling pretty good about the project progress. "Yeah, it's been pretty cool," he says. "It's done alright, innit!"
Impressively, Brien also completed a degree in popular music at Goldsmiths, University of London, while recording On A Mission and is taking her now sell-out level show on the road with a ten-piece live band. "My band is just all my friends from BRIT school, really," she says. "I used to go clubbing with the piano player." Hereon in, for Brien, the sky's the limit.
BONUS: Here’s a review Nate Patrin wrote of On A Mission for Pitchfork in 2011.
FIN.