music
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music editor: Lily Taylor
Taf Royale: From UEA Graduate to a Rising Star in the Music Industry
PHOTO CREDIT: ANOUK JONES
By Lily Taylor
I
sat down with Tafari Golding, aka Taf Royale, a UEA graduate and rising star in the rap scene. I was instantly impressed by how easy he was to talk to: despite it being our first time meeting each other, it felt like we had met before. It was his birthday the day of the interview, and although he was only turning 23, I was amazed at what the South London rapper had already achieved. I began by asking him what he’d been up to recently, which proved to be an extensive list of projects. “I’ve been performing and networking a lot. Earlier this summer, I did a studio session with some of my friends, and one of my friends is a Norwich promoter, he runs an events company that’s called NR4 Ninjas. He messaged me about 20 promoters.” As a result of this, he’s worked with Illusion Entertainment in Norwich, performing at Mojo’s nightclub. He also performed at Mantra recently with NR4 Ninjas, describing it as an “incredible experience, because I’m meeting with a lot of people that I create with.” Taf then went on to mention his friend Hawi, who has helped produce a Mantra remix of their song Push. Asking him about the difference between this remix and the original version he
said, “The difference is more subtle than anything else. With the original version, it was made just in his bedroom. We wanted it to be kind of seductive, something that makes you wanna turn the lights down low. But the club edition – we started changing different elements like the drums, added a few more echoes in there, removing the adlibs to create more ambience. We played it in the Mantra club, and I thought it was the best sounding song of that set.” It was obvious to me by now that Taf had a passion for playing sets around Norwich, so I asked him what he thought of the Norwich music scene and whether it had opened any doors for him in terms of breaking into the music industry and finding contacts. “Absolutely,” he said. “I would give almost all of the flowers to the Norwich music scene. I performed at Voodoo’s [Voodoo Daddy’s] and met this guy called Ben Street. After I had performed at Voodoo’s a few times, he said to me that he was running this hip-hop event called Bluetone at the Blues Kitchen in Brixton. Essentially, I had got my first show by networking. If it wasn’t for Voodoo Daddy’s and Ben Street, I wouldn’t have got that Blues Kitchen gig.” We then went on to talk about Taf’s debut single, Soul Music which he recorded with his sister Tashay Makeda. “My sister is an incredible roots soul singer, which is a blend of soul music,
R&B, and reggae. I love her to pieces, and she is my role model. She’s a mentor in the South London music scene and she invited me to this project they were putting on for musicians in the community who wanted to be more creative. I had all these lyrics on my phone, I’m scrolling through, all the other kids have recorded their songs and she said ‘Taf, do you have anything?’ and I said ‘Yeah, there was this song, and I forgot the melody, and I wrote a song about forgetting that.’” I interjected at this point, realising that he was referring to the first line of Soul Music. Taf confirmed this and continued. “I had a dream that I was the rapper Wiley, and I’d laid down these sixteen bars and it was crazy, but I could not remember it and that made me sad. I had the first verse already written before I went in that day. I went into the booth and recorded that, Tash wrote her verse, and the song was literally finished in about two or three hours.” I concluded the interview by making Taf selfreflect, asking him what he thinks has been the most important thing that has helped him get to where he is now. I expected him to think for a second, but he knew his answer straight away. “Me. My tenacity, my ambition, my drive, and my desire to help others, because I’m not just doing this for me, I’m doing this because once I get to a position where >