043 “Of course it gets to me. Of course it annoys me,” she says. “It’s like, don’t put me up for the award! Or don’t make it seem like you’re about that when you’re not really about that. It’s psychological – you start doubting yourself, like ‘am I doing something?’ You take it personally. I’m trying to remove that element, though. It’s not personal; it’s just the way it is.” Simz does not like to dwell, especially on the downside. It’s easy to see why she has no time to navel gaze – hers is truly a game of two halves. In the same year that saw her overlooked for awards in Britain, she was the only UK artist nominated for the XXL Freshman class (despite a huge year for male urban music acts) and the only British act featured on that year’s BET cypher. Smirking under a customary flat cap and from behind shades, she kicked off the cypher by paying homage to her city (“Posted in North side of that London/ Where fed is always a paigon, keep it quiet don't trust them”). If Simz is slept on in the UK, the US is wide awake to her talents. And her story is hardly a new one; Britain’s inability to catch on leaves black British talent in its droves draining to the states. “People are so fascinated with trend and whatever is trendy, whatever is cool, whatever everyone’s talking about [in the UK]” Simz argues. “As opposed to ‘no, this is dope, this is what I fuck with and I want people to hear it’. It just so happens Americans are that way inclined. And it’s annoying that it's not
until they do it that all of a sudden we want to – we got to stop all of that. It’s silly.” It’s a bitter pill to swallow, but rapjuggernaut Drake’s affinity for grime and UK rap can’t be divorced from the meteoric rise of artists like Dave, Skepta, and Giggs in the mainstream. And while a continually confused UK press still lump Little Simz with grime artists, the current ‘British sound’ being championed isn’t one she fits into. It has been said time and time again that she sounds “nothing coming out of the UK right now” – marrying trippy, soulful psychedelia with her machine-gun flow. This is both a USP and penalty for the genre-defying artist, who has been shaped by the same ends as many of her musical peers (for Nike’s Nothing beats a Londoner advert, she shot her cameo at a barber’s shop near Sobell Leisure Centre on Hornsey Road, a stone’s throw from her childhood home). Like many inner-city youth in the early noughties, Simz was writing bars and spitting them for eager audiences locally at age 11. But her craft was honed by attending and performing at St Mary’s Youth Club, a community centre that counts Leona Lewis and Alexandra Burke as alumni. She says she sees herself as much as a product of her area as she is a “product of arts funding”, as British actor Daniel Kaluuya referred to himself in his BAFTA acceptance speech. And she worries what cuts to those services means for an upcoming generation of access-starved, opportunity hungry artists. “Like Daniel said, we’re all products of this,” Simz says. “When you take those things away, it’s disheartening. It’s like okay, now what? And then that’s what leads to people getting in trouble because they feel like there’s no other options, which to me is the saddest thing. That’s why I get involved in places like the Roundhouse, because I was going to Roundhouse when I was 16, 17. After college I would go there, save up my money, go get a membership, use the facilities and now
years later I’m able to put on a festival in that very same place. All these things – I don’t think people realise how important they are for us.” The festival she is organising at Camden Roundhouse, ‘Welcome To Wonderland: The Experience 2’ is giving a platform to "beautiful, talented women of colour”. Complete with three stages alongside food, drink, installations and an exhibition, its side attractions include broadcaster Reggie Yates in conversations with the actors Riz Ahmed and Will Poulter. And while it's a mixed line-up in terms of the gender of artists, female acts such as Ari Lennox, Junglepussy, Cleo Sol and Lioness dominate. Its predecessor was a spectacle of nearly equal proportion – she curated a eclectic roster of performers for two stages including all female jazz group Nerija to Californian RnB singer/songwriter/producer Tiffany Gouché. Meanwhile, Mckay Felt, the illustrator responsible for her album artwork, created live art. The timing of its sequel couldn’t be more pertinent. Where Wireless festival has been widely criticised for only featuring three female artists across three days of music, similarly, Green Man’s line-up features no women at all in its top 14 headline acts. In 2017, a BBC study of 14 major UK festivals for the last decade found out of 660 headline appearances, only 37 were all-female acts. But Simz insists industry inequality wasn’t on her mind when pulling the event together. “It came about by me being fans of these women, of these people and feeling like damn, just as a fan, if I were to put together an ideal festival of who I’d want to see perform, who would it be? And those were the names that came to mind. “These are artists and women that represent a time that we’re in now, and
MUSIC
Despite all her achievements however, Little Simz has perhaps unwittingly become the patron saint of the criminally slept on. She is yet to receive a single major award despite several nods. When it was recently revealed that this year’s Wireless festival lineup only features only three women across the entire weekend, Little Simz was the name commentators urged organisers to swap with one of the several male acts. When the MOBO’s only awarded a single female artist last year (Stefflon Don, and in the category of ‘Best Female’), many cited Simz as an overlooked winner.
“People are so fascinated with whatever is trendy and whatever everyone’s talking about in the UK. As opposed to, ‘this is what I fuck with’. It’s silly”