 09/12/2007 White girls sing soul, black guys do indie, white boys rap and black girls front pop. Welcome to 2007. Is this the year where traditional stereotypes went straight out of the window? Where we judge a piece of music solely on the sound, not who’s making it? Perhaps we’ve became junkies of the listening kind - we don’t give a shit who’s peddling our fix, as long as we get more of it. ‘There’s a lot of people doing black music now,’ states latest reggae sensation, Ava Leigh. ‘Just look at Amy Winehouse and Joss Stone – no-one is pointing out that they’re white girls doing traditionally black music. Music is music at the end of the day.’
She’s absolutely right. When everyone went mental over the Mercury nominated‘Back To Black,’ we all talked about Mark Ronson’s production abilities and thattowering beehive, not really the fact that the Motown soul sound was comingright out of a skinny white girl’s mouth. So it excites us to meet the blonde,Chester born, voice on the summertime feel-good tune ‘La La La,’ and itsbouncy flip, ‘Mad About The Boy.’
’The album reads like a diary,’ Ava says of her upcoming release. Enlisting the talents of roots veterans Sly and Robbie, who she hails as ‘geniuses’, they took a downbeat track Ava penned in Wandsworth and transformed it into an upbeat anthem. ‘They saw something in it that we hadn’t seen before, it was a really bright and organic,’ she says, full of admiration. Recording was done in a garden shed by Glastonbury Tor, a basement studio in Brixton and Harry J’s famous studio in Kingston, Jamaica, which reflected Ava’s personality perfectly, from the country background to her experiences in underground Aba Shanti nights and her reggae lilt. Even Finley Quaye marks his comeback on Ava’s material, helping her reinvent the Matumbi classic ‘After Tonight’. ‘We were just going to use an original sample, like me singing over a record,’ she explains. ‘But, then we thought why not use a real person? So, we thought about it and each of us came up with Finley, especially as he’s about to release a new album. He’s such an exciting artist.’
Making the move from her quaint, northwestern roots to the throb of city lifewas the only way to enrich Ava’s soulful tones. ‘It got to the point where I wasspending more and more time in London,’ she says. ‘There’s such a greatreggae scene here and being in London just lets me absorb the music... It’s easyto be inspired here.’ Leaving her real name Hayley Carline back home, she’sfully embracing life in the capital. Her signing to Virgin has run extraordinarily smoothly, with the label allowing her to develop properly as an artist and takeher sweet time over her upcoming masterpiece. ‘When I was approached by theA&R guy, I said exactly what I wanted, how I wanted to sound, how I wanted todress...’ she recalls. ‘I’ve heard horror stories about artists that have been madeto release songs they don’t want to by their label and then being dropped, but I’dnever do something I didn’t want to do.’
Adamant that her music won’t be ‘throwaway’, Ava is here to stay. Her praise for artists that constantly reinvent themselves brings David Bowie to the top of her list of heroes. ‘I want people to still be listening to my music in fifteen years time and be like ‘yeeeah’... I want to be here for a long time.’ And we have a feeling that every little ting gonna be alright for Eva. Bring on the sunshine!
WWW.MYSPACE.COM/AVALEIGH
LOOK OUT FOR AVA’S NEW SINGLE, RELEASED IN OCTOBER (VIRGIN) |
