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Music

A Day Out with Soccer Player Turned Percussive Pop Star Georgia

First she was signed to London's QPR Girls, now she's signed to Domino.
Emma Garland
London, GB

This article was originally published on Noisey UK.

Coming from a deeply musical household in North West London, Georgia has already made a name for herself drumming for everyone from Kwes to Kate Tempest. The way she talks about her foray into music almost makes it sound like an accident—making connections through studying musicology at University of London's SOAS arm (formerly the School of Oriental and African Studies), working the counter at Rough Trade West, and just generally being so embedded in the capital’s sprawling music scene that opportunities presented themselves through friends and she grabbed every single one of them by the balls (the opportunities, not the friends).

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Over the last few years Georgia has been spending just as much time in the studio as she has behind the kit—writing, producing, and working on her own debut album, which comes out this August.

The first single from it is “Move Systems,” which basically sounds like The Knife partying with M.I.A. There are elements of grime, dub, ragga, pop, hip-hop—layers of intrigue that makes her both uniquely London and unique in general. The majority of the video was shot in a massive cosmetics store in Dalston, in which Georgia—clad in a massive parka—throws down among aisles upon aisles of boxes of hair dye and wholesale wigs.

Another fun fact about Georgia is that she used to play semi-professional football for Queens Park Rangers Girls as a teenager. Now, I don’t know squat about football, so Georgia took me to Loftus Road—the club’s current stadium—and tried to impart some sports wisdom on me while I quizzed her about music. Some poor soul also gave us a tour of the stadium and let us into all the highly restricted areas of the grounds usually reserved for David Cameron and Malaysian millionaires, and we probably didn’t take it as seriously as they would have liked.

Noisey: Hi Georgia! So you used to play for QPR Girls, which is why we’re here in QPR stadium. Tell me all about that.
Georgia: Football has been a part of my life ever since I can remember. Where I grew up it was always you go down the court yard and kick the ball around blah blah… I suppose it was always something I was quite good at and I was quite a competitive little kid with a lot of energy. I kept it going throughout school and went to a summer football camp thing, where I got scouted for QPR Girls. So I started playing for them on a regular basis, training twice a week, match on a Sunday. That was my lifestyle for three or four years. QPR was a good girls team at that time, but when I was 14 I gave it up because I wanted to do the music. I couldn’t keep committing to playing a game every weekend. But it’s nice to be back!

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I hear you did a lap of honor here once?
Yeah, we won the league three times in a row so we got to it at half-time in between a QPR game. We all got to stand in the players’ corridor, partner up, and do this lap of honour holding hands. I remember my mum did my hair in plaits, we bought new football boots, and we got to meet all the managers and stuff. Everyone stood up—they took it so seriously! It was quite good.

You should kiss the pitch. That’s a thing, right?
I really wanted to, but apparently they just put loads of chemicals down on it and I want to live.

Do you think you could have had a career in professional football if you’d stuck with it?
I think at one point I was seriously considering it. The plan would have been to go to America because that’s the place for women’s football, but honestly it was a dream for like a passing month and then I think reality hit and it was like actually, this is hard work. Training twice a week, playing every Sunday, the psychological battling with your coach, the competitive nature of the game, it’s really challenging. You need a lot of self-belief and self-discipline. Plus at that age it was kind of like, y’know, I could drink and smoke and stuff. I didn’t want to wake up every Sunday at 5 AM and drive to some godforsaken place, on top of that trying to pass my GCSEs and doing music as well. I was like a broken woman at 14! But it was fun while it lasted. I wouldn’t change the time that I had because I learned a lot about being in a team, right? You play with people you wouldn’t normally meet and you learn how to interact with everyone. It definitely gears you up for real life experience in some way, shape or form.

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Character building, right?
Honestly, my coach didn’t hold back with the psychological games either. If you played a crap game, you’d know you played a crap game! I guess after a while I was like, you know what, I don’t really need this anymore.

See, nothing good comes from sports. Let’s talk music. Your background is in session drumming, but you’ve been working on your own stuff, just played Brighton's Great Escape Festival, and now have an album coming out soon. How did you go about putting a band together?
Basically, I had to play the material live, so I had to find people I felt really comfortable playing with. I’ve played with a lot of musicians in London so I already knew the people I wanted to play with and who I thought would be good for the project. It all happened quite quickly, but it also happened quite organically.

You really have played with a lot of people—JUCE, Kwes, Kate Tempest to name a few. How did you fall in with that lot?
Well, the story starts like this: I went to SOAS University and studied musicology with my friend who was going out with Kwes at the time—well, they still are going out, they’re married [laughs]—but she was doing her own music and Kwes was producing it and I started playing drums with them live. Then I came out of university and I’d been introduced to the Young Turks scene, the Warp scene, and all these amazing people in music. So it just so happened that I started playing in a band with Alexis Taylor from Hot Chip for this guy called Fimber Bravo, who’s like a steel pan player, and through him I got to know more musicians. During that time I also took a part time job at Rough Trade West, which is where I met the JUCE girls. They came in and said they were looking for a drummer, and I thought what they were doing was really cool so I started playing with them.

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It’s cool that you’ve gone from community to community, but always through friendly connections.
It has always been through friends! And it’s so nice to know that. It’s quite hard being a session drummer, especially a female session drummer, but I think I’ve been quite lucky in that the people I’ve worked with have all been so kind and welcoming. The recording side is different to playing live though, it’s a little bit harder, I think, and I was recording with producers from all over rather than friends.

So did you start out as a session drummer and then expand?
Yeah, I mean I’ve always written my own songs as a young girl and been interested in production in particular, but drumming was just something I could always do. I didn’t really have lessons, I just picked it up. I used to play at school with my friend and we used to just go into the drum rooms and play drums all day. That’s how I sort of fell into it. I still play when I can but unfortunately time and scheduling is always a pain in the arse. Whereas I’ve tried to keep it up previously, now I’m more focused on my own project, but I’m playing drums and singing live now so it’s nice to add that in.

As someone who can neither drum nor sing, the idea of doing both of those things at once feels like trying to solve a complex maths problem whilst doing multiple backflips. Was it something you had to train yourself to do?
To be honest, I’ve never even thought about it. I know that makes me sounds like wanker, but I’ve just always been able to do it! When I was first learning drums, I was learning how to play along with songs. So even with something as simple as Karma Police by Radiohead, I would be learning the drum lines but I was always singing along because it helped me know where I was. Or when I was learning a certain drum pattern I would often learn it from the mouth before, like “ti, ka, boom, ka”—a bit like the Indian way of teaching Tabla—it’s all spoken before you actually play. So I guess because I was doing that from an early age it’s now become something that’s second nature, but if you ask most drummers they’ll always be able to sing and play at the same time because it’s very connected. Also, we’re often following the singers. If you’re a session drummer, you always keep an eye on the lead singer and you’re always in your head figuring out the structure and where the lyrics are. It’s all intertwined, really.

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Locker room chats: Noisey's Emma Garland with Georgia.

Now we're in the bit of the stadium where the dudes get nude, which I think is a great place to discuss beats. The beats in your stuff are really driven towards the front of the mix. Did your beginnings in drums lay the foundations for how you approach songwriting now?
Definitely! Although, the album is very varied actually. Some songs don’t even have drums on them. But I’m always interested in the percussive nature of drums, so even if there are no actual drums on the song, a keyboard line will be very percussive or there’ll be something else that’s driving it, giving it a pulse.

You could say there is a strong hip-hop influence in your music as well as electronic stuff. Do you remember what shifted your interest to production?
When I got exposed to Timbaland and Missy Elliott, definitely. When I heard “Get Ur Freak On” I was like goddamnit, I want to do that, and then I just became completely obsessed with Timbaland and everything he did—all the little crazy sounds and the fact that he uses sounds from all over the world. That was exciting, for me. It sounded like nothing else I’d ever heard before in my life. The Blade Runner soundtrack by Vangelis is amazing too. I’ve always been interested in the space of production, but also really valuing that one sound in a song can change the whole song. I also like Eastern European electronic music where there’s loads of space. I really will just sit at a computer for days working on one sound because that could be the changing nature of the whole song. So I guess I’ve really tried to be meticulous about finding my sound and finding what I love to do.

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As someone who’s just entering the world of production, how are you finding it?
I try to think of it almost a little bit like cooking. I mean I don’t really cook that much [laughs] but I watched my friend cook the other day and he takes a lot of time over, like, chopping the onions perfectly and waiting until they’re ready in the oil and this whole meal took two hours to make, but in the end you’re left with something really tasty. And you’re like oh man, he’s taken the time to really do that, you know?

Right. Songs are kind of like meals, in that you might take three minutes to digest it but it probably took many grueling hours to make.
It’s true! I’ve always been interested in reading up about producers on really famous tracks - the amount of time and effort that it took to make and the techniques they used. So the producer has always been a figure that I’ve been fascinated with, but it’s only now that I’m really embracing the idea that I could potentially be one myself. I certainly feel like I am honing some sort of skill.

That sounds quite humble coming from someone who’s sound has already been compared to M.I.A.
For me, that’s the highest praise, because M.I.A. is such a massive influence. When “Galang” came out my friends and I were like “this is us”! Obviously M.I.A. was always a little bit older, but being in a girl gang with all these friends who were from different parts of the world but London-based—it was our tune. M.I.A. is amazing not only in what she represents as a woman in music, but as a visionary. To be even put in the same sentence as her is quite amazing.

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It’s funny you mention London there in reference to M.I.A. because your stuff has this uniquely “London” sound—it’s kind of dark and grimey in places as well as being upbeat.
Absolutely. I’m really into dark electronic music. When I heard that first Fever Ray album, it changed my life. The production was so meticulous with these incredible vocals over the top - kind of like Timbaland, really. For me Fever Ray and definitely The Knife had a huge effect on my idea of how pop can merge with dark electronic music and come out with something unique and inviting.

It seems like London has a lot of exciting things happening at the moment but sometimes I feel like it’s difficult for culture to exist in a place where beer is EIGHT POUNDS.
Britain is on it’s arse. I like that there’s no “healthy food” option here though. Loftus Road giving the people what they want: pies from a packet.

Truly. Still, it’s interesting that this exposure of new stuff is coming at a time when London’s venues seem to be closing on a weekly basis. Given that you’ve lived here your whole life, how have you seen the city change over the last few years?
It’s really hard to answer this because I love London, and I’ll probably never live anywhere else. Different areas have changed for the better and it’s nice for different communities to merge. But a lot of people have been pushed out and feel like they don’t know their area anymore, which is sad. Cities are in a constant state of change and I can’t say whether it’s for better or worse, because there’s a lot of positives and negatives, but certainly for music I feel like it’s harder to find the good things that are happening because there’s such an over-saturation of everything.

What kind of venues did you go to growing up?
Plastic People was one of my main places so that’s a real shame [that it’s closed], and I thought it was a travesty when they took The Astoria down—I saw Bjork and a lot of other amazing people there—but I feel like there should be some more venues opening up now that are similar to the size of Oval space. If we had more spaces that catered specifically for electronic music as opposed to always having it be in clubs, that would be great. It’s annoying that one guy can move in next to a venue that’s been there for two decades and shut it down because it’s too loud, but ultimately I don’t think you’ll ever be able to drive out the whole idea of raving and stuff. People are always going to want to do that and they’ll always find a space to do it in.

Speaking of venues changing I hear QPR are leaving Loftus Road soon?
That is a tragedy! There’s so much history here.

And now we are part of that history. Thank you Georgia, for taking me to a place I can be quite certain I will never, ever come back to.

Georgia’s eponymous debut album will be released on 9.7 via Domino.

Follow Emma Garland on Twitter.