Lava La Rue: ‘We brought a rave to the Tate Modern’

Pigeonhole Lava La Rue at your peril. Just 22, the West Londoner smashes stereotypes without a backwards glance as a singer, rapper, film director, clothing designer, artist and MC. It’s no surprise her prolific creativity has already turned heads at the Tate Modern, who commissioned her to make a documentary exploring the capital’s subcultures and nightlife in 2018.

“That was a surreal email to receive,” remembers Lava La Rue – an anagram of her real name Ava Laurel – over Zoom from her brightly-painted council flat in Ladbroke Grove.

“When institutions like that are able to invest in people like us, you make something really magical. On the night it was screened, it was insane. They told me it was the busiest they’d ever seen the Tate Modern – it felt like we’d brought a rave to the Tate. There were no problems, no police; everyone had a good time. It was organic and beautiful.”

Lava’s music career so far has followed a similar trajectory, commanding mainstream recognition without compromising its underground roots. Her soulful 2018 single Widdit quietly amassed two million YouTube views while 2019’s acclaimed Stitches mixtape led to a support slot with Christine and the Queens and a role as the face of Converse, plastered on billboards across London. Recently tipped as one to watch in 2021 by BBC Introducing, she is now poised to release her Butter-Fly EP this week. A lush and gloriously understated hit of psychedelic hip-hop, it is an intimate ode to queer love and has been described as “ground-breaking” by BBC Radio 1 DJ Jack Saunders. 

“I didn’t realise how uncommon it was,” she says. “They’re just love songs like any other love song but the pronouns I’m using for my lover are female pronouns. I was just saying the truth and it would be even weirder if I was to hide the pronouns and make it ambiguous, but then I realised that’s what a lot of queer people do if they don’t want it to be in conversation. But they should be just as normal in playlists and charts as heteronormative love songs.”

Lava’s distinctive sound reflects a lifetime of inspiration drawn from the rave culture, reggae and gospel music she grew up with. Chiefly raised by her church-going Jamaican grandmother, Lava’s parents first met at the Ministry of Sound and introduced her to warehouse parties at 13. The first CD she bought herself was by Damon Albarn’s Gorillaz and she soon discovered Britpop, punk and indie.

“I remember kids would say to me, that’s white people’s music, why you listening to that?” she says. “Then I did my research and realised rock was literally invented by black men like Chuck Berry. We should be reclaiming this! This was ours to begin with! The more I started learning about my ancestry I realised so much culture came from the same lineage as me. When the Windrush generation of Caribbeans came here with their sound systems, that was the birth of rave culture and dance. When Jamaicans brought their sound systems to New York and the Bronx, that was literally the birth of hip-hop.”  

It wasn’t just the diverse sounds of West London that made an impact. The area’s vast economic divide stirred Lava’s keen interest in politics and social injustice. “Celebrities like Stella McCartney and Robbie Williams live in these multi-million-pound houses and across the road you have Grenfell Tower,” she says. “Growing up, there were middle-class kids, Somali immigrants, working class Irish kids and lots of Caribbean immigrants. You’re all just kids and you speak each other’s slang and eat each other’s foods until you get to a certain age and start noticing the differences in lifestyle and what they have access to.”  

She credits time in foster care as a teenager for her fierce independence, though is grateful she wasn’t uprooted when she was younger. “The older you are, the more you’re able to formulate a sense of self. When you’re younger, you can develop more abandonment issues because you don’t have a sense of ‘this is where I’m from, this is who I am, this is my community’ when you’re changing areas and guardians. I’ve seen the way the system works and it doesn’t always have the children’s best interests in mind, especially if people do it for financial benefits.”  

Starting college at 16 was a turning-point. “It was a school full of outcasts that you were able to get into if you didn’t actually pass your GCSEs or whatever,” she says. “I think it’s an example of how good it is if you give those kids opportunities. Even though we might not have got our qualifications, we all ended up becoming the people we were meant to be.”  

There, Lava started experimenting with spoken word and co-founded NiNE8, a DIY creative collective including rapper Biig Piig and producer Mac Wetha. The group have gone on to release two mixtapes, collaborated on the Tate documentary and performed at London Fashion Week, working together to this day.  

“If you do things alone creatively, you can probably move very quickly, but as a collective, you move further,” she explains. “I see on the internet and Twitter the mentality of ‘f**k friends, f**k relationships, I just want to get money and this bag and thrive’. I understand with the government and cancel culture you can feel you can’t really trust anyone, but it’s not nice. It’s okay to have trust in people. Sometimes that gets broken but don’t let that be a reflection of you.”  

It’s obvious even over Zoom that Lava will tackle her inevitable success entirely on her own terms. We are talking the day after Framing Britney Spears aired on British TV and she’s still outraged. “If you don’t fit into the category of a straight, white male, there’s so many questions you get asked,” she fumes. “These documentaries need to be shown for people to understand it’s really messed up. Asking whether someone’s lips are fake or they’ve had boob implants… You would never ask a guy about his penis size because it would be weird and disrespectful. It’s a double standard and it should be spoken about more.”  

Real change, she says, takes more than words though. “Things are in conversation that haven’t been in conversation before, but they’re still not always in the oppressed party’s best interest. When brands do bring things like race or sexuality into the conversation, it’s often for capitalistic gain. There’s a lot of performance activism.” Lava is certainly ready and more than able to direct the dialogue. To ensure change counts. For now, she is focused on making her voice heard through music and, eventually, on playing live again.   

“It’s frustrating seeing countries like New Zealand having huge festivals because they stuck out the lockdown and they’re living their best lives now,” she says. “I do know there’s probably going to be a rise in illegal raves because of this. Even when venues open, there’s still going to be restrictions and I think that smight spark off a counterculture of nightlife. I have no opinions on whether that’s good or bad, I just think it will happen. And when festivals return and we can go back and perform, people are going to go crazier than ever. That’s going to be quite a thing to be part of as a musician.”

Lava La Rue’s new EP Butter-Fly is out now