Connie Constance Sounds Like No One Else Her Age

Connie sings… well, she sings unusually. Good unusual, though. Beautifully. Sometimes her diction cloaks her words in what feels like a thick, comforting coat that makes them land more softly on your ears. There’s a depth to her voice that belies her 22 years. It’s as though her vocal chords hopped out of her body when she was a child, chain-smoked about 200 cigarettes and drank a few gallons of whisky, then jumped back into her throat. What that produces, most movingly in a live setting, is a canvas on which she draws her fairly bleak and self-reflective perspective on the world over music that straddles indie and soul – more on that in a bit, though. She sings about all of the usual things that matter a lot when you’re in your twenties: heartbreak, that wobbling lack of self-esteem from still feeling like a child but being expected to act like a Real Grownup, realising that actually the world is rife with injustice and trauma. If that sounds heavy and really sincere, it is.

“My mum always shows my music to people,” she says, when we meet a few weeks after the gig. “And at her birthday last weekend, this woman was like, ‘Connie you’re going to have to write a happy song, cos we’re beginning to think something’s wrong with you.’ Well, maybe there is something wrong with me.” A pause. “Maybe there’s something wrong with you too.” She laughs now, both self-aware and much sunnier in person than you might assume from her discography to date. We’re near Abbots-Langley hometown in Hertfordshire, sitting in the Watford pub her aunt once bar-tended in and now manages. When we talk in early November, her Boring Connie EP – which came out last week – is due out soon, set to follow 2015 debut EP In the Grass, and a smattering of singles in 2016. Its style, flitting between twanging electric guitars, jazzy piano refrains and skittering live drums, has been a long time coming.

At first, Connie felt she had to be ‘an R&B girl’. That would have been the easiest template to follow, as a mixed-race woman who sings, and in a digital scrapbook released alongside Boring Connie, she writes about composing 60-odd songs before she felt she’d found her voice. “I was in denial creatively for a long time,” she begins, shifting a bit in her seat and leaning towards me. “So it took a while to be like, ‘actually, I don’t listen to R&B that much so therefore I shouldn't really be making it at all. That means I’m wouldn’t even listen to my own music,” she says, chuckling to herself. She had to go through that process of elimination to know she was “not really into writing stuff that doesn’t mean anything to me. Then also you open yourself up to saying, ‘OK, I always listen to the Stone Roses and the Smiths – what do I like about them?’ What would I want to emulate or be inspired by in my own music from the stuff I still listen to now?”

Then she suddenly stops herself, saying she doesn’t even remember what the question was and is now “blabbering on and on, me me me,” which she whines in a sing-song voice before exploding into laughter. It’s a moment emblematic of how quickly she skips from introspection to self-deprecation to joy, in person and in her music. Boring Connie’s “Bad Vibes” sees her swoop from raspy low notes to almost talk-singing, punctuating a line about how “no more words could convince you how beautiful you are” that you can imagine her spitting out with a finger pointed in your face. As with one of the EP’s other tracks, “1st World Tragedy,” the vocal melodies meander in a way that feels almost absentminded. Unexpected notes bump into each other as you would into someone you accidentally shoulder barge on a busy street. Even in the moments when Connie’s lyrics display a naivety – see: “the human race is full of greed / What do we really need?” on “1st World Tragedy” – her delivery makes up for them.

That sort-of-talking vocal style is what earned her the indie half of her “indie-soul” tag. It stems from the hours she spent rifling through her step-father’s huge stockpile of CDs, which became like a mini, free record store in the house. “They were everywhere,” she says. “They took up so much space in the house. You’d go up in the loft and they were all up in that as well.” At that stage, “when I was 11 or 12, my step-dad would play indie all the time in the car and I was like, ‘ughhh, I hate this, can we not listen to KISS FM?’ Then two years down the line, I was begging him from CDs from the massive collection he had.” By the time she was about 14, she was known as that girl with all the indie classics on her iPod – and as the only mixed-race member of her family, in an almost entirely white neighbourhood, it fucked with other people’s perceptions of what she “should” like.

“I’d be in my room absolutely loving the Stone Roses, the Jam, Paul Weller. Then I’d go to school and kids were like ‘I want to listen to your iPod’ because it had all these classic bangers on it. But within my own ‘cultural group’ of the mixed-race and black people outside of school, I was always the weird one.” Blending Nina Simone, Amy Winehouse and young Morrissey as influences now makes for resolutely untrendy music. I ask whether that worries her, and she immediately perks up. “This is literally something I woke up to around two weeks ago. Talking to Luke Gomm, who I’m finishing my album up with now, I was like, ‘don’t take this as though I’m not confident in what we’re doing, but I’ve been thinking that a lot of the music that’s popular right now isn’t what I’m into.” She clarifies that it’s good, but just not to her taste, and that what she’s doing puts her music in a sort of no man’s land. “When I put the album out, against stuff that’s completely different, who’s gonna be into what I’m doing? Like” – she giggles – “this is going to be weird because I don’t know where it’s going to stand.”

And she has a point. What she does is weird, but not in the “here’s a person in an outlandish costume shouting” way that the indie world has come to understand performative weirdness. Sure, she body rolls and wiggles her arms in interesting ways, but that’s more down to the fact that she trained as a dancer at the Urdang Academy before getting serious about music. There may well be lots of people who don’t “get” what she’s doing. But at the end of the day, she decides that she’s “never made music intentionally for it to be popular. I’ve made it because it’s what came naturally, when I was thinking about stuff or feeling upset. That’s why so much of my music is quite ‘down’ – when I’m going through something hard, I write the most.” There’s a happiness pinned to that catharsis, which you can see in her face when she plays. When singing about a fucked-up relationship plummeting through its disintegration phase, she basically looks delighted. If nothing else, after seeing Connie perform you’ll want to experience at least one 3AM dancefloor with her to replicate that joy – even if it’s actually about 8.30PM on a weekday, and you’re watching from the audience.

'Boring Connie' is out now via AMF Records

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