Be Here Now

Katy B has received some good news: her debut album is on course to debut at No. 2 in the UK. With a few days to go, there’s an outside chance she’ll reach No. 1. But she isn’t getting her hopes up.

“Adele is selling twice as many me,” says the singer, gazing at the vast plate of fries just setbefore here. “She’s been at No. 1, like, forever and I don’t expect that to change.”
Despite her designation as ‘first lady of dubstep’, the 21-year-old Londoner sees herself as an old fashioned pop singer. Granted, she emerged from the UK capital’s constantly morphing underground dance scene and is closely associated with bass-heavy record label and radio station Rinse FM. For all that, she feels her dubstep affiliations are overplayed, amounting, as they do, to her debut single ‘Katy On A Mission’, and her guest vocal turn on Magnetic Man’s ‘Perfect Stranger’. Otherwise, she’s about as dubstep as James Blunt.
Contemplating a particularly massive chip (more a deep-fried hunk of potato really) Katy points out that her biggest hit, ‘Lights On’, is, if anything, an example of the up-and-coming London genre of ‘funky’, a pop-tinged style popular with the lay-dees.
“People keep labeling it ‘dubstep’, but my album is made up of influences from across the whole of London club culture rather than one genre in particular,” she reflects. “Funky is more for the girls. It’s got more in common with garage than dubstep.”
Katy and Adele actually go back a bit. They aren’t close friends, as has been reported in the press, but did cross paths whilst studying at the storied Brit school in Croydon, alma mater to Katie Melua, Amy Winehouse and others. In a recent interview Adele described the younger singer as a cheeky madam. Katy laughs when this is brought up.
“She was a few years ahead of me,” she remembers. “A lot of the people in her band went to our school as well. When it all started up I remember thinking, ‘Oh my god, all my classmates are in the charts.’ It was surreal.”
At a time when every second British pop star seems to arrive with silver spoon planted firmly in gob, there’s something refreshingly salt of the earth about Katy B. Her accent is unadulterted Only Fools And Horses and she lacks the privileged airs you find among some of her contemporaries. On a sunny afternoon in Dublin, reclining in a corner of the Morrison Hotel, she could pass for an ordinary 20-nothing. Even her outfit – comfy track pants and hoody – scream normality.
She was born in Peckham to second generation Irish parents. Her real name is Katy Brien – her grandfather dropped the ‘O’ as a way of dealing with anti-Irish prejudice in ‘50s Britain (the darkest days of ‘No Blacks, No Dogs, No Irish’ culture).
“I should really be Katy O,” she laughs. “He got rid of the letter so he’d have a better chance of getting a job. I always thought that was a bit strange – surely they’d have known he was Irish anyway, from the accent.”
Unlike many members of the diaspora she didn’t holiday here as a child. Instead, her introduction to Ireland came via-the 2008 Electric Picnic, which she attended as a punter with school friends.
“It was a really cheap holiday. We got a flight for a pound. We didn’t have money for luggage so we arrived without a tent. The plan was to buy one at Electric Picnic but they didn’t have any. We went to lost property and told them we’d lost ours. When the security guard wasn’t looking we nicked the nearest one.”
Though she has warm memories of the Brit school she’s not sure what sort of impact it had on her music career. Regardless of her place of study, she feels she would have drifted into the London dance scene eventually.
Aged 16, she started to hang around with the DJs and promoters associated with the then pirate Rinse FM. Twelve months later, she was performing in front of punters for the first time, at a huge central London club.
“I had my first PA at 17. It was like, ‘oh my god, I’m so scared.’ There are all these old people dancing!”
Before long she was hanging out at Croydon’s legendary FWD» club night, which is credited with spawning dubstep.
“It gave a home to dubstep – it was the only place where it could be played in the beginning. I’d go there really early and be out of there by midnight. I worked in JD Sports the next morning so I couldn’t stay out all night.”
She’s stayed with Rinse throughout her career, explaining that her brief flirtations with major labels didn’t exactly fill her with confidence.
“I had certain meetings with management and they made comments about my weight and things like that. So my response was that, ‘well I don’t want to work with you.’ With Rinse, you can tell their interest is in the music. It doesn’t matter how small something is – if they think it’s good they’ll support it.”
‘Small’ isn’t the first word that springs to mind in relation to Katy’s career. With a hit album and a string of top five singles under her belt, she is gradually coming to terms with stardom. Given she never set out to be famous how does it feel to be on the brink of properly celebrity-hood?
“I won’t complain about being able to sing and do what I love in life. To be able to make a living out of this is fantastic. Obviously there are pros and cons. You have to weight it up. At the end of the day, if I wasn’t doing this I’d probably be still working at JD Sports.”

On A Mission is out now. You can listen to 'Broken Record' on hotpress.com now.