MPHO – THE DEBUT ALBUM, ‘POP ART’

‘Pop Art’ is the creation of genre–defying singer, songwriter and producer, MPHO. It’s a straight-up pop record and has been a full and varied lifetime in the making,”There’s a lot to talk about with me,” says Mpho with a sly grin to emphasise the degree of understatement. But one thing she takes as seriously as her music is making sure listeners get a strong idea of who she is and what she is all about.
From sizzling summertime electro-pop with soaring hooks
(’Paranoid Type’) and fun high-energy dance music with a chorus catchphrase ready to infect the nation’s playgrounds (’Fix Ya Face’) to ruminative, lushly orchestrated, rain-on-the-windowpane feel-better-soon ballads (’Man Who Got Away’) and unpretentious, unapologetic ’80s revamps (’Box n Locks’), Mpho’s debut has got it all. The record is suffused with the anything- goes aesthetic of OutKast, the instinctive bravura risk-taking of Prince, the dayglo colours and effervescence of TLC and the your- record-collection-and-the-kitchen-sink approach to musical history of De La Soul’s 3 Feet High and Rising, but is still proudly and undeniably poppy. You could try to pigeonhole it post-modern dance, post-urban funk or new school soul – but Mpho has already come up with the perfect label for it. Just call it Pop Art – pop music with sophistication, sass and subtlety.
Mpho has clocked up long hours as session singer and music teacher but she also paints, writes poetry, and harbours ambitions as a furniture designer. Born in apartheid South Africa and raised in a bohemian, racially mixed family of musicians and political/community activists in south London, her CV includes stints as a trusted backing singer for Ms Dynamite and Natasha Bedingfield as well as a mentor and sounding-board for a pre-fame Adele. Her life story is as colourful as her music, but the overriding theme of both has been Mpho’s determination to find her own space, to define herself on her own terms.
So right from the release of her first single on Wall of Sound/Parlophone Records, she’s wasting no time in blowing apart some of the stereotypes she’s found most restrictive. Her debut single, ‘Box n Locks’, tackles some of the most frustrating of them head-on, as she rails against those who had decided, based on how she looks and where she comes from, what kind of music she should be making and what kind of things she should be writing songs about.
Over a track fashioned by producer Switch (whose previous credits include work with M.I.A.) from a sample of Martha and the Muffins’ new wave pop hit ‘Echo Beach’, Mpho kicks against the boxes people put her in, and the locks they tried to use to keep the lid on her talent. “I guess that song was the culmination of loads of different experiences in my life that I’d never really acknowledged,” she says.” I’ve had battles with communities and cultures and cliques: all through my life I didn’t ever belong to any one group. I was into Bashment, R&B and Hip Hop, but for some people I was either too light (skinned) and they were jealous or I was too light and so didn’t belong to the “Motherland” (Africa). There were times I thought, ‘Hang on – you were born in Kilburn and I was born in South Africa: what’re you talking about? How dare you!’ I also used to listen to The Jam and The Clash in my friend’s house, and sometimes felt like, ‘I’m that too’, even though punk was considered ‘for white people’. I think I’d got to the point where I’d just had enough, and that ['Echo Beach'] sample triggered the person in me that for so long I hadn’t been allowed to be. I think ‘Box n Locks’ speaks on nearly every element of my character. And that was the turning point: that was when I realised I knew what I was going to do with my record.”
Mpho’s family moved from South Africa to London when she was a
toddler to escape apartheid laws that made the very fact of her existence evidence of a crime. Music was a constant presence, with both her biological father and her stepdad being professional musicians. “I love being in the studio and writing,” she says, “but I love performing.” After starring in secondary school plays and concerts – and having classmates asking for her autograph after particularly fiery performances – Mpho found herself a smaller fish in a bigger pond at the Brits School in Croydon. “The kids who go there think it’s like Fame,” she giggles. “I never really felt I fitted in and never really pushed myself.”
The road to ‘Pop Art’ hasn’t been smooth. Along the way Mpho took a few wrong turns of her own, making music that didn’t feel sufficiently all-encompassing until that moment when Switch and Martha and the Muffins pointed her in the right direction. From there, the ideas began to flow.
Mpho’s writing has a resonance and depth that sets her apart from many of her pop peers. She’s grown up with hip hop, and it’s the rapper’s delight in wordplay that gives her lyrics their incisive bite. ‘All Change’ uses a metaphor based around train travel to talk, first, about taking charge of a relationship, then, on a deeper level, about seizing control of your destiny.
At other times, she’ll tackle subjects which, though staples of the confessional writing prized in rock or soul circles, are rare coming from artists with serious ambitions toward pop stardom. ‘S.P.A.C.E. Man’, was written after a relationship disintegrated due to her then boyfriend’s descent into drug abuse. “It’s a horrible way to exist,” she says, “but I’m not talking about it from some pious perspective of no experience.”
Sometimes a word or phrase can point her towards a song. “‘Fix
your face’ is quite a West Indian, Caribbean kind of phrase,” Mpho chuckles. “When someone’s being miserable or upset you’d say ‘Fix your face! What’s wrong with you?’” Yet in her song, ‘Fix Ya Face’, not only does Mpho become the first artist to bring a new catchphrase to the mainstream, she does so with serious intent behind the sunny exterior. “Living in Brixton, you see loads of people standing around looking angry,” she says. “I’ll walk past, trying to be bubbly and happy, trying to project some positivity for my own benefit. It’s like,
‘You know what? I could be just like you with your screwed face, but you don’t frighten me, you’re no different to me: I could be you, but I fight not to be. What I’m doing now, you could do too – and if you did it would just make happier living for everyone.’ That’s kind of where that song comes from.”
Even when she’s being sassy – such as on ‘Hips Go Pop’, one of three tracks produced by the duo of Alan Nglish and Anonymous – there’s a spikiness and an attitude to Mpho’s lyrics which belies the accessibility and excitability of the sound and the melodies. “The kind of hips the media say are gonna shake and get attention isn’t actually true,” she grins. “What actually works is women who feel confident and sexy: then other people get that. But when you feel you’re not good enough because you’re not size zero, that doesn’t work for anyone.”
So while ‘Pop Art’ is striking and individual musically, it’s in the way it distils Mpho’s unique mélange of experiences and attitudes that it’s most distinctive. “It’s funny how intertwined my music is with my politics and my upbringing,” she concludes. “I’m black, and I’m white – culturally and in my blood I’m both of those things, so why can’t I be what I am? That’s me – and my music is the same.”