BEKA: 'Everything I understand about music was birthed from the era of music that Nile Rodgers helped write'

It’s a subject that the Nottingham-born singer – whose maternal grandparents met in York – says she is looking forward to discussing with one of her musical heroes. For her, the biggest evolution has been videos.

“I think my career and everything I understand about music was birthed from the era of music that he helped write,” she says. “When I think back to that time when I was starting to be enthused with jazz, with Motown, with soul, with cinematic music, with the Quincy Joneses, the Princes, the Madonnas, the Nile Rodgers, as a young woman, it was all on tape for me in my home and my parents would be hammering the same album in the car. It was listening on tape then on CD.

“There weren’t always visuals that went along with it even in my lifetime, and I’ve gone from listening to music and allowing that to be something that fuses my imagination and interpreting it in my own way into a world where there’s music videos and you are being given a narrative, into now where you would never find a song without the visual.

“I think that development, potentially in my experience, has gone from curating your own response to other people’s creativity, to now being given almost a way to respond to it, which I think can be a beautiful thing. It facilitates us really connecting with art-makers and their story and the purpose behind what they’re creating, which can be a potent thing. Often art is so narrative-driven and feelings-driven, so the weapon of creativity has much more been put into the hands of the creator, which is quite powerful.”

When it comes to the increasing use of artificial intelligence (AI) in music, BEKA “ever sit(s) on the side of the optimist”.

“If I think about my own grandmother’s life, she’s gone from leaving England to live in the West Indies and knowing she will only be able to communicate with her family by a letter on a banana boat to now I can Facetime her and she can join in our calls, so I look at the way that she has grown with that and ever-evolved and it’s been her superpower so I always want to be someone who looks at changes in our society and things that are coming whether we like it or not and errs on the side of how do we allow them to facilitate us?” she says.

“I think even as a woman who later in life was diagnosed as neurodivergent and having ADHD, I think something that can work with my divergent brain to help me is always incredible. So I look at something like AI and think let’s use it with the boundary that we do need to use things anyway and let’s use it as a superpower. But I also think that we connect with things that humans make and you’re never going to be able to take away the power of authentic creation from people.”

While recognising that only the biggest artists gain much financially from streaming platforms, BEKA appreciates that it has helped her to reach a wider audience. “I can’t help but think about when I first started making music as BEKA I had this South Asian and Asian fanbase that from day one connected because we’d stayed in touch across the seas after a series of songs that came out with a band called Honne, and that was a real superpower. I think our ability to upload our own music and our ability to find our own fanbase and connect with those people can positively affect things like streaming

“Again, I think we underestimate the power of people wanting to back people who they resonate with. I think that’s the superpower of this online world that we have. Yes, there can be challenges as artists not being paid enough through streaming, and not everybody having the same access to big companies who have sway, yet I also think we make music for the fans and the fans will find people who they want to back if you let them.”

In 2022, BEKA released an EP called Your Skin, which contained reflections on her own mixed race heritage and identity. It was, she says, inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement. “I think being mixed race, it’s something that’s always been part of the narrative in our family, it’s been a really open discussion,” she says. “I can imagine for many other families where there are two defined races that potentially doesn’t come up, but for us, both of my parents are mixed race and it’s a really comfortable topic for us. I think also we’re a very curious family so wanting to understand the who and the where and the what of what makes us us is inherent to who we are.

“But also my dad’s adopted so again, having this West Indian and British side on my mum’s side and also this Nigerian-British side on my dad’s side but this culture that he didn’t grow up but is is also this springboard for so many questions around culturally are we the thing that we were raised around, are we the country that we’re from, what informs culture, how old are you when you can no longer assimilate to a new culture.

“All these questions are things that have always been bubbling away and I think during the Black Lives Matter movement it was a beautiful moment to stop and reflect on what my experience has been as a mixed race woman in a predominanly white environment being schooled and then again in my university, but also being someone who often feels she bridges the space between. I feel that’s a place that I sit very often as a person, so it was a real time of reflection but also it was a conversation that was already quite free in my life, I’d say, but gave me opportunity to maybe empathise with friends who are from loads of different racial backgrounds and potentially even hold some of that space for them conversationally as well.”

BEKA’s family connection with Yorkshire goes back to her grandmother, who grew up in Bishopthorpe in York as the second eldest of nine children. “My great aunts and uncles are still in York,” she says.

Her grandfather hailed from the Caribbean island of St Vincent and the Grenadines. BEKA explains: “He grew up in a poor village there and there was a resident doctor who’d come to the village to do medical care but he’d use the same needle on everyone and everyone would become ill, and my grandad speaks about how at seven he was incensed by this and it gave him that firework moment of life where he decided he was going to train to become a doctor, so he would walk miles to school shoeless and managed to work his way through the academic structures and got a scholarship to come and study in the UK. He came over on a banana boat in the Fifties and he was so impacted by the NHS here that he decided to study all forms of medicine so that he could take it back and give a high level of medicine to his people.

“On this journey, he’s in a room one day and he hears this nurse perk up and he loved her strength – that was my grandma. They started dating, fell in love and got married and then they had their first child, which was my mum, and they went back to the West Indies and ever since have been doing medical work over there. So much so that three years ago my grandad got knighted for his service to medicine in the West Indies. That all began in York.”

In the past year BEKA has composed the soundtrack for the Apple TV series Trying, starring Rafe Spall and Esther Smith. The drama immediately resonated with her, she says, because its central theme is adoption.

“On New Year’s Day 2023 I was having brunch with some friends and we were discussing if one thing could happen this year what would it be and I said, write for film and TV because that’s always been the dream,” she says. “Then three weeks later, I was at Copenhagen Fashion Week and I get a call from my manager who said, ‘I don’t know what manifestations you’ve been doing but we’ve had a call to say you’ve been put forward to do a soundtrack to a programme called Trying’.

“I had a day and a half before meeting the team and my manager said, ‘Try and watch a bit of it’, and within six or seven minutes of watching series one episode one you realise the programme’s about adoption and I sat there with my blanket on watching the TV and started weeping because I think I couldn’t believe that something that’s so central to who I am, my heritage and my sense of self, was the core topic of this one dream I’ve ever had that’s been proposed.

“We met with the team, the producer and the new director, Ellie Hendon, who’s amazing and we worked together for the next year on this album, and I got to work with a friend called Tobie Tripp who is an amazing producer but also an incredible orchestrator and understands that magical emotional part of writing music. Because we would be working from a script, I knew that I needed someone who would be able to hold that emotional space.

“I think what makes this programme so magical is as an artist you are asked to write for a montage moment, so at the end of every episode the core emotional beats of the programme are playing out in the last few minutes and your job as an artist is to write something specific for each of those moments of the episode, so you really are being given this map saying ‘this is what’s happening with the characters, we need a sense of hope and longing and hatred all in one’. Being give that task is what made it so magical.

“An album is quite an overwhelming task and something I’d always felt quite nervous about but having that triangulation of it being for something else and having this incredible team that we were sending things to, back and forth, it made it literally the greatest thing I’ve ever done.”

The Evolution of Creativity with Nile Rodgers and BEKA takes place at Leeds Playhouse on Wednesday October 2 at 7.30pm. https://www.leedsplayhouse.org.uk/event/the-evolution-of-creativity-with-nile-rodgers-and-beka/