‘Millennials don’t want to feel what others are feeling’
Alice Vincent meets Nilüfer Yanya, the gifted 22-year-old Londoner who’s being compared to Amy Winehouse and Adele
Earlier this month, research suggesting that millennials are increasingly abstaining from sex made headlines, but they’ve apparently forgotten how to love, too – according to 22-year-old singer and guitarist Nilüfer Yanya, at least. “People don’t want to feel what other people are feeling, they want to feel what they’re feeling. [They] aren’t as interested unless it relates to them. I wouldn’t call it selfish … but possibly.”
The subject comes up as we lament the lack of great modern love songs, while speaking in a Parisian gallery ahead of her show in the French capital. “The absence of them is kind of sad, that nobody really feels that way any more,” she says.
Lucky, then, that Yanya is doing her bit to bring matters of the heart back in vogue – even if her raw, jazz-inflected songs are about its disintegration more than its blossoming. The languid Keep on Calling unpicks the anatomy of a break-up. Thanks 4 Nothing was spewed out in the wake of seeing an old boyfriend walk past her window and being “horrified that I might have to talk to him – just the thought made me feel physically sick”. Even the romantically titled Baby Luv is about “being able to feel pain, and knowing that it’s important to.”
The sincerity of Yanya’s lyrics is amplified by her distinctive London accent – she still lives with her parents in the Ladbroke Grove home she grew up in – and perhaps because of this, and the beguiling, unpolished quality of her voice, she has won comparisons to Amy Winehouse and Adele. Comparisons that she robustly shrugs off: “It’s nice, but I know these singers have specifically trained their voices to sing like that, and that’s their thing, their voice. I don’t feel like a singer [in the same way].”
She has a point. Unlike those two Brit school attendees, Yanya bears no stage school training, but has instead found herself becoming a singersongwriter thanks to a mixture of good luck and keen mentors, who noticed her talent long before she did – if, indeed, she even has yet.
The middle daughter of two artists, Yanya grew up to a backdrop of Simon & Garfunkel and the Turkish music enjoyed by her father. Her musical abilities flourished thanks to the then exemplary music department at her Pimlico secondary school. “Then they turned it into an academy, and all the music got phased out,” Yanya says. “It’s a shame, because it was the most exciting thing about the school.”
She then got a further helping hand after winning a scholarship for Saturday school music classes at London’s Centre for Young Musicians. “I don’t know how long it would have taken me to [otherwise],” she says. “It makes such a difference to have that support.” Her parents wanted her to pursue more academic subjects however – it was lucky, therefore, that while she applied Goldsmith’s university to study, she failed to get in: “it felt like I’d been let off ”, she laughs.
She signed up to a vocational music college course instead, but by this point the songs Yanya had uploaded online had already caught the attention of scouts. A steady flow of major label meetings followed, though she is both dismissive of and unfazed by such industry rigmarole.
“At the beginning it’s exciting, but two years later it gets really dull,” she says of the dance undertaken to get a record deal. “After so many meetings everyone looks the same, sounds the same. My music isn’t the kind of music that’s chart music; you realise that major labels aren’t going to work for you.” In the end, she signed with ATO, an independent New York label, for whom she released her first single earlier this year.
Her music has already travelled well: the show she’s playing, in a tucked-away bar near the fashionable Paris neighbourhood of Bastille, has sold out. There’s something in the resonant soulfulness of Yanya’s music that appeals to French fans, it seems. When she sings Keep on Calling, the bobos in the room lose their cool and start to dance to the skeins of heartbreak emerging from the stage.
While her voice does have the aching roominess of Winehouse’s (with school friend Jazzy Bobbi’s saxophone lending the irresistible jazz tones to Yanya’s guitar lines) there is a far more soothing quality to her music. As a personality, she also seems far more assured than the late, great troubled star.
Her self-possession is clear when we talk about feminism, which she presents as an unquestionable logic, rather than a philosophy to be debated. She says she wants to remain single for the moment, chiefly because she thinks relationships can make young women subservient. “I feel like you slot into that role, of a girlfriend… it’s just a bit dangerous.”
She says with breezy resignation that she’s been treated “fine” as a young woman both in life and the music industry, but has also become increasingly aware of the double standards by which men and women are judged. “You don’t always feel 100per cent safe, I guess, putting stuff out there [as a woman]. It could mean more backlash, more judgment. There’s not an inbuilt system in place to protect you.”
Meanwhile one of her driving aims is to actively reject any focus on her looks – no mean feat for a female pop star. “People are trying to bring you down with their obsession with image. We don’t need to have the male gaze, it’s just imported into our brain.” Plus, she says, she simply doesn’t “want to waste my time”.
For the moment, there’s a tour to be getting on with. Her band are a tight, puppyish schmozzle of school friends who still live in London; as I watch preparations for the gig, they lark about during soundcheck, while Yanya watches on, letting out highpitched squeals of laughter.
For the next week, and the summer ahead, they’ll mostly be occupying the same van. “It’s got a kettle, got a toaster, got a table in the middle,” Yanya says of life on the road. “I’ve got everything I want”.
Nilüfer Yanya is on tour until May 29. Tickets: ticketmaster.co.uk