Kyla La Grange - rising star on the summer festival circuit
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The last time Kyla La Grange played a festival gig it was at Glastonbury. Not the Pyramid stage, mind you. A couple of times she was hauled up on to the Greenpeace stage on her own at the last minute.
"Those gigs were always a bit of a nightmare. Someone at the stage would just say: 'Oh, do you want to come and play?' and I was always hungover or didn't have a guitar," she says laughing.
She has her guitar with her today (it's broken and she's taking it in for repair), and this year's festival circuit will be different.
This year the 24-year-old budding folk-pop star has a band. "It was a long hunt finding the right people." This year she also has a single out, Walk Through Walls, a dramatic track of big guitars topped with her powerful vocals that has caught the eye of the critics. This year she's been picked out by the music press as a "face to watch". This year, people will start going out of their way to see her play - and she'll be on stage at some of the major events such as Lounge on the Farm, Secret Garden Party and Bestival.
"Last year it would have been impossible to get these gigs. Until you've got some people who like your music, you've played some good gigs and you've released something, it's very hard. I remember last year really wanting to play and there just being no chance." Her next single, Been Better, will be launched at the Lexington in King's Cross on July 12.
She's sitting in the offices of her management ATC, part of the same team who launched Radiohead, Faithless, Kate Nash and Eliza Doolittle. Wearing jeans and a baggy green top, frequently running her fingers through her suitably festival-messy hair, she appears unaffected and honest.
When she explains that her song-writing process is "an intensely lonely experience" and says, "I'm not the most sociable person I often wake up and feel quite gloomy and introspective. I can't think of a time when I would have ever described myself as a happy, bubbly person," she reveals that she has had cognitive behavioural therapy and at one point was on antidepressants.
There is no entourage and nobody ready to delete anything off-message that she might say. If she's about to hit the big time, she's making sure she doesn't let herself in on the secret.
"I know so many people who have been signed and thought the world was about to fall at their feet and then have been dropped and whose albums have flopped. It really can just eat you up a bit."
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So she's "looking forward to Secret Garden Party, definitely" not because she thinks it could be a big breakthrough, or even that "in terms of reaching people, you get a lot of new audience members coming along at festivals", but because "I've heard it's absolutely amazing and I love the idea of dressing up and getting the band to dress up."
The fact is that for Kyla and her band, the music industry is still a distinctly unglamorous place.
They are still sharing beds on tour. "The closest we got to an argument was when we went to Texas to play South by South West We were all in the same small room with two double beds side to side. One of the boys decided he couldn't face it and moved to a camp bed in the lounge," she explains.
And the £500 fees they will get from some of the festival gigs, to split between the four of them, represent some of the highest payments they have yet received.
"That's really quite good. For a lot of support acts your standard fee is about 50 quid For some of the big, really sought-after support slots, if you wanted to support someone like JLS or Take That - you actually have to pay them. It's called
a buyout," she explains.
"When you add in travel costs, the cost of your sound man and everything else, tours often cost you money rather than make it ... When I was living in Vauxhall last year I was an absolute connoisseur of the reduced section. You just get by."
But when Kyla says hers "is not a lucrative career" there's not the slightest hint of regret in her voice and you know that money is not a big motivation for her. After all, Kyla left her comprehensive school with three A grades at A-Level and scored a place at Cambridge. And as a Cambridge philosophy graduate, opportunities for a job won't have been scarce. "I really wanted to go there and knew I would have to work hard but I never imagined I would get in. My parents really wanted it.
"My dad is from Zimbabwe and my mum is from South Africa. They moved here to a council estate in South Oxhey and they had nothing, so my dad was quite proud to come over, make his own business and have a kid at Cambridge."
But big-money jobs were never on her agenda. "I don't think I'd ever pursue a money-making job anyway, so I never feel like I'm throwing it away I'm glad I did a degree because if I hadn't I'd feel a lot more insecure, but I never did it to get a good job, I just wanted to improve my brain."
Right now she's living at home with her parents in Watford, having moved out of her Vauxhall flat after she broke up with her boyfriend. She pushes her hands together between her knees like a nervous eight-year-old as she says, "It was sort of a crisis move." She has guitarist's hands.
Fingernails left long on her strumming right hand and cut to the quick on her left.
She has just about managed to give up her part-time jobs ("I worked as a secretary and in a bar in Bank, which was the worst job I've ever had in my life. It was all men who came there and they thought all women were prostitutes. They were all so rich and such nobs.") But her bassist still does shifts at Tesco, her drummer works in a gym and all her bandmates teach music for spare cash.
"Musicians always have to have another back-up for
when they're not getting that much money from gigs."
While her parents, who run a swimming school together, were thrilled to have a daughter at a top university, they still support Kyla's music career wholeheartedly.
"Strangely, they have been absolutely amazing Their attitude is that while you're in your twenties you can try to do something that you love They love coming to gigs and they tape any radio shows I'm on. I have to always say to them: 'You know it's unlikely that I'm going to make millions of pounds.'"
But it's not impossible. Just three years ago another female artist with a comparable vocal power, singer-songwriter Adele, was at a similar point in her career to Kyla now. This month, after great success in both the UK and the US, she was added to the Sunday Times Rich List - worth £6 million and ninth in a list of richest young musicians which also included Cheryl Cole and Katherine Jenkins. For Kyla, though, she's got the festivals to get through first.
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