"It wasn't that I wasn't making money, I just wasn’t focused on it." "My bum used to touch the floor," he laughs. At the time Labrinth was sleeping on a broken mattress in the smallest room of a house he shared with two friends. Though expectations weren't high, the 2010 track which he produced for Tinie Tempah, and also appeared on, went to number one within a week and won both a Brit Award and an Ivor Novello. "I was already working on 'Pass Out' because I wanted to make a grime song that could be played at the clubs." "At the time a lot of grime artists were trying to penetrate the pop scene, making stuff like 'Wearing my Rolex', and losing their essence," he says. Labrinth became part of a community of musicians uploading their music to MySpace, with his friends at performing arts schools taking his demos to record labels to stump for him, and in 2009 he was offered a deal with EMI. "Then one day my older brother started using this drum machine and I thought ‘fucking hell this feels right’". I don’t know how my mum dealt with it because I can’t be around that much noise and I make music."ĭespite this very musical upbringing, he didn't dream of being an artist and says he was "the worst musician in his family", instead spending his time drawing pictures and making sculptures. "Upstairs my sisters had their friends singing R&B or gospel songs and working out harmonies.
"Downstairs my brother had an MPC Controller and another brother had a drum-set so his friends would bring over their guitars," he says.
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The siblings, who formed a band together called Mac 9, had the run of the house. Labrinth grew up in Hackney, one of nine kids in a family with music at its soul.
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The success was a strange experience for someone who had grown up messing around with production software at home and never cared much about using music to make money.
Singles including 'Pass Out', 'Frisky' and 'Earthquake' put him at the forefront of a scene where artists like Plan B, Tinchy Stryder and Example made music which bridged the gap between pop, grime and rap. Ten years ago the musician dominated the charts and picked up awards for his releases alongside Tinie Tempah. Google poses this question via autofill when you type Timothy Lee McKenzie's alter-ego into the search engine, and it is one that our discussion naturally arrives at. Quietly, assuredly, he has succeeded where so many other British artists have failed. Across the pond Labrinth has recently worked with the likes of Kanye West and Beyoncé, as well as winning an Emmy award for the soundtrack to HBO's Euphoria last month.
The 'Imagine' video shows the weird space that he occupies: a singer who was initially famous for a specific moment in the UK, but who lives a double life via a more recent, and already illustrious, career in America. "I didn’t know I was gonna be around all these cool people but singing such a terrible version of a legendary song. "When I saw it back I was like ‘Oh shit’," he recalls. He has spent the pandemic at home in North London, happy to be given some time where he is allowed to be a hermit and make music. "I thought they had a plan," he laughs over a Zoom call, sitting in a grey jumper in his studio on a damp October afternoon. And Lambert, unlike any of her peers, is just as elegant in this chaos - causing this chaos - as when she’s holding back.On the day that the song was released, as it became clear that the "something nice for people going through a hard time" might have needed a bit more brainstorming, Labrinth's phone started lighting up with people asking him why he'd done it. Her voice is less melodic, more jagged at the rim, while the music is far rowdier, suggesting a bar band scrambling to finish up before closing time. “Locomotive,” however, captures something far more ineffable. In a Nashville that has largely forsworn emotional complexity in favor of clunky earnestness, it stands out, but is not Lambert’s turf alone. These are the small-town foibles that Kacey Musgraves has made her stock in trade.
Lambert applies her curlicue twang while describing a variety of mishaps, some small and some just the other side of decent - dating a bridesmaid’s ex and bringing him to the wedding nonetheless, a dalliance with the boss. Musically, “It All Comes Out in the Wash,” is genial verging on folksy. A pair of new songs from Miranda Lambert - her first new solo material since 2016 - show off the parts of her arsenal that have been absorbed by others and those that remain indelibly hers.
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