Phantom Limb: not just a figure of your imagination

15 August 2008

Phantom Limb

When you have a voice to rival Tina Turner and Whitney Houston before you hit your teens, there’s no doubt you’re going to be a singer; and that’s exactly what Yolanda Quartey went on and did: with the help of her buddies in Phantom Limb of course!Here we have a woman who was determined to break the norms set down by society, so I caught up with Yolanda to chat about playground bullies, the release of the new album and what exactly “Brashville” is!

What have you been up to this week?

I’ve just been back home because we released the single from the album today, its called Don’t Say A Word so today we’ve just been celebrating and I’ve been trying to keep up to speed and see what’s been going out and where in terms of sales.

To anyone who hasn’t heard of you before, how would you describe your sound?

We’re country soul music so we’ve got a bit of a Crosby, Stills and Nash feel in there and I think if you like things like the Fleet Foxes who are really hot at the moment then I think you’ll like us too because we’re very harmony-heavy and very soul and country orientated.

Who would you name as your influences?

Well I listen to a lot of things from the sixties and seventies like Etta James and Gillian Welsh, I’ve listened to every single album she’s done about 100 times, so Gillian is a very big influence of mine.

Crosby Stills and Nash and the Stones and a lot of country and soul music in general has inspired our music.

There’s a country movement coming out of Bristol at the moment and a guy who’s name I can’t remember called it “Brashville” - a tiny bit of Bristol and a whole lot of Nashville.

We’ve being going for about three and a half years but in that time no-one has managed to hit the nail on the head and we always loved country but we denied being part of that genre but everywhere you go now you see it creeping in so people are starting to realise it doesn’t just have to be Billy Rae Cyrus!

You are set to release your debut album later this month, how are you feeling about the launch?

Joyful and emotional…good emotional! A lot of love went into that album and we’re a very close band, almost like family, so what we’ve put into it to make it what it is means it will be a really good time when it comes out and we’re all going to go and have a little celebration. It’s just lovely and we’re very happy with it.

What have you been getting up to in order to promote it?

We’ve been gigging and our management have been dealing with the more structured promotion like press interviews and things but what we’ve been doing is just gigging hard because in all realism promotion is best done with the product itself and people understanding why you’re singing about things.

We love playing big gigs just as we love playing small gigs as well as big gigs; we love being crammed into a tiny pub and having it absolutely packed to bursting point and having a really good grinding soul gig in there and every time we’ve played in Bristol it’s been really packed and it’s just really great.

We’re all professional musicians and we’ve always worked in Bristol and never have I seen such perpetual support and it’s a really beautiful thing and I’m really honoured and humbled that people make the effort to turn up and get involved.

We’ve also been writing because of course to promote the album we need to move on with regards to where we’re going because when you write in a way which comes from pure inspiration you feel as though you should keep moving with your inspiration and it means that when we do a gig we can bring something new to the stage and keep everyone happy.

Do you have a favourite track from the album?

Yes! For me it is We Will Carry because for me that’s my fertility song; it was at a time when I had this urge to write about something which I thought would happen later in my life and would eventually be very poignant so that’s my ‘stride on’ kind of song.

Was the song-writing a collective effort?

There are many different ways of skinning a cat and for me the most common way for this particular album has been hearing Stew (the guitarist) come up with something and then me going ‘Oh I’ve got and idea’ and then it will start falling out of my mind in the space of five or ten minutes so I just need to get it down before it disappears.

That was how a lot of the tunes occurred but normally what happens is that the writing occurs in rehearsal studio space and Stew will be playing something he’s been mulling over for a while and editing it and making it feel real then everyone else will start playing and try to define whether it’s there or not, and then they’re play along for a while and if they keep going for about five or ten minutes then I recognise that it’s a potential song and I get a lightening bolt idea for some lyrics.

Me and Stew work very closely and most of the song creation comes from us.

How did you end up getting into the music business?

Well it was never not an option, when I was five I was always singing and realised that I liked it and did it some more and kept pushing myself to better my voice and my skills so I got to six and seven and was singing along to people on the television and was like; “I can do that: Next. Yep can do that too: Next. Whitney Houston: Yep. Chaka Khan: Yep.” So for me it was a competition which let me escape from the boredom of my childhood.

Then as I got older there was no way that I wasn’t going to sing; there are obviously other things that I can do but this is obviously something that I find phenomenally easy so I always thought that performing arts was going to have a big part of my life.

Then I got told via the usual systems of control of this country that that’s not a viable job and that no-one actually does that, so I found myself thinking; “Well hang on, do we have no records to listen to then?” and so that became a non-option for a little while but from 14 I started recording anyway and as soon as I did I rebelled by recording and releasing music which was only a tiny little tune and then I had a break for my GCSE’s and A-Levels.

I think that getting into my school band was my first step on the way to change because it was practice for me and it made me get used to writing and performing music. Me getting into that band was the turning point in my youth where I decided that I was either going to hang out with the ‘in-crowd’ or have absolutely no friends and make some new ones through music and that striking out and being an individual is what makes most musicians and I think that was what made my whole life turn on a pivot.

How did the collaborations with Will Young and Massive Attack come about?

This is a side-step into what Stew Jackson and Dan Brown do, they run a studio and have been writing with Will Young and Massive Attack and I got called in recently to pop some vocals down on for Massive Attack and they liked it so I’ve done a couple of gigs with them live.

If you had the chance to work with anyone else, who would it be?

I’d love to work with a band called Big Band who are based in LA but are actually Norwegian and are very Stones influenced band and we met them before and they have a really good vibe.

I also really like the Fleet Foxes, I just got my ears on their album recently and not only are they really hot to trot but they have just got it and they are so new and fresh.

I’d also love to work with Tina Turner because back in the day she turned my guts inside out for real and I’d love to be able to see some of that in reality.

I’m really just excited at the tiny pinpricks of light coming through the massive duvet of music industry doom.

What makes you different from all the other bands trying to make it at the moment?

I don’t know really, musically it’s a dangerous sweeping generalisation of all the other bands.

But we’re phenomenally individual whilst at the same time being infuriatingly similar but our unique selling point is that our sound is something that you cant find anywhere else. I don’t mean that in an egotistical way either, it’s just like I want to find someone similar that we can go on tour with and support and just be really nice to!

If you find anyone please tell me because that’ll be really cool but there are a lot of people who find it hard to put their finger on what exactly our music is, its like a spider diagram and we’re at the centre with all the genres around the outside!

If you weren’t in Phantom Limb what do you think you’d be doing?

I’d probably be suicidal! The problem is that I’m quite dependant on Stew to create because although I get everything out of my own mind you can often find yourself in an environment that isn’t contusive to your inspiration, if you’re in an environment which naturally inspires you then you become dependant on it, so if it wasn’t for Stew I’d be hunting high and low for someone that I could work with well.

I’m a very lucky cat!