Phantom Limb: sweating on the West Coast

Meet Yolanda Quartey. She has sung with Jazzanova, Massive Attack, Chase & Status, Dizzee Rascal, Nitin Sawhney, and even, for a wee while, in Adele’s chorus. With her own band, the excellent country soul ensemble Phantom Limb from Bristol, she recently released a second album that makes it clear, once and for all, that pigeonholes and boundaries are pointless in music.

It has, in fact, been a long time since we heard country harmonies and roots-folk guitars so neatly interwoven with a soulful approach as on The Pines. In the US they reckon the results sound kind of British; in the UK people mainly notice the Americana and West Coast influences. We asked Quartey herself, whose appearance is nearly as striking as her voice, to explain how that happened. She began at the beginning: “I have always sung, from the age of four, I think. But, as a young black girl, I grew up in a weird little white bred town. People weren’t really that friendly to each other. It was noticed that I could sing, alright, but I certainly had no idea of making it my job. I hardly ever came into contact with good music anyway. Most people asked me, ‘What do you sing? R&B?’, as if that was the only genre that existed. And they didn’t mean rhythm & blues either! [Laughs] At home, moreover, we were very poor and it simply never occurred to my parents that you could earn money with your voice. I had to escape from the expectations imposed on me there. Recently I felt a flash of recognition when I heard Michael Kiwanuka say that someone once remarked to him that playing the guitar was something for white people. I thought that was hilarious. As if, as a black, you’re not allowed to perform country or folk.

“Those prejudices haven’t disappeared yet: in 2006 an A&R boss said to me, literally, ‘Nobody wants to hear a black musician singing rock ‘n’ roll.’ Thankfully, I was able to get rid of most of the blinkers I was surrounded by when I went to school in Bristol. Crazy, really, as it’s not actually that far from where I had always lived. But absolutely everything was different. I found kindred spirits there and with them I could listen to Neil Young, Gillian Welch, and Crosby, Stills & Nash without any preconceived ideas and gradually found my independence. That’s where I met Stew Jackson, with whom I started the band later. And recently we finally got to record in LA, with the producer Marc Ford (The Black Crowes, Ben Harper), a great Neil Young fan. Perhaps the most enjoyable thing about the recording process was that we weren’t working in a depressing basement with no windows, like I’ve seen a bit too often. No, the Compound Studio in Signal Hill, near Long Beach, was on the ground floor and when you opened the windows, a lovely breeze blew in from the Pacific.
It was so warm there that we were often sweating in the studio, but that led to a sense of urgency that I think you can hear on the album. It was in the can after just three days, but we felt so much at home in California that we found it hard to come back to the overcast south-west of England. Not every west coast is the same.”

Phantom Limb 8/1, 19.30, €13/16, Botanique, Koningsstraat 236 rue Royale, Sint-Joost-ten-Node/Saint-Josse-ten-Noode, 02-218.37.32, www.botanique.be