Eska: The primary school teacher and mother nominated for a Mercury prize

When Eska’s debut was nominated for the Mercury, it vindicated her decision to quit the classroom

ESKA performs on stage at the Jazz Arena during Cheltenham Jazz Festival (2014 Edu Hawkins)

I wish Eska Mtungwazi had been my primary-school teacher. For her school’s nativity play she got the children to dress up in fluorescent gloves, yellow and green and pink and blue – a different colour for each year – and perform the Nativity song in sign language. One child did the splits at the end.

“It was so beautiful! It looked so good!” cries Eska when we meet at a cafe on Deptford High Street in London. “It’s just this primary school but I’m running it like it’s the West End you know!” she says, bubbling with energy.

The creative outpouring into her year-six classes might have been a sign that Eska was feeling somewhat creatively stunted in her musical life. Despite a career as a singer, songwriter, producer and multi-instrumentalist, a lot of her work was for other people, like Zero 7, The Cinematic Orchestra, Courtney Pine, and Tony Allen, which she did alongside her teaching job. Vocally, she was compared to Kate Bush, Laura Mvula, and Björk. Grace Jones called her up and asked if they could work together.

“In, it was about 2007, I started getting praise as an artist and I wasn’t even thinking of myself as an artist. There were small gigs I was doing around town that started getting hotly tipped and that scared the living daylights out of me,” she says. “I didn’t have a manager or a press agent or anything. These journalists were coming to my gigs and then they started writing about me! And I thought, ‘I’ve got to stop this right now and decide exactly what kind of music I want to be doing because what they are writing about you isn’t exactly what you want them to be writing’.”

In 2010 she decided to quit teaching and work on her own projects. She worked with long-time collaborator Matthew Herbert, singing in his Big Band and in turn, he helped produce her first EP, 'Gatekeeper', in 2013. She has now, finally, released 'Eska', her debut full-length album, which was nominated for a Mercury prize. If you had to categorise it, you’d call it folk, but really it’s genre-less, meandering and beautiful. Why did it take so long?

“Well, because you have to be comfortable in your own skin, know yourself and feel confident in your identity, and it was always easier to stand beside someone and wave from the sidelines because you’re not as responsible for when it goes wrong!” she laughs, entering into a frantic stream-of-consciousness monologue: “It’s thinking, ‘I’m going to be judged by not just what I sound like but I’ll be judged by the way I look, I don’t want to be judged by the way I look, I don’t like the way I look,’ and it just spiralled in my head and went out of control.

Eska performs live on stage with Zero 7 at The Roundhous (Getty Images)

A lot of music is voyeuristic now. It’s about: ‘Oh my gosh look how beautiful she is, look at her body, oh my god she can really...! Wow, I’m not like that.’ It’s this funny thing; music to make you feel unworthy. The gospel tradition is very much about the audience and they are with you, there’s this togetherness.”

Born in 1971 in Lewisham, Eska is an associate artist at the Deptford Albany theatre, across the road, and lives locally, in Peckham. Her family live around Lewisham and she has taught music at a couple of the local schools. But as a child she spent her holidays visiting her grandfather’s house in Zimbabwe, where they would gather round the piano in the living room and sing hymns with five-part harmonies before bedtime. Back home in Lewisham, she often visited the local gospel church with her family, and church music is a big part of her early musical education, although she is also classically trained.

“When I was 15 and going into a gospel church I was blown away because there was a moment everyone was singing and then, suddenly, everyone was harmonising, and they were all speaking in tongues, maybe about 400 people – and this sound! Everyone was arpeggiating. I am getting goosebumps just thinking about it, just remembering – and the woman next to me, she had this beautiful voice and I remember asking her how she was doing it, and she said to me: ‘I don’t sing’.

Oh my gosh! I thought, ‘I don’t know anyone who can sing like that!’ And I thought: ‘I want whatever she’s got. I want this. I need this.’ It was this freedom of people expressing musically and a physicality of just letting go, and I thought, ‘there is a dimension to music that I just don’t know about and I need to know because this is the missing bit’. You have to find that place of letting go.”

Motherhood and musical liberation seem to be intrinsically linked for Eska. She thought she wouldn’t have children but her baby, Wonder, came along last year. She has since played gigs with Wonder in the wings and done interviews while breastfeeding.

When Eska got the call saying she had been nominated for a Mercury last month, she said, ‘thanks’, allowed herself a moment of quiet vindication, put the phone down, and immediately had to change Wonder’s nappy.

“Sometimes I look upwards and I go: ‘Why are these trains coming all at once?’ But OK, there’s a reason and I think having Wonder helps keep a balance in a way.” She thinks more women in the public eye should be open about being mothers, citing the example of the Italian MEP, Licia Ronzulli, who took her baby with her when she needed to cast a vote at the European Parliament. “I wish more women would do it. It’s so important. There is a whole generation of women who have decided without, I think, having a conversation with anyone, that they can’t have kids and I definitely don’t think it has to be that way, you know? [But] honestly you have to be a bit of a superwoman if you have a job and a baby.”

She can’t seem to help looking on the bright side, whatever life throws at her. She didn’t get the Mercury Award, but, she says, winning isn’t necessarily the “best thing”.

“The curse of the Mercuries is legendary, isn’t it? Even being nominated has a funny effect on people. I’m just thinking about how I can make this a win for me and use it for my next creative endeavour. How can I make my next record possible? How can I make the tours better? All these things while maintaining that status as a creative, that’s the main thing for me.”

‘Eska’ is out now