Doncaster musician Skinny Pelembe: ‘Not everything needs to be such a woe-is-me thing’

Iggy Pop and Grace Jones are fans of his. Annabel Nugent speaks to multi-instrumentalist Doya Beardmore about his genre-hopping sound, leaving Gilles Peterson’s record label, and what real success looks like

Skinny Pelembe embarks on his UK tour this month (Sophie Jouvenaar)

Doya Beardmore wants to sound like no one has ever sounded before. “That’s the pursuit,” he says, perched on the edge of a squeaky leather sofa in an east London café. “What’s the point if someone else has already done it?”

Born in Johannesburg and raised in Doncaster, the 33-year-old is an easy conversationalist. He is tall, too, with long limbs all the better for stretching into those vast worlds of hip-hop, indie, soul, reggae, folk, blues, avant-pop, electronic rock, and dub. His roaming second album Hardly the Same Snake chucks all of the above into a blender and spits out tracks that sound both familiar and alien. Certainly, more familiar now that Beardmore has a Glastonbury gig in his back pocket, which he is now following up with a UK headline tour this month. Iggy Pop is a fan of his and Grace Jones, too. Gilles Peterson, who discovered Beardmore in 2019, signed him to his label soon after. And when Beardmore made the decision to step out on his own for his second release, it wasn’t long until that album too, was snatched up by Partisan Records, home also to Ezra Collective, Laura Marling, and Fontaines DC.

By design, singling out any one influence in Beardmore’s music is a near-impossible task. Instead, tracks feature only snippets of hints, recalled like half-remembered dreams still foggy around the edges. There is a wink of Massive Attack to the urgent hushed rapping of “I’ll Be on Your Mind” and a lick of the Bloc Party to the stream of consciousness unfurling in “Deadman Deadman Deadman”. As for the political pop nugget “Oh, Silly George”, listen for nods to Nigerian funk artist Willaim Onyeabor. “I think it’s time we emigrate, feel like an intruder,” intones Beardmore on a song about feeling isolated in a foreign land. Overt discussions of politics, though, are skirted. “We’re in an age of being so divided that if you do choose a side, you’re ostracised,” he says now. “I’m not telling people what to feel or how to think. I don’t give a f*** what you think if you at least have some respect for everybody else’s views.”

Unsurprisingly, Beardmore grew up in a family of conflicting musical tastes. His late dad, a country music buff, would blast Johnny Cash and Marty Robbins at home. It was through his brothers, fans of Onyx, GZA and RZA of Wu-Tang Clan fame, that Beardmore first got into rap. Really, he jokes, his genre fluency is merely a symptom of middle-child syndrome. “I was constantly trapped in the middle, trying to please both my dad and my brother,” he laughs. “I’m like, ‘Hey, I can make something that will bring us all together and we can all listen to it!’ I wanted to create this character, this musician, who bridges those worlds.”

Nobody knew what was going on in the world and I was making an album out of my own pocket and not knowing what was going to happen with it

It has taken time to build that character, that musician, within himself. It’s only with the release of his second record that Beardmore felt as though he found his voice. (Literally, too: his vocals, which laid low in the mix of his debut, rise like hot steam on the follow-up). 2019’s Dreaming Is Dead Now was released on Peterson’s label – a dream come true for the self-confessed Gilles fanboy, making his decision to leave the label shortly after more surprising still. Beardmore says he “can’t really remember” why he chose to part ways with Brownswood. “I probably wanted a different direction,” he says. “Theirs was a specific sound. I made that first album as a way to move down to London and be part of the world that I was obsessed with but then I got into the world, and I was like, ‘Eh, not for me.’ And the person who encouraged me to not try to fit into his box or his world was Giles.” He moved back home as well.

Beardmore made Hardly the Same Snake without the safety net of a label beneath him. Partway through the process, the pandemic happened – followed shortly by panic attacks. “I think everybody has them,” says Beardmore, who has a tendency to downplay hardships. “Nobody knew what was going on in the world and I was making an album out of my own pocket and not knowing what was going to happen with it,” he says. As if not to sink too far into anything resembling self-pity, he quickly adds, “But it’s nothing the Wim Hoff method couldn’t solve.” (Later when I ask Beardmore whether music can be another form of therapy, he fiddles with a sugar packet and replies, “Some tunes make you feel better. Not everything needs to be such a woe-is-me thing.”)

Beardmore was three when his family moved from South Africa to Doncaster. “It was apartheid, and my parents were a mixed couple so that didn’t particularly go down well,” he says. His mum is from Mozambique and his dad’s from Birmingham. On whether his upbringing was a quote-unquote creative one, he shrugs. “I dunno. Everyone likes music. Sometimes you’ll meet these middle-class families in London that are like, ‘We’re going to do pottery with the kids now,’ and it’s like, what? My brother had decks and would DJ; my other brother would pick up instruments from car boot sales. No one needed permission. You don’t need someone to hold your hand to be creative.” To that end, Beardmore joined garage bands and gigged as a young teenager in Doncaster before he moved to Leeds for university, which was “a bubble of middle-class white kids” – it was also where he had the first of several panic attacks.

We’re so focused on anyone under the age of 30 but f*** ’em

Age has brought a welcome sense of belonging. “I used to feel like a child playing to people who are older,” he says. “But now I feel like I have big iron f***ing boots on, clamped down on that stage. I feel like I’m supposed to be here, and I own the whole f***ing stage and that’s my domain. That’s my place, which is a nice place.” In a similar vein, he thinks being young in the industry is not all it’s cracked up to be. “I hate seeing young successful people,” he says, only half-joking. “They’re annoying. They’re so shiny, f*** ’em. Have you ever watched TV interviews from the Fifties and it’s old people discussing world matters? That’s my kind of entertainment. We’re so focused on anyone under the age of 30 but f*** ’em.”

Skinny Pelembe released his debut in 2019 on Gilles Peterson’s label Brownswood Records (Sophie Jouvenaar)

His idea of success has morphed, too. The other day, Beardmore and his girlfriend popped into The Owl in Finsbury Park where they happened across a little-known group called the Barking Poets. “It was three guys in a pop punk band playing to five people,” he grins. “The drummer was screaming and hitting the cymbals and that’s all you need. That’s success. That pursuit in itself is success, everything else is b***ocks.”

‘Hardly the Same Snake’ is out now via Partisan Records. Skinny Pelembe is on tour in the UK from 13-21 October