The outsider pop star: Jessy Lanza

It all starts here for Jessy Lanza. It’s a Friday night in Glasgow’s Stereo, a hipster back alley bar with a basement venue that’s dark and industrial, all exposed cement and bare ventilation pipes. Onstage, Lanza bounces along to the beat played by her new drummer Tori Tizzard as the lean, sexy footwork rhythm of ‘It Means I Love You’ pops over our heads. It’s their first proper tour date as a duo.

She looks like a natural up there, but at the same time there’s something at odds with the woman who breathes out ‘I Talk BB’, the sensual slow-jam which is her favourite song from her forthcoming second album ‘Oh No’. It could be Janet Jackson’s voice hitting reverberating peaks on the track, but Lanza is an unassuming young Canadian who has spent most of her life playing jazz piano. When her musician father passed away she inherited his collection of antique synths and drum machines, and after fellow Ontarians and old friends Junior Boys asked her to play a session for their 2011 album ‘It’s All True’, she enlisted the duo’s Jeremy Greenspan to help her figure them out.

Cut quickly to February 2016 and Lanza has already built up a wave of critical goodwill for her first album on the pioneering Hyperdub label, 2013’s ‘Pull My Hair Back’. So it doesn’t all quite start here for Lanza, but the next level has most definitely arrived tonight, with this first date of her European Junior Boys support tour.

“I can’t deny that pop music has always been what I’ve wanted to do, but at the same time I know I’m never gonna be a pop star,” she says hesitantly. We’re upstairs in the bar, four hours before the gig. “I’m trying to be this kind of outsider pop musician, it’s where I feel most comfortable and it’s the best place for me to go.”

Lanza is magnetic, but quietly so. She helps the band carry the gear in and then sits down to talk, dressed in black and blending in with the typically Glaswegian contingent of probable art students and musicians sitting around us.

“My parents played music in the time before DJs, when you could still make money doing hotel gigs playing the Eurythmics and Billy Idol,” says the 31-year-old native of Hamilton, Ontario. “I think it got to be too much for my mom – I have three sisters, so by the time my youngest sister was born she was like, ‘I’m fucked, I can’t do this any more’. So they stopped.”

She grew up playing classical piano and listening to standards like Ella Fitzgerald and Frank Sinatra – and Steely Dan, still a favourite – and moved to Montreal at 18 to study jazz at university. “One of the most valuable things it taught me was how to listen to a song and lift the chords,” she laughs. “It’s really easy to rip people off that way.” After university she went to Toronto for a time, then when she ran out of money it was back to Hamilton.

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This is where Greenspan comes in; Lanza has been the best friend of his Junior Boys partner Matt Didemus’ sister since their teenage years. Her session didn’t make it onto ‘It’s All True’, but their work with her synths was more fruitful. “We have different strengths,” says Greenspan a week later, on the phone from Zurich. “I know more about electronic instruments, but she’s a classically trained musician. We wrote in a way that drew on our own strengths, and very quickly we realised we had something good going.”

It took, says Lanza, a year of messing around to figure out how to work together, an album’s-worth of material scrapped on the way. They also became a couple, and have lived together for five years. The musical relationship is hard to explain, they both admit. Lanza usually starts off the lyric and the basic shape of the song, and then they bounce it back and forward between their studios, adding to it and calling each other out on the bits they don’t like. Her music is created equally by them as a duo, but it’s Lanza’s own project – Greenspan is more a sort of technical support.

“There isn’t one person in charge of any one thing,” he says. “Her musical education is way more in-depth than mine, so it’s ridiculous that some people think she’s my protégé. But people sometimes have a difficult time dealing with musical partnerships between men and women."

Aside from the jazz, Lanza’s schooldays were filled with the sound of Missy Elliott, Timbaland, Ginuwine and Aaliyah, and it’s these who most inform the nascent r’n’b grooves of her music. On this album there was also, she says, a big slice of Japanese synth-pop pioneers Yellow Magic Orchestra, particularly the 1981 solo album ‘Neuromantic’ by Yukihiro Takahashi. “I really identify with them because they made weird outsider pop music,” she says, sipping a glass of water. “They were borrowing and copying, but with their own undeniable presence.”

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Her own borrowing creates a sound that’s rich and new, layering dense electro beats with slow r’n’b grooves and the stark beauty of her voice, which is equally at home on a ballad or a pop chorus. She’s on the right roster with Hyperdub, which signed her when she wasn’t even in the room after Greenspan played a few sample tracks to label boss Steve ‘Kode 9’ Goodman – his pre-fame London flatmate – at a festival in Madrid. So why doesn’t pop-stardom appeal?

“It would be great for money,” laughs Lanza as the lights are dimmed and the Friday night post-work hubbub in Stereo builds, “but I don’t know if I could create something that formulaic which appeals to so many people. I don’t think I could dial it in. Although I guess there are people who write songs for Britney Spears and for Ariana Grande, that’s one way I could do it. Does Adele write her own music?”

The cities of Glasgow and Hamilton are very alike. Both are once-booming industrial cities built by rich Scottish people, battered into submission by de-industrialisation and only just finding their feet again in the last decade – and both are also home to electronic music scenes which rank amongst the most exciting and forward-thinking in the world. Lanza’s circle of friends at home includes the former members of Azari & III and Stones Throw signee Koushik, while Lanza appeared on fellow Hamiltonian Dan ‘Caribou’ Snaith’s last album. ‘Our Love’. “And now it’s been nominated for a Grammy award,” she says. “I’m really proud for him, he’s such a humble, hardworking guy.”

As to her own aspirations: ”I just want this album to reach more people than the first one did,” she says. “To remain something that people care about, that’s all I can really ask for. What makes people engage with you, out of everybody else that’s doing music? I don’t know, but if I can maintain it I’ll be happy.”

A week later ‘It Means I Love You’ is played on Radio 1’s breakfast show, and Jessy and the Junior Boys have enjoyed an unprecedented three sold-out shows. Yes, it’s all starting here in earnest for Jessy Lanza.

****Jessy Lanza ‘Oh No’ is out May 13 on Hyperdub****