Lucy Love

Leading Ladies is a column about our favorite female vocalists from every corner of the world—supremely rad girls whose voices pull you close and ring in your head long after they've slipped out the room. It's written by Yung Klout Gang's interviewer-at-large Lina Abascal.

She may share a name with a British porn star, but our girl Lucy Love is quite the opposite. As a singer, rapper, video director, editor, stylist, and visual artist, the Danish bombshell wields total control over her art, like few American pop stars get to do.

Rocking Chelsea bangs and a leather varsity jacket, the Zambia-born art school graduate cites her first rave (which she attended at the ripe old age of 12) as a major stylistic influence, and often pulls from 90s basement rave aesthetics. She also releases grime-meets-disco music on her own label, Suberbillion, and has worked closely with DJ and drummer Yo Akim for near six years on three albums. She's no stranger to European radio either, kicking it everywhere from Germany's Byte to London's Rinsed. Her new album, Desperate Days of Dynamite, alternates between dancey ballads and more aggressive sounds reminiscent of early 2000s UK dubstep MCs. American ears need more Love, so I spoke to the Scandinavian superstar about partying in Copenhagen's lawless utopia Freetown Christiana, the importance of total creative control, and her house hit "Prison."



THUMP: I've seen you called a MC, but what does that really mean to you? How is it different from being a traditional pop artist?
It's because I started out as a rapper and a more traditional rave MC. Now I also sing a lot, so I guess I'm a bit more pop now and the most accurate description would probably be rapper/singer.

Who are you working with production-wise?
I'm working with Danish producer, DJ & drumming legend Yo Akim, who's been my partner in crime for six years now. We're a great team and compliment each other well, if I may say so myself.

You've taken some cues from the 90s rave era with your sound. What do you love most about that type of music?
I love the vibe and the iconic sound of 90s dance music. At that time, electronic music and rave culture was still new and unexplored. To me, it's nostalgic and brings back childhood memories, since I started raving when I was 12 here in Copenhagen's Freetown Christiania.

You directed and edited your video "Prison." What inspired the idea? Had you ever directed or edited a video before?
With the "Prison" video I wanted to use simple tools to create an honest black and white video. I was inspired by 90s fashion and vogueing. I've made many of my videos myself. Not always as the director and editor, but as the art director and in post-production. I have also made videos for Linkoban, who's signed to my label.

You are releasing your album on your own label, Superbillion. How did this affect your process? What is the best part of being in control of the release?
I have released all my music on my own label. It's important for me to be in full creative control in every imaginable aspect. But of course it's also a lot of hard work and demands total dedication and passion.



Do you write all your own music? What environment do you feel most creative in?
Yes I write all my music. I work best at home, alone and in the middle of the night.

You are known for your live shows and visuals. What is your setup? What creative input do you have in this?
I use many different setups depending on the venue and stage. I am the art director and come up with all the ideas myself, and I also make the costumes and scenography. I love working with dancers, over-the-top lights, and visuals.

What elements of underground and mainstream music do you fuse to create your sound?
You can hear a lot of different elements, such as UK garage, drum and bass, house, dance, electro, pop, dubstep and eurodance.

What are some of your favorite parts of the scene in Copenhagen? Who are some other artists you like or are associated with?
Considering its small size, there's always a lot going on music-wise in Copenhagen. The nightlife is great, and during the summer there are a lot of parties in the streets. Some of my favorite internationally-known artists from Copenhagen are Mø and Trentemøller. - Vice / Thump

Someone burn this prison down!

Can we talk about how fierce rave anthem “Prison” by Danish MC Lucy Love is? Hard hitting piano, thumpin’ drums and an instantly infectious hook – living for this today!

To top it off, she’s directed, edited and starred in her own music video for the track. Watch below.

http://youtu.be/sit1IAO_Uy8

“Prison” appears on upcoming album “Desperate Days of Dynamite” which drops on September 23rd. - hardcandymusic.com

Like Thunder, Lucy Love has exploded onto the music scene with a noise that is sure to get her noticed.

With a slow and almost haunting opening, Love paces the release perfectly, gradually building the tempo with light electronica beneath clear, polished vocals. The almost hypnotic opening lulls you into the song before, at about two minutes in, unleashing the thunder as it drops into a fierce rap supported by a fast techno grind.

This is a tune: an exciting and individual piece of music that lasts for a glorious 6 minutes and 20 seconds. This track will undoubtedly go down a storm on any dancefloor.

Alice Cuddy - aaamusic.co.uk

Lucy Love – ‘Who You Are’ (OK Formula Remix)

On the lookout for a new female rapstar? Kreayshawn not doing it for you? Why not give Lucy Love a spin. She’s kind of like a dancier Lady Sovereign from Denmark (actually, she’s originally from Zambia). Her brand new single ‘Thunder’ is out in the UK today, and is taken from her forthcoming album ‘Kilo’ (which will be released through her own label, Superbillion Records). - NME

Artist: Lucy Love
Venue: Queen Of Hoxton, London
Date: 2nd Sept 2011

Hailing from Denmark Lucy Love doesn’t get to visit the UK very often, but after gracing London with her presence we are begging her to stay. Please..

The best way to describe Lucy Love‘s music is brilliant-electronic-grime delivered with fire and passion, and she pushed it to the max for her show at the Queen of Hoxton.

If you ever get a chance to see a show at the Queen of Hoxton for the love of God go! It is a hidden gem of a venue, allowing you to get up close to whoever is performing and Lucy Love took full advantage of this getting everyone pumped up and raving.

I was behind a man in a suit, perhaps came in on the way home after work, for part of the show and a girl asked him,

“Is this your kind of music?”, to which he replied ”Not really, but it’s good isn’t it?!”. Then he continued skanking.

This is a great example of how infectious Lucy Love and her music is, especially live. With grime, dub step and urban influences all rolled into one it is very very hard not to find something you like.

Playing through her songs it was very clear that every track was massive, each one could be singles on their own merit, and the tracks were performed with deserved energy. She got the crowd, a mixture of old/young/fanatics/new fans, hyped and in the palm of her hand and every person watching wanted more. Songs such as the up beat ‘Daddy was a DJ’ to the slow and filthy ‘Dirty Sleazy’ and ‘Thunder’. The finale song ‘Who You Are’ was just epic and made sure everyone there knew Lucy Love means business.

The performance was full of energy and this was transferred to the crowd. It was refreshing to see all the performers on stage having as much fun as the audience were. The venue was a small basement like room and Lucy owned it, every inch of it. Giving us the pleasure of witnessing the rare occasion, these days, of hearing and seeing an artist that is better live.

On stage Lucy Love has the confidence of a hardened A-lister but still the humble attitude of a performer doing it for the love of music. I was already a huge fan before going to the show and I wasn’t alone. I certainly wasn’t the only fan after the show, where everyone left with the top class beats and words inside their heads wanting more. People watch out, because it won’t be long until Lucy Love is on every DJ’s playlist and she is touring the world. If her show at the Queen of Hoxton is anything to go by she will be selling out shows very quickly and for an extremely long time.

Reviewer: Jonny Duck, September 2011 - Hit The Floor Magazine

Lucy Love broke through in her native Denmark with the track ’Daddy Was A DJ’, and she’s not lying. Lucy’s childhood was spent in Copenhagen being dragged along to her Zambian born dad’s disco and funk parties. ”My strongst memory of them is being eight years old and if the party got a bit too much for me I’d go and fall asleep under the coats in the cloakroom”, she explains with an infectious giggle.
Lucy has taken her home country by storm with her blend of dubstep and pop sensibilities. Used to playing to crowds of up to 20.000, now she’s got her sights set on the UK.
Although trips to the UK in her childhood, to visit her Croydon-born mum’s family, were all about ”drinking cups of tea and seeing relatives”, as a student she began to make pilgrimages to London’s night spots.
Energised by trips to Tru Playaz at Fabric, Lucy was inspired to begin a night back in her native Denmark called ’Alice in Jungleland’, at which she took to MCing.
Lucy takes a controlling stake in every aspect of her image, from designing the costumes with Swedish designer, Helena Lindberg, to overseeing her videos. In fact, she says she sees herself more aas artistic director than singer.
With her sound evolving from glitchy electroclash to a more down-tempo brooding dubstep on new single ’Thunder’, Lucy Love looks set for worldwide stardom. As for the Danes, well they’ll hate to see her leave.

Sean Griffiths, Mixmag - Mixmag, September 2011 (print, full page & cover note)

Lucy Love is not just the name of a porn star or a clothing brand, it’s also the name of one of the most interesting up and coming artists from Scandinavia. Lucy Love is a grime MC from Denmark who started out spitting at raves but for the last year she’s been playing her own stuff live at some of Copenhagen’s misty underground venues together with the producer Yo Akim. She’s cute as hell and her first single NO V.I.P. has been out for a while on all major download stores (such as iTunes) and here’s the brand new video for it. Well executed, been a long time ago since I saw a video like this, love the modeling clay vs. cardboard. It’s made by Sif Westerberg from Fyns Konstakademi and the final editing is done by Lucy Love herself. She recently was booked to the Roskilde Festival this summer at and her debut album is coming this autumn. Lucy Love, learn it, live it, LOVE it.
- First Up! www.firstup.se

ONE AND A HALF METERS OF HIPHOP WHICH IS NOT TO BE IGNORED

LUCY LOVE HAS A TALENT FOR THE DIRTY MUSIC

She is really a student at the Funen Art Academy. But in the night, Lucy Love is an underground phenomenon in the Copenhagen club scene.

By Rasmus Stroyer
Politiken, iByen Friday 18th of January 2008
www.ibyen.dk

2 years ago she decided to start rapping. For three years she had been singing other people`s songs. But now she was tired of making it as Erykah Badu, tired of being a pure copy of the new American soul queens.

She wanted to write her own songs, but not hip hop. With a British mother the choice fell on the unique British version of hip hop - grime.

“Grime is brilliant. There I could allow myself anything. I’d only been listening to grime for a year when I started. But I just decided to do it. From one day to another, I could rap. I just had it in me”, Lucy explains.

That is the way her entire short career has evolved until now. Lucy Love’s debut on a stage was when she was in college in Sweden and she had music as an optional class. She was heard, discovered and asked if she wanted to sing for others.

But singing wasn’t good enough. No, it had to be rap. Not as you know it from American or Danish rappers, but in real English cockney. With timing, that is tight on the beat.

And Lucy Love’s talent was heard. Preliminary underground, and it has made record companies to spontaneously contact her, but no, she wants to be independent. Lucy Love does it on her own terms.

She shares the name with several adult film stars, but the sultry sub harmonics suits the 22 year old rapper fine. It stands in contrast to her music and texts in its own way.


The enthusiasm is spreading

The police managed to spoil Lucy Love’s first performance at a pirate-party. She just barely managed to grab the microphone, before the force of law and order tore it out of her hands. Since then, she has MC’ed at many underground parties, and has played her own material at numerous venues.

As one of very few grime-artists, the only one in Denmark, she is being played on Danish national radio P3 and the big English pirate radio Rinse FM. Denmark’s grime expert number one, producer and dj 2000F, calls her quite simply exceptional.

"She is a technically really good MC. She has potential of making it in Europe, and her sound and expression is something different than in England. And that is positive. I hope I get a chance to remix her tracks", says 2000F, who himself releases grime from English artists and as a part of OHOI is behind the largest grime-parties in the country.

The English grime artists are from the real British concrete slum. Many of them can’t spell their own name, and the texts are about young mothers that can’t find a babysitter Friday night because grandmother also is going out on town. Just like great-grandmother is. Or it is gangster-ghetto lyrics about drugs and pulling girls.

Lucy Love does not write about that. Because her life is not like that.

"Her style is not at all as ghetto as the English grime. She doesn’t have gangster attitude, and that is cool", says dj 2000F


The Zambian connection

Of course the texts are about showing how cool she is. The style is like that. But it does not resonate of London. After Lucy Love as a two-year old moved from Zambia, where she was born, she has grown up in the more tranquil city of Copenhagen.

Today she lives on Amager and studies at the Funen Art Academy on her third year. And until five years ago it was the visual arts alone that towed her attention. She has the excess, which is why her texts are different. On her first single ‘No V.I.P.’ she raps about how tired she is of blingbling, Gucci and build-up around being famous and drawing attention to oneself as Britney Spears and Beyonce.

"I’m irritated by being confronted with V.I.P. all over the place. It is all hype. You must have this bling, and if not it is a problem. Everything is status. There has to be others than me, that are tired of it", says Lucy Love.

Lucy Love does not look much with her one and a half metres in height and the way she sits in the studio next to where her music is being recorded. She is everything else than ’here-I-come’. But there is nothing wrong with the attitude, when she first sets foot on the stage.

She says herself, that she is shakingly nervous before, and that she uses the entire day for practising.

"But as soon as I walk on to the stage, I can’t be nervous. I just can’t. It has become more fun to be on stage, and seeing the way people react".

It helps her a lot that she is playing together with the experienced dj, musician and producer Yo Akim. The two of them stand together in her project. He makes the music, she raps and writes. They met two years ago, when a mutual friend introduced Lucy Love to Yo Akim. He put four beats together, which he gave her to take home, so she could put the lyrics - Politiken, iByen

http://palmsout.blogspot.com/2008/04/visual-velcro.html

While in Denmark, Chaz & I had the pleasure of spending some time with Lucy Love and Yo Akim (who co-produced "Uzela" for the Fagget Fairys). We got to listen to their version of Danish garage/grime and were duly impressed. Myself, Johanna (626), & Lina from The Touch also got the pleasure of tagteam Djing after she & Blaqstarr did sets at Vega in Copenhagen. Enjoy this great piece of stop-motion brilliance for Lucy's first single, "No VIP" - Palms Out Sounds

Lucy Love has a mouth like the barrel of a gun. But if you think grime necessarily equates dim-witted lyrics about weapons, sex, and gold chains, you haven’t heard this rap-comet bust her rhymes.

By Nicolas Jespersen
Translation: Rasmus Ovesen

"This is crazy!"

The epidemic Danish grime-star Lucy Love - who was clad in a chalky white hooded sweat shirt - was blatantly touched by the massive turnout when she took to the stage at Pavillon Junior Wednesday and introduced her urban jungle music.

After the concert, we met the little femcee (Female MC) with the needle sharp voice for a calm moment of reflexion behind the stage.

"It went really, really well". The words might not seem like much, but as they seep through Lucy Love's lips they sound genuinely cathartic and you can almost sense her hands slowly rising up above the cheeky hairdo.

Lucy Love has already buzzed like a nectar-hungering swarm of bees in the Copenhagen underground, but the lyrical work is something relatively new, she explains:

"I have been singing for about five years as a backup singer in different hip hop bands but from one day to the next, I decided that I wanted to be a rapper. In the beginning, I wrote and recorded the tracks on my laptop and then I met Yo-akim, who is one of the few guys in this country who is interested in Drum n' Bass and Garage."

If you take the first Ryanair airplane to London or Great Britain, most people who are knowledgeable about music know of the current music phenomena like grime and dubstep. Here in Denmark, however, the scene is still in its developmental phase:

"The grime scene does exist in Denmark but more so among those who arrange parties - like for instance OHOI - than among bands and artists," explains Lucy Love.

It doesn't make her feel completely alone, however. If you have a look at the fold of trendsetting female artists outside Denmark like Lady Sovereign, Shystie, and GoldieLocks, there is - at least viewed from the outside - many indications that this scene is especially accommodating in terms of female artists. In comparison to for instance hip hop, where female artists are not granted the same attention, this seems to be true. Lucy Love glances over the ridge of her sunglasses and nods approvingly:

"I think you are right about that. On the hip hop scene the girls are basically non-existent but with regards to grime there is room for the girls on their own terms. I think a lot of girls give up with regards to hip hop because there are so many rules as to what is right and wrong."

The resolute woman's-voice is far from having given up, however. But if you expect to hear lyrics about sleazy sexual experiences, gun barrels, and gold chains the size of lassoes think again. Lucy Love, in stead, appoints herself spokesperson for what she has termed "Scandinavian grime" with a more contemplative and edifying resonance than her British colleagues. Or as she concludes in her single "No VIP": "not all that glitters is gold".

And there is absolutely no doubt that more astute sentences will pour over us when Lucy Love releases her EP Lucy Love in July. - http://www.roskilde-festival.dk

22/11/2009

Everyone that turned up at Little Vega on Friday must have done so with high expectations of the highly hyped Lucy Love. They weren’t disappointed.

Denmark’s de facto first lady of all things grunge and grime put on a scintillating performance that rocked the rafters off the concert hall, as she churned out one rough tune after another, stabbing away at the fleshy beats her on-scene Dj conjured with her sharp, high-pitched attitude-infested vocals.

Love started on an easy, conservative tone, mc-ing away in her grime element. It wasn’t long before she tweaked things up a tad though, working the crowd into something of a frenzy with a more raunchier, synth-tinged ensemble of tunes. With the crowd in her grasp, the likes of the commercially lauded “Daddy was a dj” and “V.I.P” were served, shaken and stirred, with plenty of input from her Dj, who was as much a star of the show as the chequered hoodie clad Love herself. The duo of dancers /vocalists accompanying her every move were just as impressive, nonchalantly moving along to the proceedings, seemingly in their own beat-riddled paradise in a land far far away.

If things were hot and sweaty mid-way through the show, they got sizzling and steamy towards the end, as several unreleased numbers (such as “Poison” and “We’ve only hit the ground”) found their way onto the stage, several of which contained weighty measures of drum & bass influences whilst others came in the form of chunky electro-driven symphonies, each accompanied by one wave of shrill South London vocal after another. The loco Lucy Love left the building with a wry smile on her face at the end of the show amidst a series of cheers and shouts for more. She came, she saw and she conquered. - Allan Mutuku