‘Diaries are boring!’: Joy Crookes on making pop out of sex, London buses and a love of The Clash

Every once in a while, an artist springs up fully-formed, apparently unencumbered by shyness or self-doubt. Joy Crookes is one such talent. The 23-year-old singer-songwriter from south London has just seen her debut album, Skin, jump to number five in the UK charts.

And given the way our interview starts – she shows up late, says little, slumps back in her chair, and immediately lights a roll-up – I get the feeling that she knows she’s destined for the big-time. When I ask, for instance, whether she would still like to support Harry Styles on his delayed tour, as per her pre-pandemic plans, her calm reply is: “As long as it works for me.”

If such confidence sounds misplaced, you haven’t heard her music. I first came across it one depressing January at university, in search of escape, flicking idly through a YouTube channel that featured up-and-coming artists. Nineteen-year-old Crookes popped up, sporting a black Rapunzel-style plait and a Frida Kahlo badge, and singing her latest track, Mother May I Sleep With Danger? It sounded like Ella Fitzgerald with a bad cold and a time-travelling electric guitar.

Three years and three EPs later, Crookes was nominated for the Brit Rising Star Award, and placed fourth in the BBC Sound of 2020, an annual poll of music critics that predicts breakthrough acts for the coming year. Those critics can be pleased with themselves now. Skin, a moody, delicate genre-blend – not quite soul, not quite R&B, jazz influences drizzled through every track – arrived last month. It deals with all the things you might expect from a young, mixed-race Londoner – Crookes is Irish-Bengali – from friendship and first love to Brexit and gentrification. But the lyrics lift her songs from teenage angst to poetry. “In the summer of ’16 / Was it love or nicotine / That made us mellow on the 35?” begins my favourite track, When You Were Mine.

The 35 bus runs from Clapham, through Brixton, onto Elephant and Castle: Skin is a south London album to its bones, freckled with references to street names and landmarks. Crookes is the latest in a proud tradition of local artists to hit the big time: from David Bowie to Dave, countless musical giants hail from south of the Thames.

“It’s hard to explain south London,” Crookes says. “You get every kind of person here – real communities, real families, real markets. It makes storytellers.” She still lives in Elephant & Castle, where she grew up. When the album reached number five, she headed straight to her favourite local (Skehans in New Cross).

But first she had to play the record to her dad. Growing up, Crookes divided her time between her parents, who split up when she was two. Her father, an engineer who immigrated to Brixton from Ireland as a young man, provided the bulk of her musical education. “He played me so many records. Everything from The Streets to Gregory Isaacs to Marvin Gaye to Massive Attack. If someone got the Mercury Prize, we’d buy the album, listen to it, then rate it. And then I’d buy records and play them in the car and he’d be like, ‘No, this is rubbish.’ His Peugeot was my university.”

Playing him Skin, then, was a nervy experience. “He’s the person I’m most scared to play my music to… If he doesn’t like it, I know I’m doing something wrong.” So what did he think of it? “He said: ‘You’ve made your own version of London Calling… There’s not one clear genre on that record. They’re trying out everything, and that’s what you’ve done.’ That’s not a bad compliment.”

In fact, in one way, it was the perfect compliment. Struggling with mental health issues and school bullies as a teenager, Crookes had bought her first guitar from Argos and taught herself to play. Late one night, she grabbed a Clash notebook – a freebie with the anniversary edition of London Calling – and wrote down a lyric: “You’re scared of snakes.”

Ten minutes later, she had a full song. Poison is the third track on Skin, and lyrically it hasn’t changed since that night. “[Suffering] made me cling to music even more. I felt like I had a lot on my mind as a young person, and I needed to put it somewhere. I’m not very good at sitting with my feelings. And diaries are boring.”

Crookes’s mother, who started a catering business when she moved to London from Bangladesh – she met her future husband serving him a sandwich in his work cafeteria – was also a musical influence, albeit of a different kind. “She got me into Justin Timberlake and Timbaland, who’s one of my favourite producers, and through him, Nelly Furtado.”

I point out that her eclectic mix of influences might surprise people: not every young artist would so freely admit their love of 1970s punk bands and cheesy 2000s bangers. She’s unfussed. “It’s what I’m interested in. The easiest way to flow is to draw influences from things I like, rather than what people think I should be interested in or are cool.”

Crookes’s Bangladeshi heritage is also a footprint on her music and stylings, if not always an easy one. In the video for Feet Don’t Fail Me Now, a song inspired by last summer’s Black Lives Matter protests, she wears a white sari astride a motorcycle, in deliberate provocation of the Bangladeshi custom that only widows wear white.

“I don’t like the fact that we [Bangladeshi women] are defined by our husbands’ deaths,” she says. Previously, at the Brit Awards, she had worn a lehenga – a traditional long skirt from south Asia – to highlight the lack of Asian faces in music. “No-one else would have been wearing my outfit that night, because there’s barely any of us in the industry.” I wonder what effect the unique cultural fusion of which Crookes is a product – “I don’t know any other Bangladeshi-Irish people,” she says drily – has had on her music.

“They’re both quite artistic cultures – art and poetry and literature are important parts of both, as well as protest.” They’re also both cultures that at various times have experienced horrible discrimination in Britain. “Experiencing something as damaging as racism, and watching the people you love experience it… makes for a very angry, passionate person. But a lot of it also boils down to empathy.”

Empathy spills out of Unlearn You, for example, an oddly tender track about the aftermath of sexual assault. She used the demo vocal on the final track: “It felt like I wasn’t trying. And I didn’t want to try too hard with that track.”

Staying political, I tell Crookes that, according to what I’ve read, I Don’t Mind, a mellow, jazzy number about a no-strings relationship, was partly motivated by her frustration that many south Asian women feel unable to talk about having casual sex. Is that what she was thinking about when she wrote the song? “No, I was thinking about having casual sex,” she deadpans. She’s just as evasive when I turn the conversation to her current relationship status: “I’m just making my way downtown.” She squirms when I push: “I hate talking about…” – deep breath – “…my vagina.”

Tonight, Crookes performs the second of two nights at The Forum in Kentish Town, before leaving London for a nationwide tour that will expand to Europe in February. But for now, she’s writing music again. “There’s just so much to write about. Pain, a break-up, naivety, mistakes, family as usual.”

Naivety is an interesting one: it’s not a word I would imagine figures prominently in Crookes’s vocabulary of self-reflection. “Other people’s,” she quickly clarifies, though she admits that releasing a “debut anything” will be accompanied by a certain level of greenness. But otherwise, while most people start out in their careers unsure of where they’re heading, or what they want to do when they get there, Joy Crookes is not your average twenty-something. She knows where she’s going.

Joy Crookes performs at The Forum, Kentish Town tonight, then tours. Tickets: joycrookes.com/tour