Zoe Devlin

Singer Zoe Devlin started out in Notting Hill, playing at Carnival and Portobello Gold. Last month she was at Westbourne Studios for the screening of the Strummer biopic, in which she appears. Lucy Land meets the rising star

You might not have heard of Zoe Devlin – aka Devlin Love –yet but she can already count Noel Gallagher (‘I think she’s fantastic’), Blur bassist Alex James (‘Where did you get her from?’), Ska pioneer Prince Buster (‘She sing sweeter than Phyllis Dyllon’) and the late Joe Strummer (‘This girl’s gonna make it’) among her fans. Like a lot of singers on the cusp of stardom, she’s young – 22 – but unlike most she has already spent nine years learning her trade.
At 13, she started learning guitar and singing with Celtic-Ska band The Trojans at Notting Hill Carnival. A year later, she started sneaking into St Moritz club in Soho for the regular night, Gaz’s Rockin’ Blues (run by Gaz Mayall, lead singer of The Trojans) where she became friends with fellow wild child Lily Allen.
‘One night, I got on stage to sing and this black guy got up and started grinding against me so I told him to get off the stage,’ she says. ‘He got off and looked really confused. Gaz ran up from the bar and said; “Do you know who you’ve pushed off stage?” It was Prince Buster – one of my favourite artists. I went into the recording studio with him the next day.’ Zoe speaks fast. With one leg pulled up, she is sitting with her back to the arm of the sofa at Westbourne Studios, drinking a Bloody Mary after a late night which kicked off at a Barbara Streisand concert. (‘I know, it’s not very rock ‘n’ roll but the tickets were free.’)
As a nod to her country music influences, she’s wearing tight black jeans tucked into cowboy boots, a black and white striped vest and a bracelet pulled up on her slim upper arm. She looks girly-sweet but has a sexy-yet-streetwise Gwen Stefani look about her. Her make-up is striking; three curls are painted under her eyes. ‘I’ve been doing my make-up since about 13. My face is my canvas. I spend about three hours on it every day,’ she laughs.
The youngest of three children, Zoe grew
up in jazz bars that her parents owned. Her Malaysian mother would often sing while her Scottish father played drums.
‘I used to sit at the bar and interrogate older people and I’m still doing the same but with bands,’ she smiles. ‘My parents suddenly went from being poor to having quite a bit of money and I hated it.’ It’s hard to tell whether she’s being serious. After all, she chose to move from state education to Queen’s College in Harley Street for the jazz choir and lack of school uniform.
‘I thought, brilliant because I just love dressing up. But suddenly I was in this fake world.’ She would freak out her classmates by arriving at school with a mod sign drawn on her face and would head to Notting Hill whenever she got the chance.
‘You can wear what you like in Portobello. There’s such a real atmosphere and I think that having been forced into such a cold, posh school, Portobello just brought back that whole feeling of freedom.’ The area was a source of inspiration. Armed with a note pad for jotting down lyrics, she wandered around the market chatting to locals.
Clearly, Zoe thrived on her liberal and diverse childhood experiences. She joined acid house, blues, country and gospel band Alabama 3 (whose track Woke Up This Morning was the chosen theme tune for The Sopranos) four years ago and is busy touring with them.
‘I wanted to be a musician who does loads of different styles of music,’ she says simply. Among others, she has also worked with drum ‘n’ bass band Qemist and producer Pablo Cook who wrote tracks for Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten, a biopic about The Clash frontman, in which Zoe appears with Alabama 3.
But what about a solo career? ‘A lot of people are interested. I’m not going to sign anything in a hurry like I did when I was 14 and signed to an awful management company,’ she reveals. ‘They screwed up a lot of my childhood, trying to get me to do pop and win Fame Academy. I went to the audition for Fame Academy to take the piss. I swore at the camera and did one of my own songs instead of one my management told me to do. My management were horrified,’ she chuckles. ‘That was one of the reasons I joined A3. There’s only one tour bus company that will take them and they’re called Why Not!’
With influences ranging from Billie Holiday to Brian Wilson, who would she most like to work with? ‘Damon Albarn and DJ Danger Mouse,’ she says without hesitation. ‘I used to run around Notting Hill, looking for Damon’s pink house and hang outside a door I thought was his,’ she admits.
‘We [Alabama 3] did an acoustic here one night when there was a Wild West-themed exhibition which attracted the local cowboys so I got the real hump and wanted to go home as soon as we finished. Then I looked up and, no shit, there’s Damon Albarn, sitting right there [she points to the sofa on her right]. I was obsessed with Blur when I was younger. They turned me on to Syd Barratt and The Kinks. I blanked everyone because I was so into Damon, and I knocked his drink over. The Beach Boys came on and we started singing [she breaks into song], “God only knows what I’d be without you...”
When he left I turned to the person next to me and said, “Oh, I love him,” before asking his name. It was Danger Mouse. There are all these naïve moments. He gave me his email but I lost it – I was going to work with him.’ So Damon and/or Danger Mouse, if you’re reading this…

www.myspace.com/devlinlovesolomusic