When singer and producer Asha Nandy thinks back to her childhood, she remembers the bustle of London and the hush of the Co Cork countryside. She regards herself as the product of two very different worlds: the endless red-brick sprawl of Bermondsey, south of the Thames, and the wide open fields of the townland of Killeen, near Blarney. “I very much consider that I grew up between both.
Living in London, my mum was working with so much Irish culture. I was surrounded by Irish people,” says Nandy, who records cutting-edge electro-pop as Yunè Pinku. “I spent a lot of time in Cork.
I was a little hybrid. There are ideas about community that exist in Ireland more than in somewhere like London. I’ll put out a song, and everyone in my family has heard it in two days.
” She may have been born in London, but Nandy is proud to speak in a Cork accent – if you didn’t know, you might easily conclude she had grown up closer to Shandon than Southwark. Her Irish origins also inform her brilliantly innovative dance music. Last year, she covered Sinéad O’Connor’s Drink Before The War, a spectral torch song from O’Connor’s debut album, The Lion and the Cobra.
Meanwhile, on her new upcoming new EP, Scarlet Lamb, she draws on influences such as My Bloody Valentine and The Cranberries’ Dolores O’Riordan. “There’s probably a lot of subconscious things that I listen to coming through. A few people have picked out different artists on different songs.
Some people hav.