Interview, Nishla Smith on 'Friends With Monsters'

Sydney-born, Manchester-based singer and songwriter Nishla Smith loves to tell stories. Her debut album Friends With Monsters explores Nishla’s own experiences with insomnia, her vivid yet melancholic songs brought to life with music videos directed by Nishla herself and a selection of commissioned visuals from local artists.

Video-calling us from her home in Manchester with her newly adopted puppy on her lap vying for her attention, Nishla kindly took the time to chat with us about her new album, including the collaborators she worked with on its visual direction, her love of storytelling, and where she plans to go from here.

Before we go into your more recent work, what are some of your earliest memories from listening to, or performing music? Did you grow up in a musical household?

I grew up in a household of music-lovers; both of my parents love music, and we had a huge stereo system that dominated our house. We always had music on - all different kinds of things, they had really wide tastes. We’d listen to classical music, my dad was really into crazy psychedelic music from the ‘70s and ‘80s as well as pop and whatnot, and my mum really loved that ‘70s pop-folk crossover like Carole King and Carly Simon. That stuff in particular was what I really chimed with, as well as some of the more popular jazz vocalists like Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday. It’s because of this that by the time I grew up and left home I already knew a lot of jazz standards, but I didn’t understand what that meant yet - I’d just listened to all these songs and learned them, then later kind of retroactively came to understand what jazz was and how it fit into the musical world.

You describe yourself as a ‘natural storyteller’, have you always been drawn to vocalists and lyricists?

Definitely, I love all kinds of singers. I always ‘hear’ the lyrics - you know how some people ‘hear the lyrics’ and some people don’t? I kind of joke that my superpower is that I only need to listen to a song once or twice to remember all the lyrics. I’m always looking for what those stories are - I think it comes from my grandmother, who is the other big musical influence in my life. She was an opera singer who chose - when she was 16 - not to follow the opera path and became a doctor. She’s a real storyteller, the way she can spin a yarn is incredible. I feel like I’ve just grown up with a lot of women who know how to tell a really good story - I’ve always been known for that, even before I realised that was part of my musical output.

You’ve moved around a lot too - coming from Australia, living in Germany for a bit, and now you’ve settled in Manchester. What was it that led you there?

I did an undergraduate degree in classical singing in Sydney, then moved to Melbourne kind of on a whim - I’ve done most of my moves like that, I decided to move and did it within a week! I had a pop band playing my original music in Melbourne, and I met my partner who’s a cellist, then eventually we moved to Germany together. I’d started singing jazz while I was in Melbourne but I got more serious about it while I was in Germany - I met an amazing pianist from Israel by coincidence - Daniel Schwarzwald - and we had both a duo and quintet together.

I’d do these crazy trips to Berlin on the bus, take my lesson at the Jazz Institute, do a midnight jazz gig with some friends, then crash on their couch and busk all day to make my bus fare back. I did that for a while before actually moving there with my partner - the Berlin jazz scene is amazing, but it was more expensive than we thought it’d be, and it wasn’t quite working out. We had some friends that were in Manchester that just invited us, so we just spontaneously came over and it immediately felt like the right choice. I started turning up to jazz jams and everyone was so friendly and welcoming, it wasn’t long before people started offering me shows. The jazz scene in the north is quite small, but it’s a strong one, and there are lots of great things going on.

Smith in the music video for 'Julien'

Could you talk a little about the narrative behind Friends With Monsters?

I’ve struggled with sleep for a long time - not like lying awake at night worrying about things, more like a fear of the dark. Even last night I went downstairs twice to check inside the cupboards, and in Germany I’d sometimes set up these elaborate booby-traps downstairs. The album’s not just about my inability to sleep but quite specifically about being afraid of the dark. The four interludes on the album - each played with a different member of my band - encapsulate that; ‘Twilight’ is about this sense of dread and melancholy, ‘Midnight’ is about that feeling of being so desperate to sleep but you can’t let go, ‘3 A.M.’ is when you’re so tired you’re delirious, and then ‘Dawn’ is almost hymn-like - it’s that sense of relief that then gives way to ‘Up’ which is the last song on the album, which is quite an optimistic song about the sun rising, feeling okay again. I think I’m a pretty optimistic person most of the time, and even though the album’s quite melancholy and quite dark in some ways, I think ‘Up’ is a good ending; it’s a hopeful song.

The members of your group you mentioned… are these people who you met during that initial period in Manchester where you were going around all the jazz jams?

Yeah, exactly - my pianist and drummer Richard Jones and Johnny Hunter play together quite a lot - I actually met Rich when I saw him playing in Johnny’s band at a local jazz night. Richard just had a super friendly face, so I introduced myself. We played standards together for about a year before I started working on my original stuff. I was nervous to ask Johnny too - he's such a lovely person and such a great player, but I didn't know him that well, so it was nice when he agreed to play with me! And then Aaron Wood and Joshua Cavanagh-Brierley were from different corners of the scene; I love Aaron’s playing, I’d heard him a couple of times and was blown away by how beautifully he plays, he’s very thoughtful; Josh is an amazing bass player and a completely insane guy; he’s so passionate about original music, he really puts his heart and soul into it.

For Friends With Monsters you also worked with a number of visual artists to provide commissioned pieces for the music, and you put together a zine for the deluxe edition of the album too. Is the visual component of a project an important thing for you as well?

Definitely, I think I’m quite a visual person. I started collaborating with visual artists back in 2019 with a project called ‘What Happened to Agnes’, a staged song cycle about my grandmother’s sister who disappeared as a child in Malaysia back in the 1930s. I worked with an artist called Luca Shaw - who actually made a really beautiful piece for this zine - and it was a really eye-opening experience giving her my music and seeing her respond visually. I also directed all of the music videos for Friends With Monsters, and made all the props and costumes in them over lockdown. I was also able to work with dancers from the I M Pact Collective for the ‘Friends With Monsters’ video, and I’m planning to do a lot more things like that in the future.

I feel like I’ve learned so much through collaboration and having people to respond to, and it’s because of Arts Council England that I was able to commission all of this work. We’re displaying all the pieces that were created for the album on Monday [8th November] night as part of the Manchester launch, and we’ll be screening all the music videos there too. After that we’ll be moving to Luca’s studio in Underbank in Stockport for December, so people will be able to see the work there too.

You’re currently touring the material for Friends With Monsters - how has the reception been?

It’s interesting, because I’ve had to explain the concept of the record to people - it’s been in my head for so long that I forget that other people don’t know what it all means! We’ve been playing all the new songs with some other originals and standards thrown in, and I think people have been understanding it - the response has been really nice from audiences so far, and quite a few people have bought the zine as well. I’m really excited for the Monday show because it’s a home crowd; we’ll be putting up all these big risograph prints of the artwork and showing all the videos. I’m gonna wear the pyjamas like in the music videos, and I’m trying to convince my band to let me buy them all matching stripy pyjamas but I’m not sure they want me to!

What does your 2022 look like? Anything you’ve got in the works?

I have a plan in the pipeline for the quintet which I won’t go into too much detail, but it involves more collaboration and furthering the relationship between the quintet and the dancers. Rather than the dancers working with the pre-recorded music of the album, I’m envisioning more of a live response to the music - it’ll be all new music, focussed around the idea of movement.

Hopefully we’ll have more duo shows, too, and more touring for the album. My theatre project Ulita has a musical we’ve just cast - we’ve got two really talented actor-singers on board, and it’s the first time we’ve done something where I’m not on stage. The next year or so will mostly be getting through the production stage and hopefully getting it ready to be performed. So yeah, I’ve got lots of things coming up!

Nishla and her band play at JazzLeeds on Sunday 14th November, Spotted Dog in Birmingham on Tuesday 23rd November, and the Vortex Jazz Club in London on Thursday 2nd December. Click here to see all of Nishla's upcoming tour dates.

Friends With Monsters is available now on Digital, CD, and Vinyl...