Twigs was born Tahliah Debrett Barnett in 1988, in Cheltenham, to an English/Spanish mother and a Jamaican father.

Posted in Excerpts/Quotes on 2022-03-29 20:15Z by Steven

Twigs was born Tahliah Debrett Barnett in 1988, in Cheltenham, to an English/Spanish mother and a Jamaican father. She was also raised by a “jazz fanatic” Bajan stepfather. “What’s it like in Leeds?” she asks me with wide eyes. Assuming she’s asking what it’s like to be Black in Leeds, I tell her that, surprisingly, I had a more Black experience up north than I ever did living in London. “I definitely understand what you’re saying,” she says. “As a teenager, I started getting the bus to Gloucester to be around people who were from the same culture as me. I’ve never experienced such an intense West Indian experience as I did in Gloucester.”

Kadish Morris, “FKA twigs: ‘I don’t have secrets. I’m not ashamed of anything’,” The Guardian, March 26, 2022. https://www.theguardian.com/music/2022/mar/26/fka-twigs-i-dont-have-secrets-im-not-ashamed-of-anything.

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FKA twigs: ‘I don’t have secrets. I’m not ashamed of anything’

Posted in Articles, Arts, Caribbean/Latin America, Interviews, Media Archive, United Kingdom on 2022-03-29 02:07Z by Steven

FKA twigs: ‘I don’t have secrets. I’m not ashamed of anything’

The Guardian
2022-03-26

Kadish Morris, Editor, Critic & Poet

FKA twigs: ‘I think vulnerability is really hot.’ Photograph: Aidan Zamiri/The Guardian

After a hellish couple of years, the pop visionary is back. She talks about beating illness, escaping abuse, and the joy of connecting with her Caribbean roots

FKA twigs isn’t special, she says, she just rehearses a lot. “I don’t think I was born with anything more than the rest of the world,” says the 34-year-old singer-songwriter. It might be hard to believe that anybody could do the splits down a pole or wield a sword, Wushu-style, the way twigs has done without possessing some divine powers, but it’s all in the training. She can afford private lessons now, but when she started out as a fresh-faced back-up dancer, YouTube tutorials and group dance classes helped her to perfect her craft. “I practise and I practise and I practise. That’s who I am.”

Twigs has had a spellbinding career, exploding on to the pop scene a decade ago with operatic vocal arrangements, conceptual videos and futuristic instrumentals. In 2014 the New Yorker magazine said that she “dresses like a high-fashion model from antiquity, but her songs promise the very contemporary pleasures of texture and emotional immediacy”. Since then, she’s released several acclaimed albums and is considered a trailblazer in pop, R&B and Afrofuturism…

Read the entire interview here.

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