If rising star Phildel's shape-shifting songs don't come with any of the usual pop reference points, it's probably because of her strict family upbringing – in which all music was banned from the house
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The Observer, Sunday 31 March 2013
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Phildel: 'It’s impossible for people to comprehend, if they’ve always known music at home, the vacuum in your mind when you grew up without it.' Photograph: Katherine Rose for the Observer. Styling by Crystabel Riley at Stella Creative Artists
Hearing people talk about the first record they ever owned can be as boring as listening to other people's dreams, but your ears prick up when someone tells you it was a CD called In the Mix Ibiza '98, their friends bought it for their 15th birthday, and they kept it in their desk at school because if they'd taken it home there was no knowing how their stepfather would react. Phildel Ng, renamed Zara by her stepfather at the age of nine, didn't tell the other girls that she wasn't allowed to listen to music. Instead, the CD took on a kind of talismanic power, the names of the great composers – the Tamperer featuring Maya (Feel It), Mousse T vs Hot 'N' Juicy (Horny) – glowing with all the mysterious promise of a forbidden world.
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Phildel
The Disappearance of the Girl
Decca
2013
Now you can hear Phildel's music all over TV, on adverts for Marks & Spencer, Expedia, Apple iPad and Persil and Omo washing powder (a particularly sentimental one featuring a little girl and the slogan "Dirt is good"): she's one of those modern artists who's been hiding in plain sight earning money from her songs, long before there was any talk of a record contract. But somehow it's still hard to believe, after our coffee overlooking the Eurostar platform at St Pancras station, that she was born in the 20th century. There are, as she is the first to admit, vast "holes" in her musical knowledge. She can't remember the names of pop stars. She talks about songwriting in terms of shape and colour. The title track on her debut album, The Disappearance of the Girl, represents, she says, the moment when, at the hands of her stepfather, she "slipped from the moderate, liberal culture of [her] birth into a new world of silence and control".
She was born in Kensington, west London, in 1983 and grew up with her Chinese father and Irish mother, until her mum's relationship with an Islamic Egyptian colleague at the grocery store where she worked broke the family apart. With her new stepfather, she moved to Whetstone in north-west London; the name change, the headscarves, the mosque and the three hours of domestic chores every evening after school were "just part of me being prepared for womanhood, as far as Islam was concerned," she says. "The kind of thing that is going on for girls in this country every day – you know, getting ready to take up your 'rightful role'." Music was banned from the house in accordance, mother and daughter were led to believe, with the religion – her stepfather disposed of her toy piano and the family record collection.
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But the restrictions, she's realised over time, were not really to do with religion at all. Shortly after they moved in together, her stepfather started to limit Phildel's time with her mother – when she returned home from school, she was sent to a separate room. "She definitely suffered, and he only gave her £10 a week," she says. "Looking back, I felt like I didn't see her for 10 years." It was only in adulthood that she found support through the charity Refuge. For the most part, the 1990s passed in a kind of cotton-wool blur, like miserable childhoods do. She recalls parents of friends taking her in for a night here and there, most memorably at 12, when the rest of the family (now including her younger sister, her stepfather's biological child) went on holiday to Egypt, leaving her at home "to make my own arrangements". She was unable to stay with her real father because he was ill with cancer and in and out of hospital: their calls were limited, and during the 10 years she lived in Whetstone she was not allowed to answer the phone.
Sometimes it seems you can't get anywhere in music these days without the sorrowful backstory. The TV talent shows have set up the expectation of personal demons or valiant struggle and the traditional record industry has followed suit – for the last five years, every press release for a new artist seems to carry a tale of woe, from Rumer, who arrived along with the idea of her identity crisis, to Ren Harvieu, who broke her back just before her debut album was due out. Even Tunde Baiyewu, from the Lighthouse Family, was revealed, in advance of his new solo album, to be the stepson of the former head of the Nigerian military, who was being tortured in prison around the time the breezy Lifted ruled the airwaves.
But it's rare to find someone whose unfortunate circumstances actually shaped the mechanics of their music. Phildel's songs don't really sound like Kate Bush, or Tori Amos, or Joni Mitchell, or any one of the other singer-songwriters to which young female artists get compared, because at the time she began composing she never had access to that stuff. "It's impossible for people to comprehend, if they've always known music at home, the vacuum in your mind when you grew up without it in the pre-internet area," she explains. "Later on, the world of existing music remains irrelevant to you because you learned to visualise the sounds you hear." Her girls' day school in Barnet (Queen Elizabeth school) was a refuge, with a brand new practice room and a brand new piano she visited most lunchtimes ("My friends thought I was having lessons at home"). The keyboard was a tight space on which her imagination played out in patterns of songwriting that can be heard on the debut album – the insistent, airless little tunes were inspired, she has realised, by the nursery rhymes she remembered from before her parents' divorce ("It felt like solving a puzzle"). Though fuelled by recognisable emotions – anger, hatred, romance – her lyrics are stylised and full of archetypes; Jung would have a field day. In Holes in Your Coffin and The Wolf she hisses threats at a nameless aggressor ("The wishes I've made are too vicious to tell/Everyone knows that I'm going to hell/And if it's true I'll go there with you…"). There are moons, tides and funerals, banshees, switchblades and spells. It's no surprise that someone who grew up "under the radar of mainstream society, its morality and justice" found favour with the goths and the dreamers – all over YouTube there's footage of Twilight and Being Human cut to her songs, and Mariah Huehner, one of the authors of the True Blood and Angel stories, recently claimed she was an influence.
But you can see why the advertisers went for Phildel's music too. These songs are so tightly written they can be looped, chopped and tweaked while retaining their atmosphere. A couple of years back, when she was working part-time in an office in London, a colleague passed a demo tape of unfinished material to a producer-friend, who licensed them to various ad campaigns. "It's been interesting to hear the stuff used in various states of finality," she says. The whole attitude towards advertising and music has changed in recent years, it's simply not seen as selling out any more. The steady income allowed Phildel to pay her musicians and buy the software that would enable her to realise a few grander ambitions. She taught herself orchestral arrangement using the computer program the Vienna Symphonic Library, scored the accompaniment for the song Mistakes, then recorded it with a real orchestra once she was signed to Decca. The album features a lot of dance/classical production techniques not a million miles away from William Orbit, or Tori Amos in her Professional Widow period, but like everything else with Phildel those kind of references don't necessarily apply. Rather, she explains that at 17, she finally broke away from her stepfather's home and moved in with her father (by then recovered), rediscovered his collection of Puccini and Stravinsky on vinyl and spent a lot of time dancing around the kitchen to local London radio.
The human brain is a funny thing, and the true impact of Phildel's bizarre childhood didn't hit till her mid-20s, by which time everything seemed to be going swimmingly with a degree (English literature), a relationship and the start of a music career. "So many people would say, 'At least you've had a happy ending'," she laughs, "and I was thinking, 'Yes, but I know this isn't the end.' By the time I was 24 my nervous system was in bits, I couldn't do anything and I was bewildered as to why it had all hit me when the 'problem' was technically over." The last song on the album, Funeral Bell, records the mind being pulled in all sorts of directions in the contemplation of suicide. It was the process of coming to terms with her unhappy childhood that allowed her, as she puts it, to "realign herself with society" – though without the backup of her mother and younger sister, from whom she is estranged.
"I personally feel that my stepfather's behaviour was 100% psychology and nothing to do with the religion he used to justify his treatment of us," she says today. "It all came from the fact that he couldn't communicate. He was isolated, and men in general are not encouraged to seek emotional support the way women are – they cannot ask for help."
Music, of course, has been the biggest part of the therapeutic process, with its capacity to take thoughts grown in the darkest recesses of someone's brain and turn them into something a 15-year-old can enjoy making a Kristen Stewart montage to. Phildel is still trying to fill the gaps in her knowledge since she realised, at 21, that she was looking at a picture of John Lennon and had no idea who it was. Then again, some of the most unusual artists clearly listen to very little music by other people – it just takes a bit of balls to admit it.
The Disappearance of the Girl is out now on Decca Records. Phildel plays the St Pancras Old Church on 25 April (sold out), Bush Hall on 15 May and Secret Garden Party on 27 July
