Music
Discover the woman of many talents as she performs tracks The Hunger and Headlights.
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Grace Savage is a woman of many talents – and, as her name might suggest, an artist of many emotional shades. She is a four-time UK beatboxing champion, and former member of Shlomo’s Vocal Orchestra. She’s also an actress, whose role in Home at the National Theatre was named the most startling performance of 2014 (in a theatre critic’s top-10 that included Gillian Anderson and Carey Mulligan, no less).
Now, the Devon-born artist has turned to singing – though ‘turned’ isn’t quite the right word. As a child, Savage couldn’t help mimicking different accents or the sounds of household appliances. In the same way, when she started putting together her award-winning beatboxing sets, she couldn’t help sneaking in musical refrains. As she tells us in this See. Hear. Now. session, “over the years it’s melded into one thing”.
If Savage’s beatboxing inspiration was Rahzel, ‘the Godfather of noise’, who she saw perform when she was 14, her key musical influences are “strong, powerful women”: Lauryn Hill, Amy Winehouse, Destiny’s Child. You have to be pretty strong yourself to survive, let alone thrive, in the male-dominated beatboxing landscape, and the two tracks performed here are as lyrically gutsy as they are sonically sensuous. Former single Headlights is a wake-up call to female friends diminished in abusive relationships, while The Hunger – part of her brand new Control Freak EP – is a bid to reinstate the raciness in long-term relationships.
Watch Grace Savage perform Headlights and The Hunger in the player above.
