ShINRI and me — Is Black Music

Oct 1

Oct 1 ShINRI and me

She got on the number 48 bus in Hackney with her friends. They all came upstairs and sat on the top of the bus.

I recognised her as that light-skinned black sista who played angular folk music on her steel-stringed guitar.

I had seen her in clubs I had gone to that Jamika Ajalon had hipped me to. She would strut the stage with her guitar at her hip shouting and singing about love and abuse, two subjects that were alien to a young male like me. Her hair seemed to be different colours at once, and her voice was rough and beautiful simultaneously, like steel velvet.

Her music was warm and challenging . Inviting and fierce, full of energy and unapologetically loving.

Her vocal delivery foreign, unBritish and un-black American. Not European or African in a familiar way. Unknown to me. Closer to something nomadic and noble.

And now on this bus I interpreted her raised voice as something unapproachable. But I felt a comradeship, and searched for an excuse to connect.

But just as soon as she had hopped the bus, she hopped off. I watched her from the upstairs window with her guitar case and friends as her raging blond and feathered shaved head cut through the Hackney streets. The shining colours blending with bohemian black ones.

My eyes would never see her again. Like so much of 90s London, she would fade away as the post-millennium turned into 2011.

All I was left with was a old CD-R that I had bought at one of her gigs. We would play it over and over when we first started doing this radio show. In our minds she was a prototype Is Black Music artist. Alternative and eclectic, unchategorizable. Music that stretches beyond genres, taking in all creative influences and subjects.

When I asked friends if they knew what became of her they all just pointed south towards Spain.

I put out the call on the air and social media but she seemed to have vanished.

Then one day I got a message from someone unknown to me with a different name. ShINRI had heard we were searching for her and appeared.

We had finally found her. Here is her story and here is her music.