INTERVIEW: Holly Flo Lightly – Rap Workaholic

The more music coverage you do as a journalist, the more scenes you end up familiarising yourself with. All of them have their plus points, and their minus points, but it’s rare that you’ll leave a gig, a festival or an interview without getting at least a taste of the fan dedication that’s keeping the wheels slick. With UK hip-hop, it’s almost more like a massive social group than a scene. Everyone knows, or at least knows of everyone else and fans and practitioners mingle without any overriding sense of reverence or superiority. I’m reminded of this every time I cover a show, or indeed meet someone involved in the scene, and it goes doubly so with somebody like Holly Flo Lightly.

Holly has been working her way up the ranks for a few years now, popping up at nights in London and Bristol, jumping on stage with people like Eva Lazarus and First Degree Burns and slowly trickling new recorded material in ahead of her first EP coming out later this month. With all these things, you get this sense of her constantly building projects in her head, and then gradually bringing them into existence, nothing is random, nothing is half-hearted. She’s a powerful performer, both in rap and in song, and a talent spoken word artist, but she doesn’t wear that, or wave it around. “I fucked everything off about 7 years ago” She tells me, hands wrapped around a coffee, fresh off a train from Bristol with a rolling travel bag parked next to her. “I’d been living in Kent and then I just thought ‘fuck this’ and did a ski season in Austria, was meant to get a job in Greece but I was too rowdy, got sacked, so I just got a one way flight to Barcelona.”

From there, she worked her way up from spoken word sessions in Barcelonian slams. “Everyone else was talking in Catalan about the revolution and then I was there going ‘I feel like this inside’ so I used to get 2 out of 10s” she recounts, but the musical element actually started earlier. “I was into musical theatre when I was a kid, danced around in leotards, all that stuff.” She says, “I was in a squat in Barecelona about 3 years ago now and we just wrote a song about smoking weed, and then I realised how fun it was, and just ended up doing it more. It was a bit difficult to progress because I wouldn’t have got better rapping with people who are speaking Spanish and Catalan.”

After moving back from the UK, Holly Flo Lightly eventually emerged as a persona, inspired in part by the work of Ed Scissortongue and in part by the film where the name came from. “It started out with me just needing a pun, I hadn’t actually seen the film at that point, and then having watched it, and been amazed by it, I decided it was the ideal theme to work with.” Holly recalls. From speaking to her, the comparison to Audrey Hepburn isn’t exactly immediate, but the way she performs, the nuances and the sharp edges are kind of indicative of that same anti-establishment approach. I mean, come on, who would ever think to blend Blake Edwards and UK hip-hop? The EP is entitled Aperitif, and next year the full Breakfast ePiffanies album will drop. “There’s lots of sound bites from the film itself, it’s got so many gold lines. I’ll probably do a themed party for the launch, dressed up a bit like her.”

One of the things that really brought Holly to light was Artemis, a documentary about women in UK hip-hop , directly by Oliver Whitehouse. It featured Holly alongside 8 other MCs, each of them dropping bars, answering questions and generally making themselves known. “Ollie contacted me and said that everyone would get a free video, and then I focused so much on doing the a capella part that I kind of forgot about the interview questions, so when the camera was on me I was kind of going ‘ah shit’. He was asking leading questions because that’s how he wanted the documentary to go, but he’s a good friend of mine, and I’ve worked with him loads since then.” Holly says, leaning back in her chair. 

Artemis highlights an important aspect of UK hip-hip – that, sadly, like all other variations of the genre, women just don’t have the same platform that men do. “The reason there’s less women than men is kind of like chicken and egg, if there are less women rapping, there’ll be less women producers jumping up following the same inspiration. So many people who have made friends with me through the scene have been girls who have come up to me with something they wrote. It helps them gain confidence.” Holly says. “Play to your strengths, if you got booked because you’re a girl, fuck it, you’ve got a booking.”

This lets some light break against another string, Holly’s ongoing work with youth programs, teaching kids how to rap. “It’s fully interactive. A lot of learning that kids do now is either in front of a computer or behind a desk. If you’ve got everyone standing around in a circle, being honest about their feelings, different things come out. The most important things about teaching aren’t in the job spec, it’s about noticing when a kid needs an extra g up, and workshops give them an opportunity to do that.” She says, smiling.

“They make me better, helping young people rap makes me a better rapper. I just think, with the dwindling culture in the UK and all the budget cuts it’s really really important that we give young people an opportunity to find out what their passion is and then give them a platform to do it themselves, and not on a fucking computer. Unless it’s a beat. It’s great because I’ll hear from them saying they’ve just got a job as a backing singer or something and about how I inspired them to do it and thanking me. I’ll even see them rapping in music videos sometimes, it’s really nice. They even call me Miss, it’s a good way to connect, since I rap, but what I did find out is that you can’t rap to the youth about the youth, they will not listen.”

It’s perhaps unsurprising that through all this, Holly has built up an impressive list of counterparts. Sika are putting her EP out, with Termite on the beats, while the production credit on her album goes to another Sika mainstay – King Bracket. Sika were always a dominant force at Boom Bap festival, and I can think of few other labels better equipped to work with Holly. Since moving to Bristol she’s also performed with Eva Lazarus. “she invited me to jump on at her Colston gig. It was different that the kind of thing she usually does, more acoustic stuff, and my favourite song at that time was ‘Amsterdam’, and she asked me to jump on that, I was gassed. It gives you more freedom as a vocalist, you only have to stick to one thing with a looping beat, but with a band it’s more exciting, and you can charge more to get in.” She laughs “In a way you’re one of the least important instruments involved, they’re the main part which you have to fit yourself around, but then it’s also on your to get the crowd involved.”

It’s hard not to pick up on Holly’s dedication, she’s picked up so many different things in the space of only a few years (she admitted at one stage that time management isn’t her strong suit), but equally she seems utterly determined to do things  her way, whatever that ends up morphing into. “I feel like I need to put everything I’ve got into it now, I really just want to make it work and fuck everything else off. Even if I can’t afford to eat, it doesn’t matter.”

Keep an eye out for Holly’s EP later this month, as well as BITCH PLEASE, a collaborative project between her, vocalist/violinist Sarah Tonin, DJ Lucinda and producer Kushie.