After she graduated, Andreya Triana started temping. And then kept temping. She worked as a sushi waitress, in an ice-cream van, for an insurance company, for a hearing-aid shop, spent weeks emptying files in a basement with no windows. “It was hard graft,” she muses now. “I couldn’t sleep because I didn’t know how I was going to pay my rent, I couldn’t buy decent food.” But she stuck a sign above her bed that read “Faith, focus and belief”, and spent all her spare time creating music.
Ten years on, Mobo nomination and Koko headline show booking in hand, the 33-year-old singer can look back philosophically – “I really value that experience, and I appreciate everything so much now”. She began writing songs aged seven and performing at open mic nights at 17 (“I would feel sick before it, I was so nervous”). Her pre-performance ritual now consists of a glass of wine and loud music – upped to two glasses this September when she performed at the O2 arena for rugby event Wear the Rose, with 14,500 people singing along to her songs (“I still can’t believe that happened”). Other highlights this year included performing on Later… with Jools Holland in April ,and meeting Samuel L Jackson.
The half-Jamaican, quarter-Trinidadian, quarter-Scottish singer was brought up in Brixton by her microbiologist mother (“she’s like Superwoman”), before being uprooted to Worcester aged 14. “It was a big transition – it wasn’t as diverse culturally and musically. For a few years I got quite introverted, and that’s when I got more into music.” Triana discovered jazz while studying music technology in Leeds, and later flirted with electronica: she provided vocals on Mr Scruff’s track Hold On and collaborated with (then-unknown) Flying Lotus on the track Tea Leaf Dancers in 2006. The song attracted the attention of digital music polymath Bonobo, who would go on to produce her first album, and in 2010 she signed to independent label Ninja Tune.
Yet her sound is most at home with the warm, husky soul music she grew up loving. Her second album, Giants, released last May, finessed the downtempo sound of 2010’s Lost Where I Belong, adding effervescent energy (Gold) and moments of tenderness (Everything You Never Had Pt II, dedicated to her mother); new single, Playing with Fire, sounds like a Bond theme manqué.
She now lives in north-east London with her musician boyfriend, and many of her friends are musicians. What does she do outside of music? “I’m into sewing: I make bags, clothes and patchwork blankets, with bright African fabric.” Then there’s books, Netflix, and cooking Sunday roasts. But lately her life has been far less homely. She has been in LA to work on her next album… and this week there’s Koko. “It will be my biggest London show to date, with strings and horns, so it’s going to be a big one. It will be the finale to an incredible year.”
Andreya Triana plays Koko, London NW1 on 17 November
