Crazy Cat - Remi Nicole

Remi Nicole isn’t about making statements. Except one. She is not an Oasis obsessive - contrary to popular assumption. “I saw Noel Gallagher last night actually and I told him this as well. What it was, was I had a holiday romance when I was fourteen in Port-u-gal,” she splits the syllables just to stress the facts further, “not in Malaga or anywhere else, and this boy gave me an Oasis CD, that was the first time I got into Oasis, I was fourteen. I came back, listened to the album and liked them as much as anyone else at that time because they were big at that time. Then, when I was eighteen I looked out of the window and Noel Gallagher was there at Tiffany’s jewellery shop and I said, ‘Oh there’s Noel Gallagher from Oasis, do you know what, fuck getting jewellery, I’ll get a guitar.’ That’s how far it’s gone, I’m not obsessed, I don’t even own their albums, but so far everyone keeps calling me an Oasis obsessive but I’m not.” Right then, that’s that settled.
 
Today, twenty-four year old Remi Nicole is sitting outside a North London Rehearsal Studio eating her lunch, or rather, a selection of assorted bite size melon chunks from the local supermarket. Although it’s almost 4pm, this is no alfresco bite to eat, it’s just the first time she’s had chance to consider satisfying her hunger all day. Whilst she’s had little to eat, her week so far has hardly been starved of things to do. On Monday and Tuesday she was supporting Amy Winehouse at London’s Shepard’s Bush Empire and since then she’s be incused in a rehearsal room getting ready for her first full club tour which starts in a matter of days.
 
“It’s only when you actually say it that I’m...,” Nicole stops, it’s clear that – melon aside - it’s all a bit too much to swallow at the minute. “Yeah it’s been a crazy week and it’s been a crazy couple of months but recently it’s getting more and more crazy because I’m confirmed on Glastonbury stages and Bestival and V and all that lot.” Trying to find a perspective, she adds, with striking honesty: “On the wider scale obviously it’s crazy but things have been so crazy that I just haven’t even sat back once and gone…,” again, she stops. “I’m scared to sit back, because so much has happened that if I sit back, I might blow up,” she giggles nervously, in her cheeky London tone. “You know, my head might go in such a spin that it might fall off.”
 
Wit and humour is not just confined to Nicole’s personality, it runs through her music as well. Still only one official single in, Nicole tells cursory tales of, well, herself. ‘Fed Up,’ which the singer released in May, is as good an example as any. Stripped to the bare bones of just Nicole’s sweet, accented voice and her acoustic guitar, the song is about her giving everything and her friend, Lauren, not quite reciprocating the same in return. “None of my songs are statements to the world because they were all written just for me, not in mind of being a songwriter,” she adds, candidly. “I never thought that anyone would ever hear them.”
 
If she sounds a little surprised still, then that’s because Nicole - who was only discovered playing her personal-to-her library of songs at an acoustic gig in London last October – never chose music to be her profession, in an unexpected way, it’s chosen her. Created from a diverse heritage (she’s part Austrian, Trinidadian, English and Jewish) the North Londoner’s dream was to become an actress. She studied at Birmingham’s School of Speech and Drama in her late teens, supplementing the course with a job at Infection Control Solutions (yes – it was as boring as it sounds) and, although she was rewarded with roles, the professions languid unpredictability, combined with her desire to succeed, would ultimately cause her to seek exit stage left. “It was the worst,” she confesses. “You never know how good of an actress or actor you are because you don’t watch yourself often enough, but, I thought I was quite good and it used to annoy me when I used to see people on TV in regular roles that were rubbish and I’m sitting in an office job struggling. I had so many close calls; did you see the film ‘Children of Men’ with Clive Owen?” she asks. “I had such a close call for that and I wasn’t black enough. It was always oh you’re not tall enough or you’re not cockney enough or not white enough. It was always such little stupid things – lots of times I was almost nearly in.”