Good For The Environment: Ebony Bones

From behind a huge pair of sunglasses, custom-made chain link scarf and red beret, Ebony Thomas is talking about her handbag. To most, including myself, it’s one of Tesco’s new Natural Green Bags; to Thomas, however, it’s rather more special. “Do you like my Tesco bag? Look at that,” she says, pointing. “It’s my little green Tesco bag.” Like the colourful clothes Thomas wears, the bag has undergone some heavy reconstruction – with safety pins holding its corners together and badges attached liberally to give it a little extra personality. “Yeah,” she says, picking it up for closer inspection, “I carry it round like a Fendi handbag.”

Like her handbag, Thomas, who’s making waves under the moniker Ebony Bones, is a one off. Up until two years ago, the 24-year-old was better known as Yasmin McHugh, the unlucky-in-love character in Channel Five’s now defunct soap opera Family Affairs. After joining the programme at the age of 16, Thomas quickly grew into one of soap’s most volatile but loved characters, picking up nominations for her acting, as well as looks. But, like most soap veterans, playing somebody she wasn’t soon became a “chore”.

“I was almost creatively frustrated because I just really didn’t want to do it anymore,” admits Thomas, in her usual embroidered brand of cockney. “So I spent all my downtime in between filming on my laptop making bits, producing and turning my dressing room into a mini studio – not for anyone else to hear but just for my own sanity.”

Initially, Thomas told no one about her interest in making music, not even her family, because she was “very anxious and nervous” about embodying what she calls the “bloody cliché”: going from soap actress to musician. That changed, however, last year, when she started to upload her work onto Myspace. Unprocessed but textured, one of her first songs was the devilishly infectious ‘We Know All About U’. Featuring little more than a simple three note bassline, a 4/4 beat and Thomas’s menacing refrain of “We know all about you, yes we do,” the song became the most played unsigned track on BBC Radio One and has, much to Thomas’s surprise, since featured on a BBC advert. “I was like, ‘Oh my God it’s not even mixed…arrrgggh’,” she recalls, literally screaming. “They just took it raw as it was.”

If Thomas needed some reassurance about her career change, then it came bizarrely last summer during a chance meeting with Rat Scabies, drummer in punk pioneers The Damned, in a West London pub. As she remembers, the pair’s conversation about the Holy Grail soon shifted when Scabies revealed his past identity. “I was like, ‘Right, what did you do?’ And he was like, ‘Yeah I played drums’. And the week before that I was reading this interview with Dave Grohl and he was saying, ‘My favourite drummer of all time is Rat Scabies from the Damned’.” Thomas pauses for effect. “I was like, ‘Wow – you’re pretty famous’. He was like, ‘Yeah, well you know, we had the first punk track out ever. I was like, ‘Oh good for you’.”

I ask her if, in hindsight, the meeting, which led Scabies to perform on her early demos, felt like it was meant to happen. “Yeah, I think now in hindsight definitely it does. You know, what’s meant for you won’t pass you, as the saying goes,” replies Thomas, her calm face breaking into a smile.