Santogold: A Champagne Supernova

It’s 10.45am when Santi White emerges, slightly later than planned, in a hotel suite in West London. Clutching her pink Blackberry, her coy handshake is accompanied by a waterfall of apologies. While some focus on her attire, most address the fact that, this morning, her mouth and brain are struggling to work together.

What happened, White reveals, was that following her showcase – under her alter-ego Santogold - in a pub in the east end of London, friends “convinced me to drink champagne, which I don’t drink at all.” White suddenly laughs, winces and then laughs again – it doesn’t take a doctor to diagnose that she’s suffering from a hangover. Her jumper is baggy, her baseball cap is pulled over her eyes and, if she had her own way, she would have arrived at the interview “in my pyjamas”.

“It was horrible,” White says, returning to the show. “As soon as I stepped up on stage I thought I was going to pass out. Crazy hot. Everybody was drenched – even people that were watching. It was like a pool party.” White’s show, timed to coincide with the UK release of her debut album ‘Santogold’, was a hot ticket. In the crowd, along with members of the Black Lips and Kaiser Chiefs’ frontman Ricky Wilson, was Mark Ronson – who White has collaborated with and knows well enough to dog-sit for from time to time in New York, where she lives.

For White, the show was a culmination to a barrage of hype that began last December when she released her debut single ‘Creator’. A fantastic example of her instinctive talent, the song unravels like an autobiography about its maker. “Me, I’m a creator / thrillers do make it up / the rules I break got me a place up on the radar,” she sings during the songs chorus. Very quickly, and thanks largely to the dub-inspired song, White found herself being heralded as ‘one of the ones to watch’ in 2008. It’s a position that most would find intimidating, but not, it seems, White.

“The hype is good. It doesn’t make me feel pressure, if that’s what you mean, at all,” she says, defiantly. “I just felt kind of excited by it and leading up to that point I hadn’t really let anybody hear much stuff so I didn’t know how it was going to be received, so I felt more excited and eager to want to press on and get it right.”

Is she the type of person, then, that thrives off expectation? “No,” she replies, even more convincingly. “I’m really a perfectionist anyway and really hard on myself so I already was, I guess, thriving off my own need to really capture exactly what’s in my head. So, it didn’t make me put more pressure on myself, I already just wanted to be really good.”

Few could argue that White hasn’t achieved her mission with ‘Santogold’. ‘L.E.S Artistes’ – which was originally the b-side to ‘Creator’ last year – blends fuzzy electro with muted guitars, while ‘Lights Out’, with its infectious chorus and guitar riff, has mainstream single written all over it. Although White regards the album as a pop record - because “I write pop song structures” - the singer has collaborated with producers that, on the whole, operate in the electronic underground. Switch, Freq Nasty, Diplo and Sinden – you name them and somewhere down the line White has spent time in the studio with them.