Shura: Star of hit single Touch explains why she chose music instead of Man City
Whenever she plays 'Touch' live now, the audience take their cue from the video and start making out
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Your support makes all the difference.At the start of this year, a little-known artist called Shura got put on the map when she was added to the BBC Sound Of... longlist, which predicts the music stars to emerge in 2015. She was picked alongside acts such as James Bay, Kwabs and Years & Years, but unlike those who rush-released albums, Shura has yet to release her debut.
“I am totally happy to meander up that hill for as long as it takes, as long as I am putting out good music,” Shura, real name Aleksandra Denton, says when we meet for coffee. In her trademark denim jacket, beanie and green-tipped blonde hair, she is pre-emptively dressed for winter on this mild day.
“Winter’s coming though. It is!” she insists. “I love winter. I’m really excited about it. I love scarves and hats and coats, I love it. I think it’s because I’m a bit Russian so I’m like, ‘I know what to do here’.”
It’s not the first verbal tangent she goes on. During our chat she also lectures me on how eggs are “the closest thing you can get to magic”, and leaves a message on my Dictaphone when I leave the table, talking as though she’s the narrator in a radio play: “Emily is going to wash the tube gunk off her hands, while I eat my cute food,” she tells no-one in particular. In person she bounces between great earnestness and a glib, deadpan kind of humour that reminds me of Greta Gerwig’s kooky, lost soul character in indie flick Frances Ha.
“On one level I am a massive joker and can’t take anything seriously, but on the other hand I’m incredibly serious and a deep thinker so I have that dichotomy within me,” she says, explaining that dichotomy comes across in her debut album: “where there are really serious subjects that make you feel good to listen to. You know, with “Touch”, if you think about the lyrics it’s horrible, but it feels really nice.”
“Touch”, co-produced with Joel Pott of Athlete, is the single that’s been floating about YouTube for about a year, quietly ratcheting up millions of views. It’s now on just over 20 million and counting. The video for “Touch”, directed and made by Shura, shows lots of her friends, softly-lit and snogging in slow-motion.
“That was one of the best days of my life,” says Shura, who recently came out as gay. “Just literally all of my friends who are gay were like, ‘yeah whatever, it’s hilarious’, but one girl really fancied the girl she was snogging and she was like, ‘can you please put me with Alice, I really want to snog Alice, can you make me snog Alice?’ So I was like, ‘Alright’, and now they’re a couple, so it’s really like a cupid moment.”
The song is about “probably my first grown-up relationship” she says, it plays with the theme of breaking up but being in the in-between period where you haven’t figured out how to behave as “just friends”. “I’ve had relationships before where you break up and you think you’re going to die, and then you realise you’re definitely not going to die and actually you’re probably better off without them. But I guess this is the first time I went through a real grieving process, realising that the person I thought they were didn’t exist and so you go through a period of mourning. It absolutely is a death, and we lived together so there was this big hole in my life. We were together two years. It was four years ago, so we’re friends now and it’s totally fine.”
Whenever she plays “Touch” live now, the audience take their cue from the video and start making out.
“At gigs we’ll have loads of young kids and a few middle-aged couples snogging. Like literally at my Village Underground gig a couple were up against a wall, and 40 minutes after the show had finished they were still there. Everyone was like ‘the show’s over. Go home! You can take it further there!’”
Shura’s mother is an actress from Russia and her father is an English documentary film-maker. She gets her musical side from her dad, who used to play guitar to Shura, her twin brother and half brother when they were kids, when they would “sing silly songs about frogs”.But it was her older brother, Oli, a DJ, who had the greatest influence on her musical style.
“Oli got me into drum’n’bass and hip-hop and got me into electronic music way before I was able to fully appreciate what it meant... so I’d be off my face in a club listening to jungle music being like ‘yeah this is great’ trying to play it to my friends who were like, ‘No! I just want to listen to Spice Girls. Shut up’.”
But despite playing guitar since the age of 13, she never considered making music for a career.
“I’d written songs since I was 16, but I never thought that I would be a musician full time.” Instead a career as a footballer beckoned.
She was approached by a recruiter for Manchester City after a tournament one day at her primary school when she had scored “a really great goal,” and her dad allowed her to join, even though “he has spent so much of his life trying to convince his two sons not to be into football”. However, at the age of 16 she decided to drop football.
“I made the decision that I could either go outside in the freezing cold in the wind and rain and get muddy, or just stay inside and be a rock star. I didn’t want to physically hurt any more. I’d be in bandages and limping.”
At 16 she started making sweet folky music, but the acoustic guitar got swapped for a synthesizer after she returned from a trip to South America.
After finishing her English literature degree, the 23-year-old decided to go on a six-month trip. “When I was at university I was reading lots of Gabriel Garcia Márquez and Pablo Neruda and I was super-obsessed with magic realism and I took the books with me, so I’ve got loads of, like, jungle-fucked books now. It was amazing. I fell in love with that place in the books and wanted to see if I was in love with it in real life and I, like, totally was.”
One of the more bizarre jobs she took on was working at a conservation centre where she had to take a puma called Gato (“cat” in Spanish) for walks on a lead. He didn’t wear a muzzle.
“He was rescued from the circus, so he was never a wild puma,” she explains. “He’d had his back legs broken, so he could fit into a cage and he was a bit weirdand I would walk him for eight hours a day in the Amazon.” I gawp. “It’s kind of mental. I can’t believe I did it. He did actually bite my knee at one point and ripped a hole in my leggings – but he was very gentle! It’s just occasionally he would get a bit grumpy.”
Shura features on the new single from Mura Masa, ‘Love For That’, out now; her next single, ‘Touch’, will be released in early 2016 and tickets for her Shepherd’s Bush Empire gig on 26 May are on sale now
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