“ Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Otis Redding, Al Green: classic soul sounds. Finding artists that I would never have discovered shaped everything about me, even as a person – from my sound to my style, to what music I’m into.” But as soon as I went there, I discovered so many Black soul artists and got into it really quickly and loved it.
As a young, Black working-class girl, it wasn’t something that I felt belonged to me. “My parents didn’t collect records, and I always thought of it as being an old, white, middle-class thing. Because I had been singing from when I was at school, I said to myself, ‘I’m not going to change shitty nappies…’
I was left with the dregs of work experience that nobody else wanted: a nursery or a record shop. “I did my work experience there by fluke: I was meant to be working somewhere else, but, a week before, I was told they had double-booked. You worked at Flashback record store in London from the age of 15. With ‘B.O.T.A.’ having clocked up over a million streams, we spoke to Rose – on a rare day off between back-to-back European festival bookings – about the track’s unexpected success, her transformative time working in a London record store and what’s coming next. “This is the first year where I feel like maybe I am a DJ – the impostor syndrome is finally starting to go away a bit!” “I’ve been DJing for a few years, but it’s only taken off recently,” she tells NME today over Zoom. Since then the DJ, producer and vocalist’s star has ascended, having worked her way up through London’s underground scene over the past decade: from DJ sets for fabric, Rhythm Section and Boiler Room to hosting a Vinyl Factory radio show, and collaborating with artists including Angel D’Lite (‘Pleasure Xone 43’), M4A4 (‘Shades Of Red’) and Cody Currie (‘Flame’). Jordan, then it was being played by actual festival punters up at the Stone Circle. Seemingly everywhere you turned at Worthy Farm, it was blasting out of a set of speakers: if it wasn’t being repeatedly spun by underground tastemaker DJs Jaguar, Peach and former NME cover star I. If there was one song that took on a life of its own at Glastonbury 2022, it was Eliza Rose’s empowering house anthem ‘B.O.T.A.