Stephanie Phillips

Life in a touring band brings with it a particular set of hazards. Brendan Yates, lead singer of the Baltimore hardcore band Turnstile, has just experienced the big one: The tour van broke down. “I had a rough morning,” he confesses over the phone, speaking from the recently repaired van as the five-piece band races toward their next show in Phoenix.
Judging by the reaction to their new album, Glow On, this won’t be the last time the band will be faced with battling the vagaries of life on to...

The desire to take a music project beyond the confines of an album has driven the career direction of so many creatively ambitious musicians. From classic studio films, such as The Who’s “Tommy” (1975) or Prince’s “Purple Rain” (1984), to extended music video projects, such as Beyoncé’s “Lemonade” in 2016, the music-to-film pipeline, when done successfully, can establish an artist’s auteur status.

On the wall of Skin’s Brooklyn home studio hangs a picture of Grace Jones. The Jamaican model is crawling on all fours, her face frozen in a sultry snarl and angled defiantly towards the camera.

For much of Skin’s career, she has found herself compared to the artworld icon and disco firebrand. “I always saw it in a positive light, but it used to annoy me that people are so limited in their imagination of how many Black people, Black women, there were,” explains the Skunk Anansie frontwoman ov...

Post-punk friends, writer Jon Savage and guitarist and singer Johnny Marr meet to discuss their relationship, their enduring work ethic and the challenges facing young people today
Today has been declared an Equals day. This wasn’t a call made by Rolling Stone, but by avid fans of the north London pop group and long-time close friends, author and music journalist Jon Savage and legendary guitarist and songwriter Johnny Marr. As we sit in Marr’s Stockport studio on a fiercely dreary Monday aft...

From a song so good she almost forgot her shopping, to the iconoclastic brilliance of Alice Coltrane, Bas Jan’s Serafina Steer guides Stephanie Phillips through thirteen songs and albums that have inspired her

Perhaps it is because there are so few odes to Black British girlhood that when one comes around a fight for ownership can break out so easily. This was the narrative that came to dominate south east London rapper Enny’s 2020 single ‘Peng Black Girls’. Originally featuring unsigned singer Amia Brave, the collaboration and accompanying video were praised for its joyous depiction of the beauty and variety of Black womanhood. When a new remix of the song dropped, many were surprised to see her l...

Even through the small and pixelated screen of our video call, the positive energy radiating from producer and multi-instrumentalist cktrl feels as if it could power a small jet plane. Calling from his home studio in Lewisham, southeast London, cktrl – real name Bradley Miller – is dressed casuall...

Indie star Moses Sumney talks the joys of lockdown, not staying in his ‘box’ and the objectification of Black men

Andy Bell of Ride talks Stephanie Phillips through his Baker’s Dozen, from listening to Spacemen 3 in a damp student box room to handing Tierra Whack a copy of Green Eggs And Ha

Ahead of Donaufestival, experimental noise artist Elvin Brandhi speaks to Stephanie Phillips about letting go on stage, travelling to Uganda with the Nyege Nyege collective, and listening to a Rihanna sample for five hours

A reawakened political spirit has propelled many UK alternative bands to wider success lately. What makes this rowdy West London quintet so different?

From her teenage adoration of Julian Cope to days spent trawling through the record collection of the local library, Miki Berenyi guides Stephanie Phillips through the 13 albums that made her

After years spent struggling to make a name for herself in electronic music as a Black female artist and producer, Karen Nyame KG finally hit a brick wall of racism and misogynoir. “It was always, ‘are you palatable enough for a wide audience?’ ‘How can we monetize this?’,” she says looking back on that time in her life. “It really took a toll on my self-esteem and self-confidence.”

Wolf Alice didn’t exactly dream big at the start of their careers. They’re one of the biggest bands in the UK at the moment but despite reaching the heady heights of music stardom, they say they never really indulged many wild aspirations when they were young. “Ellie says she just wanted enough money to buy hot lunches every day,” guitarist Joff Oddie jokes, reminiscing about the 2010s, when Wolf Alice were a folk duo starting out in London.

In this week’s Baker’s Dozen, Anika guides Stephanie Phillips through the records that made her, from the power of Grace Jones, Courtney Love and PJ Harvey, to the soothing effects of Goldie and Guru