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FLOHIO: Fashion’s favourite rapper on style, skipping and setting her eyes on the Mercury Prize

<p>Strike a pose: FLOHIO has a clothing range, Foam, with MCQ, an Alexander McQueen spin-off</p> (Shenell Kennedy)

Strike a pose: FLOHIO has a clothing range, Foam, with MCQ, an Alexander McQueen spin-off

(Shenell Kennedy)

The poster on the wall in FLOHIO’s bedroom is a cartoon of a member of the rap crew A$AP Mob, drawn in the style of Casper the Friendly Ghost, whose T-shirt reads: “This is my last year being broke.” When was that for her? “That was about two years ago,” she says, and laughs. In 2018, Naomi Campbell picked the south London rapper in Vogue magazine among “10 rising female stars reimagining our future”, and things have been going pretty well since then. Last year she was named on BBC’s Sound of 2019 list and released a series of edgily brilliant singles characterised by dense, murky electronics and her fierce, uncompromising rhyming. When we speak, she’s on the cusp of releasing a new mixtape and has just launched a range of clothing, Foam, in collaboration with the Alexander McQueen spin-off MCQ.

The concept is “classic workwear styles reimagined with a focus on construction”, made with “recycled textile waste fibre, industrial hardware and shipping graphics”, says the blurb. “I love fashion. Come on, look at me, my guy!” says FLOHIO — real name Funmi Ohiosumah — more simply. All I can see through her phone screen is a white sweater and bright red tips on her hair, but recent videos reveal her as a woman with a fondness for voluminous jackets and Edward Scissorhands fingers. “I don’t have no stylists on most of my shoots. The Foam range is just my sense of style.”

As regards music, she isn’t as prolific as some. The mixtape, Unveiled, is her first longer collection, coming over four years after she emerged as the fiery voice of the single SE16 by producers God Colony. She was originally planning to release four songs with an intro and an outro, but kept adding to the selection — there are 10.

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“I’ve had some of these songs since 2018, so imagine how frustrated I am, putting this project out almost into 2021. But then 2019 was such a fast year, just touring touring touring, that I didn’t have much time to write.”

Like the rest of the world, the 28-year-old has spent much more time at home this year. Her last live performance in front of an audience was in the Netherlands in January, though she’s just back from Berlin, where she was filming for YouTube music channel Colors. She lives on her own, just down the road from her older sister, in Bermondsey, where she moved at the age of eight from Lagos. She remembers the area as a child as “just people walking towards the Den” — Millwall’s football ground — but says it’s “now a lot more friendly, a lot of families, happy faces.”

She has a studio at home so wasn’t prevented from working. “I thought this year was gonna be a mess but the only thing I’m not happy about is the performance side of things,” she says. “Earlier in the year was an unhealthy time for my mindset — eat, smoke, watch TV, play games — but this lockdown I’ve been going to the park, doing some skipping. It’s been okay.”

During her early years in Nigeria, her mum, a Londoner, was over here, her pilot father was away a lot and her sister was in boarding school. She was mostly looked after by her

grandmother before coming to live with her mum. She spent a lot of time on her own and says she is still a shy person, though the power of her rap delivery might suggest otherwise. “I was a wallflower sort of kid. I wasn’t full of energy.” In her teens she added Bermondsey’s Salmon Youth Centre to her limited list of haunts. She first went with a friend with the intention of joining the girls’ football team.

“They were showing us round and after they said ‘music studio’ I didn’t hear anything else. I was there every Wednesday and Friday, paying my 50p, going upstairs.” It took about a year for her to pluck up the courage to step in front of the microphone and rap. Later, as she took her music more seriously, she had a parallel career in graphic design, ending up with a job at left-field record label Ninja Tune. While she was working on imagery for Thundercat, Forest Swords and Machinedrum, her songs were playing on the office radio on BBC 6 Music.

“It must be because I’m such a quiet kid, that I thought they probably wouldn’t care about what I was doing,” she says. “I didn’t even tell them I do music.” But the work of another rapper, formerly on Ninja Tune, did inspire her. “Ever since I saw Speech Debelle get the Mercury Prize, that’s my goal.”

As far as 2021 goes, she says she wants to focus more on collaborations. She has previously shared song space with The Streets, NAO and Richard Russell’s Everything is Recorded project, but far more compositions could do with a dose of her quick-fire vocals.

We’ll have to wait for a full album. “I need to experience a few more things before I can start working on an album,” she says. Pandemic or no pandemic, she’ll get there in the end. “We’re resilient beings. We adapt. I try to be optimistic. It’s my world, and I have to create it as I see fit. I could let everything affect me, or I could just go in my studio and make songs.”

No Panic No Pain is released on November 27 on Alphaton

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