Remi Nicole
Biography
On Remi Nicole's 18th birthday her dad took her to swish jewellers Tiffany and said she could have anything she wanted. 'I was looking around, but I didn't want to take the piss, and the things that I liked were all about £45,000'. As if by magic, whilst Remi's eyes were scanning the counters for something both passable and on the right side of a few hundred quid, Noel Gallagher swaggered past the shop window. From that moment on Remi's fate was sealed, even if it did take a few years to get flowing. 'I thought 'I don't want anything from here – I want a guitar'. Musical ADHD soon struck though, and the girl who'd already had brief dalliances with piano, trumpet, drums and violin set aside her shiny six-string in favour of uni and various other teenage endeavours. But last year Remi decided that she'd finally learn how to play her birthday guitar and, whilst she was making grand plans, she'd also master Spanish as well. Currently, the Spanish is looking muy mal, but the guitar playing has rather taken off...23 year old Remi might have a more mixed heritage than most (she's part Austrian, Trinidadian, English and also Jewish), but she's a North London girl through and through. Aside from a six month stint in Trinidad when she was younger, she's lived on the sunny side of the Thames all her life, flitting between Holloway, Islington Highgate, Tufnell Park and presently residing in Highbury. Bought up on a heady mixture of Rod Stewart, Tracey Chapman and more reggae and soul than you can shake a very large stick at by her mother, Remi's first dalliance with performance happened at the age of three when she ran terrified from the stage of Butlins after being put in her best frock and told to sing a nursery rhyme in front of hundreds of holidaymakers.
Luckily Remi's got a hell of a lot better in the art of stagecraft since that fateful day. She's only been gigging since October last year after more or less stumbling across her new found career in music, but is more than familiar with treading the boards after training as an actress at the Birmingham School of Speech and Drama. But the actor's life wasn't to be for Remi, who quickly became disillusioned with a life of waiting on auditions and holding down a depressing office job at the same time. 'I worked at a place called Infection Control Solutions in Mill Hill; they audited hospitals for MRSA, and I was doing admin whilst applying for acting jobs and dodgy corporate stuff'. So late last summer when Remi was at a friend's house watching him record a song, which was almost instantly mixed by his producer sat in the front room. 'I was like, is it this easy? So I said that I was gonna write a song, and I wrote a song called Go Mr Sunshine the very next day'. She then played the finished acoustic number to a friend on Hampstead Heath during a sunny afternoon's picnic - the friend saw more than a touch of raw, unfettered potential and hooked Remi up with a mate in the music industry. After a series of encounters with various other producers and more musically inclined mates, Remi slowly realised that her future didn't have to lie with the folk at Infection Control Solutions and as a jobbing actress, and fell into creating her very own brand of inimitable indie-pop in earnest.
A long suffering rock fan, Remi regularly had to deal with being wound-up by her bashment loving cousins over her musical tastes. She fell for the charms of Oasis after being introduced to them by a holiday romance in Portugal at age 13, and had to keep her love of boys in bands to herself for years. Remi's music now confronts the people who assume that as a young black woman, she makes R'n'B. "Everyone who sees me says 'do you sing R'n'B?' It just shows that there aren't enough people out there who are breaking down barriers.' Remi also used to get harrangued at college for liking guitar music, 'the only reason I was cool at college was because I was good at pool. I used to hustle for money, and um, that's why I got chucked off my course before going onto acting.' Songs like Rock n Roll and Fed Up tell Remi's story straight - with her astute observations and witty banter perhaps she puts it best in Rock n Roll; "They said you're not normal why don't you sing RnB. I said I've got no rhythm and I got no blues, I'm as happy as can be."
read less
Features
- No features are currently available.
News Articles
CDs
Live Apperances
- No sets have been reviewed.