The Artists on the Frequency — the station's own singers, bands and sound systems. One act at a time; pick a name to hear who they are.
Effra
Named for the river under Brixton — hidden, constant, still flowing.
Born Beverley Campbell on Railton Road in 1961, Effra took her name from the lost river that runs buried beneath Brixton and Herne Hill: invisible, never stopped. It fits. Two musical worlds met in her parents' front room — her father's Studio One sides on a weekend, Alton Ellis and John Holt; her mother's American soul on the radio. Burning Spear and Aretha on the same Sunday afternoon. She took both in long before she knew she was learning anything.
The voice came from church — a Pentecostal choir in Herne Hill, where she learned not technique but authority: the understanding that a voice can change the temperature of a room. She carried it out of the choir, through Saxon sound-system dances (she was at the back from the age of thirteen) and three years doing hair on Acre Lane, and into lovers rock just as the British form was finding itself at the end of the seventies. Brixton Rain, Sunday Coldharbour, Market Day — the everyday South London made tender.
Key tracksBrixton Rain · Sunday Coldharbour · Market Day · Sandringham Road
- Roots
- Brixton / Herne Hill (Railton Road), South London
- In the lineage of
- Carroll Thompson, Janet Kay