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Sam Obernik with Dave Spoon and Paul Harris |
Obernik’s words on the street
Dance diva Sam Obernik talks to Grooves about Baditude, Belsize Park – and breakfast
COSY Belsize Park may not be known for its buzzing nightclubs but even dance divas need a haven.
Nestled in the heart of the neighbourhood, Sam Obernik, one of the hottest dance acts of the moment, has made her home.
She’s gone from busking on the streets of Dublin to having a worldwide summer hit in 2002 with Just Won’t Do to touring the jazz circuit with her collection of club covers.
And her new single Baditude – a collaboration with Dave Spoon and Paul Harris – which has long been on Radio 1’s playlist, has just entered the Top 40.
As a teenager Sam busked with a collection of up and coming Irish singers, including Glen Hansard, who went on to star in Alan Parker’s 1991 film The Commitments. Her strangest memory of the time, apart from “plenty of flashing” from passers-by, was: “Being bundled into the back of a police van. We were just a nuisance, there were so many of us playing on Saturday afternoons.”
Sam’s arrival in Belsize Park six years ago is “a long, rambling, dangerous story”, she says, only explaining: “I landed in London after having been in the States. I got married, started a family, got unmarried.
“What I love about this area is it’s just like a market town. You move up towards Belsize Park and it’s sort of arty and eccentric, then you move up to Hampstead and it’s almost corporate. It’s like a society pyramid but it holds together quite well.”
She says her 13-year-old son, who goes to school in Hampstead, “flinches slightly” at her chosen career “because he’s the age he is, but I think his friends think it’s pretty cool”.
Her favourite place to have breakfast in Belsize Park is “a little café called Chez Nous where you can get a good, honest breakfast”.
She “fell” into dance music after living next to a recording studio.
Suddenly she was projected into the stratosphere with her project with Tim Deluxe Just Won’t Do. Sam says she hates being labelled a singer-songwriter and, in protest at the term “dance diva”, created the jazz project Barefoot, in which she produces and covers classic club tunes.
Dancefloor favourites such as Ebeneezer Goode, Born Slippy and White Lines are recreated and regurgitated with brass and string arrangements.
When preparing for gigs, there’s no Madonna-style group prayer, instead. Sam says: “Whisky is my friend, that’s my plus one. I actually get pretty grumpy before I go on stage and introspective. I like to be alone.”
Her hot tips of the moment are Ida Maria’s I Like You So Much Better When You’re Naked and Florence and the Machine’s Kiss with a Fist.
She adds: “It’s one of the cleverest songs I’ve heard all year. The quirkier the better. It’s just flying in the face of what everyone expects female singers to be.” |
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