Lava La Rue and the quest for radical compassion

When NME meets Lava La Rue, it’s just over a week before the UK general election. Until now, the Tories will have presided over the country for half of the 26-year-old’s lifetime. Windrush scandals, diminishing government support for transgender people and the spectre of austerity are just some of the issues that have dictated much of their existence. They’re conditions ripe to produce the next kitchen sink epic but, on their debut album, La Rue’s veered rather off-piste.

“I am an alien,” they explain, “who’s just crash-landed in a rural British area, but I’m pretending to be a Boy Scout. Because what I’ve learned about humans is that they have scouts, so I’ll dress up as one of those to blend in. I could just be on an adventure and ask loads of questions and no one will think it’s weird.”

You heard that right. That’s the concept for La Rue’s NME photoshoot the next day, which parallels the narrative for their long-awaited debut album ‘Starface’. After years of hard graft founding West London’s radical pop collective NiNE8, acting as a creative director for Wet Leg and releasing one of NME’s best EPs of 2021, ‘Butter-Fly’, La Rue is finally in a position to release their debut solo record through Dirty Hit: “I definitely wanted to push what I could do musically, and that’s why it took me so long to make an album.”

‘Starface’ is most certainly ambitious. It’s a fantastical, psychedelic journey into the chasms of the human psyche, where La Rue will search high and low to understand the meaning of radical love and compassion. But it’s also a product of years of training and learning: “I started Lava when I was 16. I’m 26 now, but it really does feel like I’ve been in education this whole time, training to be like a nurse. It’s been seven years – I’m ready to hit the surgery!”

“Radical love is asking: what’s the most impactful way to spend my energy?”

NME meets La Rue at Dirty Hit’s offices just around the corner from Westbourne Park, where they spent their childhood (which was “definitely a factor” in signing with the label). They’re a definitive product of West London, having grown up in Harlesden and Stonebridge, with previous stints in Kensal Rise and Ladbroke Grove. Not that they meant to be The Voice of West. “I joke how I’m always putting West on the map,” they say, “and I go to America, and they’re like, ‘Are you from South London?’ Sometimes I do have to make it obvious, but it’s not something I’ve set out to do – it’s my experience.”

West is where they became well-acquainted with punk music with their first-ever teenage band, The West Borns (geddit?). La Rue received their education through the group’s bassist, who was 13 years old at the time and happened to be the granddaughter of Ian Dury and the Blockheads bassist Mick Gallagher. “She was like Effy from Skins: a child with a mad story,” they reminisce. “Her granddad played with Ian Dury and briefly with The Clash as well. And her dad was in prison. Classic West London…”

La Rue founded the NiNE8 Collective while at college with members like Mac Wetha and Biig Piig as a hub for eager creatives with limited resources. The group is still active today, and they’re fiercely communal, with everyone being credited as songwriters and payments split equally between each member. La Rue carries that spirit into ‘Starface’ as well, with the collective credited on the track ‘Fluorescent’ – to the dismay of Internet sleuths intent on busting them as industry plants: “People are so obsessed with ‘ghostwriter’ chat that they couldn’t see, as a solo artist, that I’d be so collaborative. That’s how I work.”

Although the album is indebted to genres like funk, indie, and soul, a primary touchstone for ‘Starface’ is psychedelia, both musically and visually. There’s the sci-fi madness of The Fifth Element, and David Bowie alter ego Ziggy Stardust’s fingerprints are all over La Rue’s trademark star that covers their eye. “It naturally happened – I was putting on stage makeup, and I watched a documentary and saw Bowie doing that before a show,” La Rue explains.

“That was after I’d already started doing the star. But I was like, I know exactly what that motherfucker feels like!” They grin. “Gen Z deserve a lesbian Bowie.”

Starface is an extension of La Rue themselves and of the people they’ve met in their 26 years. The alter ego also incorporates fictional characters, like “the 10th Doctor and a bit of Lenny Kravitz, if he was English and had a vagina”. Using that sci-fi lens, La Rue explores a number of ways to be radically loved. There’s references to them falling in love and trying out polyamory and queer love in songs like ‘Lovebites’, of meeting someone already entangled in a relationship and “kind of wanting to make it work, but also not wanting to cause any problems or make things toxic. That’s another form of radical love: I don’t want to force being your main person if that’s not the best for the dynamic.”

But ‘Starface’ also makes clear the reasons for this compassion. Grounded in the stories La Rue was surrounded by in multicultural West London, its most gutting track ‘Humanity’ documents a friendship that La Rue lost to addiction: “Now she got a new stare / Class A glaze, gave up on any help”. It’s tender, painful, vulnerable, and “one of those songs that just poured out of me”.

“Gen Z deserve a lesbian Bowie”

La Rue explains that the song also reflects on how important debates often involve “a lot of people trying to outsmart each other as opposed to actually making change.” The incessant questions in the song’s pre-chorus (“Was it anyone’s fault? Can we get her restored?”), they say, are a call for compassion before indulging in the blame game.

“Let’s prioritise the people being affected first, and then we can point fingers,” they urge. “The person who’s being affected by it can’t even hear you blaming each other. And that, for me, is just a metaphor for so much on the Internet.”

Ah yes, the Internet: that cesspit of negativity, bad-faith takes and oversimplification. It’s also the perfect breeding ground for radical compassion: the principle of reaching out to others to understand them, even when it feels like the last thing you’d want to do.

La Rue brings up an old memory: they once designed a charity shirt for Lazy Oaf, which juxtaposed the British and Jamaican flags to represent their heritage. A “small handful of people” were not pleased about the shirt, arguing that the Union Jack was a “coloniser flag”. Though La Rue “got where they were coming from”, they believed they could “rep that flag in a punk way because I come from a colonised background.”

“It’s tongue-in-cheek,” they continue. “However, right now, you are so upset by the symbolism that you don’t even care that the money has gone to actual people. Sometimes people can be so clouded by their own values that they do not strategically think about the result.”

“A lot of people are trying to outsmart each other, not actually make change”

La Rue talks about the anecdote with a refreshing lack of hesitation. Some artists would fret about being cancelled or saying the wrong thing, but they stand firm in their opinions. “Some people spend so long ranting online that it feels like you’ve done something because it’s time-consuming,” they reason. “They actually haven’t done anything constructive for the cause – they haven’t gone to the protest, they haven’t signed the petitions. They’ve just argued. And so that radical love is actually taking that and asking: what’s the most impactful way to spend my energy?”

Part of that energy should be spent looking deeper into the divisions across the country currently, and they give the example of the right-wing UK Reform Party, which is worryingly on the rise. “A lot of the voters of that party want the exact same thing as the left, which is affordable housing and access to healthcare,” they say, “but they’ve managed to play on this fear from people that are feeling like they’re losing their British identity and don’t want to embrace the beauties of British multiculturalism. So they refuse to join the left, even though a lot of our problems are the same.”

For a mixed-race, nonbinary, queer working-class person, holding compassion for the people you are expected to be pitted against is truly difficult and frustrating. But that is exactly the message of ‘Starface’, whether it’s navigating rocky romantic territory, battling your inner demons, or even just existing. “The people who are capitalising off of us are counting on working-class communities being completely divided at the moment,” La Rue says. “It’s really important for them that we’re busy arguing with each other.

“There’s a lot of people who are racist as fuck in this country,” they continue, rapping their hands on the table, “and I’ve been positioned like I should hate them, right? And I’m like, wait – working-class white British people haven’t had access to education, and they have literally been tricked into thinking that immigrants are the enemy.

“I should hate this person – no, I feel total compassion,” La Rue declares. “How can we think we’re so much better than them? That’s radical compassion for me.”

Lava La Rue’s ‘Starface’ is out now via Dirty Hit

Listen to Lava La Rue’s exclusive playlist to accompany The Cover below on Spotify and here on Apple Music

Words: Alex Rigotti
Photography: Jamie Waters
Hair & Makeup: Maya Man at Stella Creative Artists using Ultra Violette
Label: Dirty Hit

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