The lineup: Anita Blay (vocals, songs).
The background: There have been a couple of attempts of late to foist a homegrown Kelis - a scary hi-tech hippie-chick - on the British people, notably Ebony Bones earlier this year and Shingai Shoniwa of Noisettes last year, and they've generally been met with excitement from the press but raised eyebrows from the public, who either can't handle the aggressive exuberance, or recoil from what they perceive to be a media creation with no real substance to back it up. As with the above radical femmes, the 22-year-old Anita Blay, a brash, colourful black east London daughter of Ghanian parents who, as thecocknbullkid, offers a clash of electro-trash and soul flash with a dash of grime, looks good on paper, and indeed in one (music) paper she has been hailed as "probably the most interesting thing to have come out of London since Klaxons". She's got all the right ingredients - attention-grabbing image, powerful voice that can do the MIA-ish rapid-fire stun-gun sing-speech thing or proper R&B warbles - and her self-penned songs are catchy confections with interesting insights about sex and death, beauty and depravity, in the city. In fact, because of the way she sings, and because of the way she writes, she's been described as a cross between Morrissey and Neneh Cherry. Cherrissey, then.
Now that we think about it, in a way she's a latterday, one-woman Yazoo, with Blay doing the warm-vocal Alison Moyet parts and the cold electronics being handled by her collaborator: producer and Metronomy founder member Joe Mount. Actually, Yazoo is a good reference point: the demo for one of her new songs, Attention, has one foot in the modern world of MIA, even Missy, but the synth-lines remind us of the simple but effective two or three-note keyboard melodies on all those old-style futurist Yazoo or Human League hits. But the first thing you're going to hear from thecocknbullkid is her debut single On My Own, which is a camp, vampy, slow, sparse, throbbing spurt of vaudeville techno, with shades of OutKast's recent forays into jumping jive, featuring a fuck-off lyric that makes it an I Will Survive for the Hoxton Bar & Grill set. She can do electro (Shake), she can straddle the line between grime and twitchy-tempo R&B (There's a Mother in Our Bed), but whether she can find an audience for her sassy brat-funk - "Pop should never just be saccharine," she says, "it should be black and tortured, too" - remains to be seen.
The buzz: "Freudian kitchen-sink stories set to Timbaland-lite beats. DIY pop brilliance."
The truth: She's not militant enough to rival MIA nor malleable enough to be a pop muppet, so she's going to have to carve a new niche for herself.
Most likely to:Cause a minor furore down at Glastonbury, where she's performing next week.
Least likely to: Inspire Morrissey to work with Metronomy.
What to buy: On My Own is released by Need Now Future on July 7.
File next to: Spektrum, Ebony Bones, Neneh Cherry, Kelis.
Links: www.myspace.com/thecocknbullkid
Tomorrow's new band: We Have Band.
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