QSC Aspiring Interview: Sansha on ‘Swans’ and being unintentionally funny on stage

Blending bedroom pop, elements of jazz and classical, and her unique tongue-in-cheek swipes at finding her way in life and relationships, Sansha is a South-London-based artist and producer. Having performed at Latitude Festival and two runs of her one-woman show at the Edinburgh Fringe, Sansha chats to Headliner about her recent single releases as she looks to build on the success of her third EP, and announces one of her biggest headline shows yet.

A fear that Sansha shares from regularly gigging around the UK capital and her recent foray into compèring live music events is the realisation that so many musicians are trying to ‘make it’. And while she’s right that there are a lot of artists vying for Spotify playlist places and social media followers, there is still plenty of room for the Sansha sound — especially as she is one of few artists who can truly claim to be offering something unique in a saturated scene. This was marked by the release of her 2018 debut EP, A Good Time, a showcase of her individual voice that combines spoken word, operatic yet jazzy vocals, bedroom pop production, and her multi-instrumentalist capabilities on the trumpet and violin.

“I started violin first when I was about five, then I did trumpet, and then I started singing when I was about 11,” Sansha says on where it all started. “I was the freak who would play instruments in school assembly. I was totally inept socially and academically. I was an absolute freak, but I was good at music, so that was why I did it so much, because I couldn't do anything else.”

Another key element of the Sansha oeuvre is her vocal delivery, which sees her swapping between sung lyrics with spoken delivery. The latter is often either bitingly direct or simply very funny. That’s not to say Sansha is a comedy music act like the Lonely Island, although many have remarked that her between-song-banter on stage is so entertaining that it verges on stand-up comedy.

“The comedy aspect wasn't actually deliberate,” she says. “When I first started doing comedic lyrics and being a bit comedic on stage, it just happened like that. I think I'm just quite a literal lyricist, and eventually realised it was kind of funny. And with doing funny stories on stage, I wasn't particularly trying or really inspired by anyone. I was just explaining my songs and a venue owner said to me, ‘Oh, I didn't know you were going to do comedy.’ And I said, ‘Oh, I didn't either.’ Then it became a bit more deliberate after that.”

Of course, there were more overt musical influences, as she recalls “Anyone around my age grew up listening to Kate Nash — I don’t know if you would call her lyrics funny, but they are very on the nose. The talk-singing was definitely inspired by Kate Nash and Lily Allen [Sansha is regularly compared to the latter], that whole era. Who did [sings] ‘Why’d you have to go and put stars in their eyes?’ Jack…? Just Jack!” she remembers. “There were all of these English singers who would use spoken words when I first started writing songs.”

The debut A Good Time in 2018 is a pretty clear manifestation of all this, with its blunt and relatable song content: the opening title track is about a bad family holiday, while The Boy Never Left You Behind is about a time she realised her neighbour on the opposite side of the road was watching her get changed. A Good Time caught on at the BBC, as their BBC Introducing track of the week upon its release.

The music kept coming, with a slew of 2019 singles including the lo-fi goodness of Purple Patches, vocal harmony anthem The Moon, and Blank Fall, each of which makes up some of her strongest songs to date, and three of the five songs on the resulting Story Time EP in 2020.

“Purple Patches is about how my dad gets really affected by the weather and how I think he might have seasonal affective disorder. And it's about depression as well. I feel like the topics of A Good Time were really straightforward, whereas they got a bit more complex in Story Time. The Moon isn’t actually about the moon — it’s about being in a relationship but secretly being in love with someone else.”

More singles ensued, one of which very quickly became the most successful so far — Dream Dancer was released in 2021 and currently sits pretty at almost 250,000 streams on Spotify alone. A disco-infused bop with strings about when her brother was a father-to-be, Sansha released an accompanying music video in which her friends perform the song in a karaoke bar.

Sansha explains one of the biggest driving factors for the success: “Dream Dancer was featured on an H&M playlist that played in places all around the world, like Malaysia and Indonesia. It was really cool. People commented on the music video, saying things like, ‘I'm here in Indonesia, listening to your song in the shop.’

“But for that EP (Big Time) I wasn't using a typical singer-songwriter approach. I was writing in higher BPMs and basically making dance tracks. It was the first time I worked with another producer because Aria Wood reached out to me on Instagram asking if I wanted to collaborate. So I would create the entire track with all the instruments, then send it to her. She would then redo it, but more towards what I was intending. It was a funny process because I would think the track was pretty much done in my demo, but when it came back, it would sound so much fuller.”

Despite much of her music coming across as jovial and these successes she’s enjoyed, Sansha is nonetheless very happy to highlight how difficult it is to be an independent music artist as things stand.

“It's really difficult. What I enjoy most is the in-person stuff — gigging, meeting other artists, and organising gigs. I do like making music, but releasing it sometimes isn't nice, and it's actually affected my mental health this year. It's easy to feel that if your song hasn't done well on Spotify, then your art isn’t legitimate. It can feel like you've made a pretend song, or that your success isn't real. As an artist, there's pressure to be successful or you feel like a failure. I don’t think this is solely due to the current market; it's just part of being a musician.

“You feel the need to prove the legitimacy of your art — if I’m at a barbecue with friends, I feel there’s this pressure to have something to say, like ‘I’ve been on an H&M playlist!’ Otherwise you feel weird or lame. I'm trying to think about what makes your art legitimate if it’s not the industry approving it, because I do believe music can be good without industry approval.”

Thankfully, none of this has deterred Sansha from sticking to her guns and releasing the music she wants to release. And her left-turn into making more dance-inspired music continues to yield fruit with Never Been Better, her first song to come out in 2024. More disco-inspired strings (the music video sees her playing violin on London balconies), an irresistible bass line, while she sings ‘Pain is energising / I feel it pulsing through me.’

“That was so much fun to make,” Sansha says. “That song went through so many iterations. My friend Matt, a producer called Portamento, added a load of analogue synths and changed some sounds, which made it sound completely different and way more upbeat. Then my producer friend Will took all my drums, changed the sounds to make them sharper, and I ended up re-recording everything. It literally took me about a year and a half to finish. I was listening to a lot of Donna Summer and old-school disco.”

And we arrive in the present day with Swans, another exciting turn as Sansha shows her more introspective side, with lush, soundtrack-esque lo-fi piano chords and keys. “I kissed this comedian on a beanbag at the Edinburgh Fringe festival, in one of the bars where all the comedians hang out. I actually went to the Top Secret Comedy Club last month and he was performing — I was dying inside because I’d literally written and released a song about him. When I came back to London, I was still seeing this guy, we weren’t exclusive and we weren’t sure about each other. Secretly, I kept thinking about the comedian. I couldn’t be explicit in my lyrics so I used a lot of metaphors.

“The song is really about how people can become symbolic of things you want but don’t have. I don’t think I was specifically obsessed with him; he symbolised total freedom and being single, which I think I still wanted. So, I was fixating on him and what he represented for me — that’s what the song is about.”

You may have gleaned by now that the Sansha live experience is very special, and highly entertaining, especially now that she’s cut her teeth with her one-woman show at the Edinburgh Fringe. So it’s brilliant to hear her announce one of her biggest London headline shows yet.

“I’m actually announcing my next headline gig today, which is on the 8th of November. It's going to be at The Ivy House in Nunhead, Southeast London. I really wanted that venue, and I'm so glad I've booked it because it's a community-run pub, and the room where they have the music is like going back in a time warp. It feels like an old-school cabaret room, which really fits the vibe of what I want to do. There will be loads of different art forms in my gig, almost like a cabaret, except that I’m going to be doing everything myself.”

And regarding what ‘Play Out Loud’ means to Sansha, she says that it’s “Connecting with people in a meaningful way through music. Because sometimes, if you spoke about the topics of what you're feeling to a group of people just through speech, it would just be really random and intense. But music gives you the opportunity to connect with people in that way.”

The Sansha Cabaret in Southeast London sounds pretty unmissable, so earmark the 8th of November with the Ivy House. In the meantime, Never Been Better and Swans are both out now and demand listening. As if anyone needs a reminder to get a bit introspective, while not taking life too seriously.