Make no bones about it

The music of London’s Ebony Bones is as
brash and brilliant as her wild wardrobe

POLYCHROME PARTY-STARTER: Ebony Bones

by RUPERT BOTTENBERG

If you don’t know London, England’s Ebony Bones (née Ebony Thomas), don’t worry, you will soon. She’s rather hard to miss with her gigantic hair and absurdist outfits of impossible shapes and every colour in the rainbow, cranked up to maximum saturation.

That multicoloured mash-up is matched by her music. The sounds on the former TV actress’s debut LP, Bone of My Bones, have drawn facile comparisons to MIA and Santigold. They aren’t entirely inappropriate—the latter is echoed in Bones’s tune “The Muzik,” with its lo-fi yet lovable video of fans bugging out in the streets of 20 cities—but Bones certainly has her own thing going on, one that suggests Sesame Street with Clash frontman Joe Strummer its creative director. Equal parts political firebrand and brazen party girl, Bones blends bubblegum bounce with pugnacious punk and international thunder-funk, wrapping it all in an indefatigable, eye-popping spectacle.

Mirror: Before getting into making music, you were acting on stage and TV. Do you feel you carried anything over from that? Not business contacts and such, but rather on the creative side.

Ebony Bones: Well, I was never a great actress—so no, not really. I think I was 12 when I was approached by the head of the Shakespeare Globe to star in his production of Macbeth—as a witch. I was the only child actor in the cast and I’d never acted before, let alone performed Shakespeare, but most of this business is about magic—you don’t know how it happens.

M: I’m particularly interested in your politically oriented songs. “We Know All About U” hints at the sense of “safer, but at what cost?” that many feel these days of heightened surveillance and access to private info.

EB: I feel there’s a far larger more sinister agenda in waiting for us all, worldwide. Democracy, in my eyes, doesn’t even really exist. All I know is that fact can be far stranger than fiction and we must all keep an open and decreeing mind.

M: I love the video for “The Muzik,” which grabs me in a way no big-budget video full of special effects and famous stars ever could. I don’t think I’m the only one. Why do you think that is?

EB: It’s organic, I guess. My label at the time told me they had no money for a video, so I turned to the fans.

M: I’d love to see all those freaks and geeks from “The Muzik” in one place, that would be some party! Barring that, it would be great to see outtakes, the full clips for at least some of the dancers.

EB: Mmm—now there’s an idea.

M: Ebony Bones started as a bedroom solo project but before long, it became a full-fledged band. What were your criteria in selecting these folks?

EB: You have to be able to make a great cup of tea—milky, two sugars. If you can’t, well, then I’m afraid this just isn’t gonna work.

M: Apparently, your fans have started showing up at concerts appropriately costumed and/or masked. Do people seem to get a lot wilder and crazier when they’re in costumes?

EB: With or without a mask, most people are generally crazy. They’re just waiting for the opportunity to show it.

WITH A-ROCK AND SHAYDAKISS AT
LE BELMONT ON MONDAY, FEB. 8,
10 P.M., $15