Tayla: pop's most audacious new star

'I wrote and recorded Call Me Danger in a day,’ says Tayla of her wildly catchy debut single which, with its mix of hip-hop, pop and RnB, is set to become a staple of the party season’s playlists. ‘But sometimes a song can take 25 minutes. It’s like magic, in a weird way. I just feed off whatever’s around me.’

The 23-year-old star is getting used to life in the fast lane — just a few months ago, no one had heard of her. Now, with her upbeat fusion of 90s-meets-00s G-funk, Tayla has bewitched critics from The New York Times, whose Playlist column picked up her debut single Call Me Danger in August, to Vice, who hailed the single as ‘a summer banger’.

Last month, she headlined London’s Sink the Pink: Under the Sea ball — a self-proclaimed ‘gigantic, genre-bending, expectation smashing, polysexual party’ staged for 3,000 screaming club kids. They brought their best looks; she brought her infectious hooks. From the stage of the Troxy, she could make out a sea of costumes beneath the house lights — sailors, mermen, seamen, octopussies — and then, in the mix, her 45-year-old mum, Michelle. ‘It was the first live show of mine she’d ever seen,’ says Tayla. Didn’t her mum feel out of her element? ‘She’s a party animal — just like me.’

It’s clear that not much fazes Tayla. She’s the kind of person who would jump out of a window for a laugh — she once did, on a dare, out of a house, one storey up. ‘Clearly I was drunk,’ she says. ‘There was grass there, thank God...’ Her video for Call Me Danger sees her free-wheeling around Soho on rickshaws with her real-life pals Becca and Cherry. It’s a portrait of her youth, of sorts, she says. ‘It was about creating our own party wherever we were.’

Born Tayla Malcolm, she grew up in Birmingham with her mother, a carer, her younger brother, Troy, and younger sister, Trinity. (There’s a dad too, whom she has a ‘weird relationship with’ and prefers not to talk about. ‘It’s in the past,’ she says.) She was bounced between higher and further education colleges Matthew Boulton and South & City, ‘a rebel’ who was ‘constantly kicked out of school’. ‘I put glue on the teacher’s seat once,’ she admits. ‘I played the class clown a lot — but that’s because I really like entertaining people. If I’ve done that, then I’m happy, whatever the consequences.’

After leaving school for good at 16, she joined a 30-man dance group, Tru Street, picking up B-boy, pop and dance moves (her party trick is doing the worm), while also putting in the hours on Birmingham’s open-mic night scene. ‘The open-mic nights always used to shake me up,’ she says. ‘Everyone’s watching you, nothing else is going on, just me, and the fear of f***ing up.’

There were second jobs she held down to support her dreams: waitressing at a Premier Inn, retail at Carphone Warehouse and Topshop. ‘I was actually in the Oxford Street one recently when I heard Call Me Danger playing,’ she says. ‘You hear your song come on in Topshop and this ball of energy starts from your feet and goes all the way up. You just start to dance, even with people in the queue next to you.’ Before this summer, her big moment was a sleek vocal performance on Minus One, a 2014 track by Belgian house producer Andy Faisca (aka A.N.D.Y.). Then things exploded: she signed with independent label The Shooting Gallery Recordings, wrote Call Me Danger with UK producer Mr Watt and put the single straight out.

Despite burgeoning stardom, Tayla maintains she’s still grounded. She’s poised to move to East London but currently splits her time between the capital and her home town where she does charity work with youth clubs, ‘confidence boosters for people who have been kicked out of school with nothing to do’.

‘It’s hard for kids to be creative when all they’re doing is hanging out on the streets looking — well — like bad people, especially to the cops, or to the public,’ she says. ‘It’s really hard for them to express themselves.’

Relationships are ‘politely off-limits’ but there’s one object of her affection she’s only too happy to discuss: Beyoncé — ‘Queen B!’ —whom she saw at Wembley in July. She was so close she could almost touch her. ‘She could see me,’ laughs Tayla. ‘I feel like any moment now, she’s going to shout me out.’ Like her hero Queen B, she’s dropped her surname for the stage, not just because she likes the way ‘Tayla’ looks on its own, but also because the full name treatment reminds her ‘of being told off at school’. Does it matter that there’s already the multi-platinum Taylor Swift out there? ‘Nah, I’m not afraid of there being another Taylor.’

And what about the other pressures of being a woman in the music industry? ‘I’m going to dress how I’m going to dress,’ she shrugs (vintage jumpers, hoodies and caps are mixed in with Nike, Adidas and Beyoncé’s Ivy Park). ‘If I don’t feel good in it, then I’m not wearing it.’ Staying true to yourself is a big deal for Tayla. ‘I think the industry needs to get its confidence back,’ she shrugs.