Watching LYNKS (formally LYNKS Afrikka) perform is unlike anything else you are likely to experience, with stunning avant-garde costumes always complete with a full mask, dancers synchronizing to blasting electronic beats and a heavy dose of both hilarity and politicism.
An uncompromising artist who inhabits the DIY spirit with vigour, the entity of LYNKS was conceived at a house party when an impromptu performance changed their musical direction from Elliot Smith to Peaches in one swift blow. They have since released EP’s ‘Smash Hits’ 1 and 2, as well as their latest installment ‘Men’, expanding on the satiristic portrayal of straight male culture that they tackle so well.
On the second day of The Great Escape, the London based powerhouse leapt onto the stage at 12pm raising the crowd from any hungover stupor they may have found themselves in and giving the festival goers a what for.
Afterwards, Clash sat down with them to dig a little deeper under the mask..
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So I have to ask, how are you finding The Great Escape so far?
It’s been fun, though so far all I’ve done is get a wristband, performed for 20 minutes, and now I’m here!
Are you looking forward to seeing any other acts?
Yes, I am, definitely MUNA. Also PVA, Katy J Pearson, Cassyette. I have a lot of mates who are playing so I’m gonna be doing the loyal friend thing where you go to a music festival with hundreds of new artists and just watch all my friends’ sets.
You gotta support your mates! I saw your performance this morning – it was brilliant, so much energy and I loved the moves in ‘Silly Boy’! Do you have a favorite song to perform?
At the moment it probably is ‘Silly Boy’! It’s probably my favorite song I’ve got out so far. I always say, when I’m trying to write a LYNKS song, there’s three things I want to do. Number one: banging, heavy dance beat. Number two: make it funny and three: have some kind of deeper message about the world. If I can do any two of those I’m happy but I feel like Silly Boy is one of the few songs I’ve managed all three. It’s so satisfying performing it and being like fuck you annoying straight boys! And dance you crowd of monkeys! And then also people are laughing so it’s the perfect mix of food groups that make up LYNKS.
I imagine seeing you perform for the first time could be quite a formative experience, is there an artist that made you feel that way when you first saw them live?
Yes absolutely. Do you know Robyn? So I feel like in the last six or seven years there’s been this new wave of ‘poptimism’, but when Robyn was big, pop music was so not cool. If you were ‘into’ music you would not admit that you liked pop. You’d be like this is trash. Now there’s stuff like Grimes’ ‘Artangels’, Carly Rae Jepsen, Charli XCX… pop is a lot more respected.
When Robyn released ‘Body Talk’ I remember being so obsessed with those songs but also thinking, this is so bad, why do I like this?! Then when I was at Latitude when I was 17, all my friends went to see the headliner, Damon Albarn, and I snuck off to see Robyn. Every queer or queer adjacent person who was at the festival was in that crowd and all the straights were at Damon Albarn and the vibe was just amazing. That was when I realised oh, maybe pop music is good! Maybe this is what I love. It was just one of the best gigs ever and maybe one of the best nights of my life.
That sounds wonderful. If you had an endless budget and endless time are there any dream projects you would like to explore?
I have literally infinite ideas… one is having a stage entirely covered in scaffolding and then basing it off of the Cell Block Tango from Chicago where I have like 30 dancers choreographed to move differently on the different levels. Maybe with some stripper poles and gauze so the shadows could be projected larger than life. You know when you’re a kid and you dream about headlining Glastonbury? Yeah that’s what I would do for it. I remember watching videos of some of Kanye’s mad stage setups and dreaming about having that budget. When it gets to the point of being a high budget theater set, that’s where I wanna be. But right now all I have budget for is two dancers and a table, which is still good!
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Incorporating choreography and costume in your sets definitely seems to aid the natural storytelling of the music. Did the LYNKS character develop as an extension of yourself?
I don’t know how much of a character or persona there even is anymore, I feel like me and LYNKS are really quite similar, LYNKS is just a bit more unhinged.
I suppose the character actually used to be quite consciously all of the nasty, insecure, under-the-surface parts of myself that I held back in day to day life. I didn’t really say that openly but that’s what I thought to myself. In the music I would write all the stuff I was scared or insecure about but through the process of doing that I realised all those things weren’t actually that bad and could be seen as good aspects of my personality. I think that my personality has grown closer to LYNKS and LYNKS’s has grown closer to me to the point where we’ve met somewhere in the middle. It’s definitely helped me be more comfortable with all my eccentricities.
So yeah, not so much of a character, more just me on stage and me offstage, me in costume and me out of costume.
I think costume can be a very powerful way of allowing you to let go of inhibitions. Is there a particular performance that will go down as a core memory?
Loads! But Latitude mainstage definitely stands out because it was the first performance after lockdown and still the biggest stage I’ve ever played on. We didn’t expect anyone to be there but there was a massive crowd which was unbelievable. Heaven in London was also insane because we thought we might get 600 people but it ended up being almost full and the crowd was acting like I was Harry Styles or something; rabidly screaming like zombies and they all had crazy makeup on for the queer night so actually like a pack of glittery zombies. It was lowkey terrifying but amazing.
There was also a performance I did early on with not a single person there, which I’ll also always remember as quite a formative experience because we just had so much fun with it regardless, running around the whole venue going mad.
Songs like ‘Str8 Acting’ are delivered quite in a humorous fashion but create an empowering message at the same time, can you talk about your process in creating the songs?
So I used to write music before LYNKS that had much more traditional lyrics and I think I was used to artists writing lyrics that didn’t sound how people sound when they’re speaking. People don’t speak without telling jokes, that’s how our language works and for me when I started writing as LYNKS I realised I didn’t have to use some slightly bullshity poetic voice, I could just write how I speak; full of jokes and chatting shit and swearing. I realised that was so much easier and fun, just saying what came into my mind and being more unfiltered. Obviously that wouldn’t work for all types of music but it definitely works with my songs.
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Did the costume and the movement then develop around those conversational lyrics?
I think when I started, a question I would always ask myself was: what’s more entertaining and then I would follow that. So I thought are we gonna have dancers and choreography? Yes. Sparkly costumes? Yes. A silly table to put the laptop on? Yes. Because they all make it more fun. Are we gonna have instruments? Does that make it more entertaining? No. No one cares.
This might be controversial (I hope not!), but I’ve often thought, should I do the thing that a lot of production heavy artists do where they have a skeleton band, a drummer with some launch pads and part of a backing track… and I decided that I could, but literally why? I’d just be trying to recreate the backing track but doing it a bit shit. Seems like a lot of work for something the audience really don’t care about and as an audience member I think I’d rather see a stage being fully used by the dancing and performing rather than someone whacking pads that make noises that are already in the backing track.
Totally, you take up the stage with your movement already. I’d say the punchiness of the music forces the listener to hear the message, was this a conscious decision?
I think it was Robyn or someone that worked with Robyn (I’m obsessed with Robyn as you can probably tell at this point), they talked about writing the ‘Body Talk’ album with a process where they would take a song that they’d been writing and then methodically go through everything and take out any parts that didn’t feel necessary to the song which you can really hear when you listen to it.
I do add a lot of random sound effects for no reason but I also realise with dance music you don’t want to swamp the listener with a wall of sound so I want to make sure the beat and the lyrics have their exact place and everything is super crispy. That’s why I never put reverb on anything. So yes, conscious but not in a deep way I just think it makes it more fun to listen to!
You’re someone who has quite large community ties with other queer artists and creators, what would you say to someone trying to find their voice within that scene?
I think more than most scenes, within the queer scene I think there’s the capacity for you to really go for whatever you wanna do. We’re all quite used to no one including us in anything so we’re very conscious of inclusivity. This of course applies to some spaces more than others, especially within larger cities, you can normally find some kind of night, however small, that will let you try your material out even if you’re totally new.
If you have’t got mates in the queer community yet which is often the case for younger queers, I genuinly think if you go into a queer venue and you don’t know anyone and you go up to a stranger and say hi, unlike straight spaces you normally get a really nice response. So it’s also about unlearning what you’ve learnt throughout the rest of the world and realising it’s going to be a lot more accepting than other spaces. So really you just have to bite the bullet and do it.
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Words: Oshen Douglas McCormick
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