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Philly rapper and singer Amanda Blank blew me away the other night when I accompanied my colleague Stanley Black to view a one-night-only performance at the Hoxton Square Bar and Kitchen, Shoreditch. I did not really know what to expect: I’d heard snippets of her album on her cleverly marketed MySpace page (http://www.myspace.com/amandablank). Despite a few funky beats, I did not think much of it.

We arrived as press and took the front of the stage to begin the assessment. She was supposed to be on at 10:30pm but it was 10:40 now and we weren’t impressed. I also wondered why there was a lady on the steps to the stage in front of me wearing a cloak, and not much else. She had no shoes on and kept knocking back mouthfuls of wine from a bottle. It was so classy. Having been standing for nearly twenty minutes now, Stanley Black enquired whether I thought it would be impolite to ask this lady to move over while we continued to wait.... Then this lady got up and took to the stage like a bat in a warehouse.

 

The Amanda Blank show was very very cool, and having never seen her live before I wondered if all her live performances were as wired as that, or whether she customised it to the London crowd. Dub step, grime, funk, house and pop had places on that stage that night, and the galvanisation of genres left no awkward questions.

As a result, a little bit of research was in order. The child of ex-Hippies, Blank was born and raised in Pennsylvania. She’s a prominent part of the emerging Rock Philly Crew and her collaborations to date have been vast: Spank Rock / Sweathart / Palstic Little / Ghostface Killah / M.I.A. / Santigold. I thought I recognised that unhindered, unnerved expression of dirty sounds. As M.I.A. and Santigold had been before her, Amanda Blank is one of Grammy-award nominee Diplo’s current muses. This is evident on the Santigold remix collaboration of “I’m a Lady”.

 

 

 

Blank releases her first album, “I Love You” this year. Her first release is Track 9: Might Like You Better, an electro-pop-funk track admitting what a lot of girls might think but not say. This fine lady is one to watch. For a list of her future appearances, refer to her MySpace page, but word on the street is that she won’t be back in London for a while.

 

Augusta Onyiuke-Eluma