JAYAHADADREAM

What’s the story behind your name, and how did it come to represent your journey as an artist?

I had a Martin Luther King poster with his famous I Have A Dream speech on it hanging in my hallway throughout my childhood. When I first started rapping, I would use it as an intro. At the time, I was studying philosophy and ethics at A-level, and we were learning about the idea of potential becoming reality — the journey from what could be to what is. That really stuck with me. I thought, “When people listen to my music, it’s like I had a dream.” Then, years from now, when they look back on my work, they’ll be able to say, “Yeah, she had a dream, and she made it happen!"

What’s the strangest thing that’s ever inspired a lyric?

There’s a guy called Danny Elfman, who wrote the soundtrack for The Nightmare Before Christmas and was also in a group called Oingo Boingo, which was this mad band from the ’80s. Then, I’ll be listening to Tracy Chapman and somehow that will inspire my grime bars. In my early music, I used to take lyrics from ’80s groups and rework them in my own way. I also grew up watching a lot of musicals, like Grease and Les Misérables. I love The Rocky Horror Picture Show soundtrack — that theatricality has had a huge influence on my music and the way I create.

What did you study before becoming a teacher?

I did a sociology degree and my dissertation quoted Headie One. It was about the link between drill music and the UK’s austerity cuts. In sociology, there’s this theory called The Sociological Imagination, which talks about how individual issues link to overall issues in society. Being a teacher and rapping is the same thing, but rapping’s better because I can reach more people.