Good For The Environment: Ebony Bones

As you might expect from someone who embellishes her own clothes and has built the foundations of her music career on her own, Thomas comes from a creative and hard-working family. As a child, her mother’s job in the fashion industry often took her to Italy, which meant Thomas spent her days after school helping her father run his music stall in Brixton Market. “It was quite a turbulent time in Brixton and here was this guy selling random reggae and punk tracks and opening up the community to different styles of music – I found that really inspiring,” Thomas says, fondly. “So for me I couldn’t help but be influenced by all of that I think.”

Thanks partly to her father’s eclectic taste, Thomas spent much of her childhood listening to music that isolated her from her friends. “When everyone is listening to Fivestar and you’re listening to old post-punk tracks then you’re the odd one out in the classroom when you’re six,” she recalls. “And it was that, there was Fivestar and Mc Hammer and New Kids on the Block in the charts and I wasn’t a fan of any of them…actually, I lie, I loved Fivestar.” Thomas emits her trademark cackle. “But I loved everyone from Sousxie Soux and The Banshees to Funkadelic and George Clinton…all the greats, David Haselhoff, Timmy Mallet.”

Thomas says that her music is “very much representative of the melting pot of London”; of the city’s “different cultural ethnicities”, and, contrary to the intimidating anti-male lyrics of her debut single proper, ‘Don’t Fart On My Heart’, “empowering for all”. She continues: “You know, guys have as much to say to girls as girls do to boys. I’ve never been shy about embracing my masculinity as a female but then I think that comes from only listening to a lot of empowered females like Bjork, Grace Jones, Annie Lennox, The Slits – women who weren’t about being a little totty on the stage and just singing it as it was.”

Thomas is currently working on her debut album which, although she remains tight lipped about its contents, she insists “is all coming together very well”. After spending time in studios in New York and Los Angeles with Future Cut, she’s currently working alongside Richard X in London. Despite an already illustrious role call of producers, however, it’s the production work she’s done herself that’s really left her excited. “I think when you’ve invested yourself into it and made the music you just feel so proud,” says Thomas, smiling.

Indeed, after spending the last two years working for herself, Thomas admits that she’s found having to listen to other people’s input hard to adjust to. “It’s very strange to kind of sit in there with somebody else and discuss ideas and, you know, talk about what you want to do with someone else before it pops out,” she says. “I’m used to kind of just having the idea, putting it down and then uploading it, so it’s been a real sort of growing process.”

She might be unconventional, but the plaudits just keep coming for Thomas. This June she’ll make her second appearance at the Glastonbury Festival – last year she made the trip as an unsigned artist – along with her eight-piece backing band, all of whom share her intoxicating flare for fashion and creativity. And then? Well, Thomas is just happy to get this far. “For me, I thought if you didn’t sound like Jamelia or Beyonce you didn’t have a fucking chance in hell,” she says. “For me, it started off as something for my friends to listen to or have a laugh in my house - it wasn’t something that was meant to be ever-growing.”