L.A. Salami releases Ottoline

L.A Salami’s journey of self-discovery is one that extends far beyond music. Born Lookman Adekunle Salami in Peckham, to a Nigerian mother and absent father, various circumstances meant he spent the first few years of his childhood in a foster home and he felt like an outsider for quite some time. “Because I didn’t go to live with my mum until I was like 6 or 7, I sort of always felt locked off from my culture,” he says. “If I grew up with my mum, I’d probably know Yoruba now.” Already feeling like an outcast at home, it was a feeling that echoed throughout his school life, which he says started with two years of “growing pains” before he was able to find his place. “I was a quiet student,” he admits. “The first two years were really bad because, basically, I was like this scrawny little kid. I didn’t have a growth spurt so I was really small, and I had to fight a lot because my two best friends were hench from a young age. I’d get questions as to why I was hanging out with them a lot. People used to catch me all the time and I just had to learn how to fight and stand my ground.”

For Lookman’s small friendship group, there was an unfortunate commonality that bonded them all. “I used to be quite sensitive as a child and there’d be a lot of gang violence around,” he says. “I went to school just off Queens Road—St. Thomas: The Apostle—and a lot of that street stuff would bleed into the school. It used to upset me because we were all in the same sort of situations. Everyone had their thing. I grew up in a foster home. My two best friends, one of them lived with his mum and two sisters in a one-bedroom flat. My other friend, his mum died when he was 15 and she was a single mum. Everyone had their thing, but we didn’t take it out on each other.”

Creativity was always an instinctive outlet for Lookman, but he was never confined to just one medium. In fact, growing up, he’d wanted to combine them all: visual art, music, the written word—everything. “My first love was actually film,” he says. “When I saw Jurassic Park, when I was 7 or something, it blew my mind. Steven Spielberg became my hero and I wanted to become a film director.” Over time, he found himself gravitating towards poetry and music. Punk was an early source of joy (“Punk bands were my shit! I used to always daydream about being a punk band.”), but he always felt like music could only ever be something he consumed rather than created. Until he heard Bob Dylan: “I started seriously playing music after I heard Bob Dylan because I wasn’t a good singer. I think the first time I heard him was when I was around the age of 13. That’s when I started playing my little foster brother’s mini guitar, for about a week, and never touched the guitar again for years and years and years. I realised it’s not about how well you sing—it’s how honest you are and how authentic you are and how much of your truth can you put into a melody.”

Since expanding his palette and loosening the definitions he applies to his own music, Lookman has been looking to modern rap titans such as Kanye West, Drake and Kendrick Lamar—particularly the former’s hunger for experimentation, even if the results aren’t to Lookman’s own tastes. “That’s kind of why rock & roll died: because all the big rock & roll artists stopped being weird and they stopped trying things. Kanye West is constantly being weird, constantly trying things and constantly pushing the boundaries.” That weirdness is something he’s been applying to his own creative process. More than anything, it’s given his music a new level of raw, instinctual beauty, often flitting between singing and a more spoken-word-meets-rap delivery.

With his first two projects—two EPs in 2013’s Another Shade Of Blue and 2014’s The Prelude—L.A Salami explored a post-punk/indie/folk hybrid, and with every drop, he said to himself: “This is the sound.” But as he gets ready to release his fourth studio album, Ottoline, he’s untethered himself from any genre classifications. “I used to describe my music as postmodern blues,” he says, “but these days I just describe it as lyrically-centred, genre-nonspecific music.” Recorded over lockdown, the world’s collective experience of isolation has informed large parts of Ottoline, thematically, ironically the record he’s been working on since is his most collaborative to date. He created the album “with a bunch of people I respect and we tried to make a record that resonates with the post-Covid effects of the world and how it’s affected artists.”

L.A Salami is a triple-threat creative. With his music and work in the film industry catching on by the day, he’s also intent on making a name for himself in the art world and will be connecting the dots between all three to supplement the new album’s release. “Basically, I sell art as my side hustle, selling my prints and stuff,” he explains. “So with this record, I want to launch an art collection I’ve been working on. I really want it to go hand-in-hand with the merch, so I want to get the ball rolling on that soon. From there, hopefully I’ll just keep making records and keep trying to get better at my craft so I can get paid more,” he laughs. 2022 belongs to Lookman.