Connie Constance was always going to get my attention, if only for the fact that one of my daughters is called Connie and my grandmother was called Constance. (Her real name is equally good: Constance Power). After the name the musical attention first started at Brighton’s Great Escape in 2016 where having watched her languidly gilt-edged set in a seafront club I tweeted: “Connie Constance is the new queen of cool.” Then a couple of months after that she put out a video for Lose My Mind and it was clear that Connie meant business. (For regular readers of the blog, click here, watch the first 10 seconds of the video and you’ll understand why I think that).
Now Connie raises the game again with new single Fast Cars (which is nothing to do with the late 80’s hit of a similar name by Tracy Chapman) and its accompanying video.
Connie’s musical upbringing was a mixed one, having hung out at school with all the indie kids listening to the likes of Blur, The Smiths and Arctic Monkeys and then outside of that she would be with friends who listened to R&B and hip hop. It’s the latter influence that seems more to the fore on this new single. It’s a love song that considers the often vacuous want of materialism: “You want fast cars and movie stars, but I want to train in the deep end,” she sings. The song is accompanied by a video that echoes the theme of the lyrics but also casts Connie and her friends as rich aristocrat, a Marie Antoinette type figure. The difference of course is the skin colour. “I wanted to create a universe where people of our backgrounds and skin colours would have lived in castles like Knebworth instead of being cut out of British history,” she says of the video.
With Jorja Smith having broken through with her mellow blend of jazz-soul-pop, given the right breaks Connie Constance could easily be following her as the next one on everyone’s lips.
Connie Constance - Fast Cars (Video)
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