WATCH: A woman on a musical mission is latest Limerick Person of the Month

A local  woman who has been putting her own unique stamp on the Irish music scene has been named the Limerick Person of the Month.

Hip hop and spoken word artist Denise Chaila is among the new wave of Irish female artists who are enjoying growing success in 2020.

Denise is the highest-charting Irish female soloist so far in 2020.

“This is a huge surprise. I get a lot of people telling me I can’t be from Limerick because of my accent, or they just see a black woman and think ‘obviously not’ but I’m really proud of being from Limerick, incredibly so. This is the city that shaped me into adulthood. I’ve lived in a lot of places but it takes a lot for me to call somewhere home,” said Denise who was presented with the Limerick Person of the Month award at the Clayton Hotel.

Denise was raised in Zambia until the age of eight when her family moved to Dublin. The family had spent a year in Dublin when she was three years old. Having lived in Dublin for 10 years the Chaila family relocated to Limerick in 2012 to facilitate Denise’s father’s work.  Elijah is a consultant neurologist at University Hospital Limerick while Denise’s mother Lydia works as a radiographer in the hospital in Ennis. Her parents, she says, are her heroes, in very different ways.

“I moved here in 2012 at the age of 18. I met all of the people who nurtured me into a musician here - all of the people who gave me the final push to go for this - they were all from Limerick. Limerick is the place I came to and people embraced me and made me look beyond my doubt and I think it’s really apt because where but a place called Limerick to go and discover yourself as a lyrcist,” she smiled.

Denise initially studied politics and international relations in UL but left the course before her third year “because I was like ‘I really want to do music’ and it was really difficult as the course progressed to commit myself to academic study”.

And so she spent a year doing music with Music Generation who gave her “a lot of love and confidence”.

She then did a two-year stint studying sociology and English, again in UL, “because I loved the teachers there - my teachers in UL have been life-changing.”

However, she was “too stubbornly attached” to her musical dreams to finish the course.

So who were Denise’s musical inspirations growing up? 

“Lauren Hill was my big inspiration,” she announced.

“Sister Act 2 did a lot for me. If you re-watch that movie and hear the way I talk and speak and the things I care about, it’s almost a direct parallel of how I felt growing up. Beyonce then was the first example I ever saw of what it was like to witness a black woman in the era I live in aspire to and achieve things far and beyond what I thought could be achieved. And Samantha Mumba was always a big part of my childhood. She is also a Zambian woman.”

Her parents, she says, have been her “backbone” something she is particularly conscious of since Covid-19 struck the world. 

“Music suddenly changed as Covid hit and the dynamic of the industry became this constantly moving terrain. It was like I was standing on solid ground and all of a sudden an earthquake happened. They have been such an encouragement and support”.

Sadly, Denise has lost family members in Zambia to Covid.

“It makes it very, very real on several different levels.”

In terms of the music industry, she is frustrated at how the Government “has consistently turned a blind eye to funding and safeguarding those people who are also doing emotional work and working to the bone in an unforgiving climate while not knowing where rent is coming from”. 

“I have been forced to wonder over the last number of months if artists are really seen as citizens and as contributors to society the way they were claimed to be at the beginning of the pandemic because surely, if so, there would be a lot more effort to protect and to just ensure that the future of the arts and music industry in Ireland is successful and has a future beyond Covid. I’m personally very lucky to have the ability to come back to my parents - not everybody has that. I have to find a way to survive. If I didn’t have such a good relationship with my parents and if they didn’t understand how difficult the music industry is, I would really be in a desperate position and a lot of people are in a desperate position”. 

She says there is “nothing consistent” for her at the moment in terms of an income from music.

“But I have been busy over the last number of months with Courage and Other Voices which started something really beautiful in my life.”

Her success means she is “enjoying and negotiating and very anxious about a level of visibility that I never had to navigate before”.

“It’s not lost on my that these types of opportunity are not being handed out to everybody.

“There are a few things that are marked out for the next two months but they are not consistent. It wouldn’t be enough to make a living out of. If I tried to get a month of rent on the gigs I wouldn’t be able to survive.”

She is releasing a mixed tape after October followed by an album “maybe in another year or two”. She has a new release coming out on August 29 which she is “very excited about”.

The song that has got her name out to a wider audience, Chaila, she says “has completely changed my life”. An ode to her heritage it pokes fun at the often mispronunciations of her Zambian surname.

The song - which has reached Number 8 - is the hip hop/spoken word artist's first to receive a music video and follows her televised performances on Other Voices and Songs From An Empty Room on RTÉ.

And while some people say she sounds American, “I’ve never been there,” Denise admitted.

Her ultimate goal music-wise? “I just want to do work to the best of my ability to the highest level.”