Interview with Ramsgate's Maxine Scott… on busking, pop-soul the debut EP
Single ‘Sinner’ has seen Scott go independent and earned rave reviews
All Images - Louisa Wilkie
Hailing from Ramsgate, Maxine Scott (@maxinescottt) has been on our radar for some time now.
Her pop-soul tracks and influences from the likes of Jorja Smith and Sasha Keable have seen Scott don the stages at such venues as London’s Jazz Cafe and The Blues Kitchen. While her biggest track to date, New To This, has garnered 78,000 plays on Spotify, new single Sinner has seen Scott go independent and earned rave reviews and some high-profile plays. We thought it was high time to have a chat.
I think the first time we saw your work you were at Ramrock Records in Ramsgate?
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I was.
And now you’ve got an EP being recorded! Has music always been the goal for you?
I lived in Ramsgate all my life, really, and loved singing from a young age – it’s one of those cliché stories, you know, I loved singing and would wake my parents up at 4am by singing. I was always participating in school plays and school shows. And from there I studied music at the Academy of Contemporary Music in London. My parents wanted me to do a bit more of an academic route, but I took some A-levels at Chatham House and failed those miserably. So I was, like, ‘I’m just going for see what I love’. ACM was great to network and to be around that sort of environment.
Finishing your studies, what were your first footsteps to becoming a musician or recording artist?
I came back and was having conversations and talking to Jo Wallace because obviously she’s well known around Ramsgate for Ramrock. I sent her some music I’d been working on because I learned to kind of produce myself. And she really liked it. I spent a good few years and had a good few releases with them, which was great. Now I’m releasing my debut EP independently, which is exciting. I decided to do that because I just believe that it’s going through a different direction.
Amazing – so what does the day look like for you? Are you writing and recording all the time? Have you still got a day job?
It’s an interesting story. I moved back after university and was working as a chef at my dad’s restaurant, the Royal Harbour Brasserie. That’s been the family business most of my life.
Last year I was thinking ‘You know, I’ve been here too long’. I was still doing some gigs in London and was with the label. And then my dad fired me from the job!
Ha ha! Excellent! That’s one way to get things moving!
And so I was, like, ‘OK, I’m not going to go and get another job. I’m gonna go and do music full-time’. So I started busking in London and just haven’t looked back since.
From that I’ve been booked up performing in hotels around London. It’s good to pay the bills! And then my artist stuff is the thing that I want to grow and eventually be touring around the world!
OK, so you’re busking – did you have to get a licence for that? Or do you just go and do it?
You do have to and the busking police are a little bit hot on it. But me and my guitarist, we just kind of go a bit rogue sometimes. They tried to tell us ‘Oh, you know you got to get a licence. You can’t play here!’. But there’s loads of people going against it at the moment because it’s not actually illegal.
“It’s funny, in busking lots of people go down this conventional route, with all this gear with all these pedals and all the signs, and I know it’s all good, but we just came along with this little Behringer speaker, no sign, just singing really good, old-school jazz tunes. We’ve earned good money from it. So it’s been good.
Have you got some favourite spots?
Liverpool Street is good. We started off in Piccadilly, so it’s always nice to go back there. You always get big crowds in Piccadilly.
Nice. Do you ever mix in some of your own stuff? To test it out?
Yeah, of course. And when they drop pennies for it, you know it’s a good song! Honestly, it’s taught me so much because you have to learn how to work the audience. It’s actually more psychological than you think. It’s good for your nerves – I had a lot of stage fright – so it’s good for building up your confidence and just talking to people. Also no one really gives a sh*t apart from you, so you’ve just got to break that barrier down.
I suppose it’s good for concentration, too, because anything can happen – like a pigeon landing on your head…
So true! What I find really interesting is I find it easier to get in the flow state when I’m busking on the street rather than on stage. There’s so much expectation when you’ve got an event or you’re at a live venue. People are just constantly walking past and, yeah, I do get crowds every so often, but when the crowds come I’m already in a flow state. So I’m not even worrying about the crowds – I’m just giving the best performance I possibly can.
You have played some very big venues, though, like the Jazz Cafe.
Yeah, I’ve done the Jazz Cafe, Hootananny Brixton, The Blues Kitchen and a few others.
So the live gigs are in support of songwriting and recording the EP right now?
I’ve dropped off a little bit with the songwriting because when you’re trying to produce an EP so much effort goes into finalising it all – my creativity is going into that and making sure I can fund everything as well. So, it’s working a lot, which is performing, which isn’t bad because it’s really making my voice strong even after just six months of doing this.
Tell us a bit about the EP.
I’m working alongside one of my friends, Strama. She’s an artist, but she also produces, so we’ve been working with each other for a couple years now. And we wrote all these tunes a while back. It’s now all coming to fruition. It’s coming out, I’m saying, in the summertime 2024.
And it sounds like you have a plan after that…
After the EP is done, I will be promoting it for the next year. But in the background I’ve already been in contact with some new producers – through busking, actually. One of the guys I’m in contact with, he’s a producer who has been off to LA to record with Ed Sheeran and things like that and he liked all the stuff I sent him. He wants to get in the studio for a trial and if that door does open we could potentially work on a bigger project.
You know, for the next few years, I want to constantly evolve as an artist, trying to take the next step.
