It’s so good to have Denise Chaila back. It’s nearly six years since she released her Choice Prize-winning mixtape which featured one of the soundtracks of the covid era in The Limerick-based Zambian-born rapper is in Connolly’s of Leap on Saturday for the opening date of her first ever solo tour.
Can that be right? It felt like there was a period at the start of the decade where she was ubiquitous — but maybe that was just on our screens, streamed performances that have stuck with us over the years. She’s calling the tour a ‘reintroduction’.
The show lasts over 90 minutes, comprising songs old and new, as well as spoken word interludes a la Frank Ocean’s She talks to the crowd like old friends, including telling us about her breast reduction surgery during the summer, which she got with two days’ notice. She says she’s allergic to opioids, which made the days post-operation a bit fraught. She laughs through the story and the pain.
Fronting an eight-piece band (seven-eighths female), including Beyonce’s former tour dancer Kaitlyn Sardin, Chaila opens with a toast — to the lives we lead, to the dreams we make, the moments we chase, and “the fucked up shit we can’t erase”.
And then it’s into the music. She opens with a new track that gains power over its runtime and finds Chaila declaring: “I’ll find my own way home.” She’s been on a journey over the past couple of years, literally and figuratively.
She went to a place in Brazil with the largest concentration of African people outside of Africa; this is because of history, she says — but history does not belong to the conqueror. She wrote a song about it all called dedicated it to a woman who “taught me how to love and live with my spirits in the world”.
Another new song, came because “I don’t want to just write what I think — I want to write what I feel too”. It’s about the first seven years of her life. Both tracks lean a bit too heavily on acoustic guitar, as do her stories between tracks. It’s not quite muzak, but the arrangements have that coffee-house blend.
The older tracks, maybe because we didn’t experience them as much as we think, still sound fresh. gets a reboot and interpolates Chance the Rapper’s Before the euphoric in the middle of the set, she covers by Destiny’s Child which edges into the Ting Tings’ indie sleaze hit Chaila can be deadly serious but she can also have fun while she’s doing it.
She admits: “I’ve been really reluctant to sing any of the songs from my first mixtape, because I have different relationships now with the people who I made it with and that hurts. I haven’t wanted to say that out loud and so I hid for three years because I was ashamed of myself for not succeeding in keeping those relationships.”
We also get remix from 2022, a take on a Slum Village track that featured on a release from Limerick’s Brian Cross aka B+ called The acoustic guitar keeps picking through her very first release Chaila’s searing spoken-word piece that covers racism, trafficking, predators, and so much more. It’s powerful on its own and doesn’t need any accompaniment to the words.
The night ends with a cover of , an unexpected conclusion to Chaila’s reintroduction. It fits, in a way. Chaila is not returning as the lockdown phenomenon of She’s coming back as a bandleader with unfinished business. We can’t wait to see what she does next.
