“It’s scary how many St. George flags there are”: Blood Orange on returning home to Essex and mourning his mother | Dave Haynes

DYvonte Haynes tells me how he returned to live in his childhood home in Ilford, east London, when he was 37, after his mother fell ill. “It was a surreal experience,” he says of his sudden move from Brooklyn, where he makes music like Blood Orange, to sleeping in the bedroom where he once put up posters of David Beckham and the Smashing Pumpkins. “Physically, you’re bigger: your shape has changed. But the space is the same. The memories are the same.”

Haynes returned to England to be at his mother’s hospital bedside, and remained at home for a period after her death in 2023. This tragic turmoil spawned his fifth full-length release, Essex Honey, a clear contender for album of the year. It’s a record grounded in sadness but alive with the flashes of memory that came with returning home on the edge of Essex. A record that sounds more like the place he left nearly two decades ago.

Hynes began in the 2000s making dance punk with Test Icicles and indie pop as Lightspeed Champion, then settled into influential, groove-led R&B like Blood Orange, and was sought out as a songwriter by Solange, Mariah Carey, Carly Rae Jepsen and others. Fields, a classic collaboration with Third Coast Percussion, was nominated for a Grammy in 2021. But Essex Honey exists at a slight distance from all that came before it: full of sweeping, ambient vistas that range from melancholy to sublime like an estuary sky, where the lyrics meditate on death, youth and the restorative influences of the English countryside.

Haynes is speaking to me from New York, a rare moment at home before he embarks on a tour that will weave headlining solo dates with arena support slots for Lorde, who appears on the album. “There’s a lot of work that needs to be done after someone dies… a lot of logistical work that needs to be done,” he says of the days and weeks after his mother’s death. “I was very aware that I had to do my job at this point. And so I was. But, you know, in the back of my mind, I kept thinking, like, I feel like this is going to happen Bite me “Sometime in the future.”

He was scheduled to tour his classic compositions in 2023, including at the Sydney Opera House. “I wanted to keep going. And then I said… I couldn’t imagine doing it. I talked to my sister about it. Sometimes you just need someone’s blessing to say, ‘No, it’s okay. You don’t have to do this.’ Instead, he took time off to grieve, eventually renting a place in Paris. He wasn’t planning on making a record about his mother’s death, but he found himself working on tracks just to process things.

The most direct autobiography is The Last of England. It begins with a screenshot of a dinner table conversation his sister had with his mother over Christmas 2022. “I think we were talking about the Beatles, and my nephew was in the background running around screaming,” he says. “But its significance is that it became the last Christmas we spent together, and the last time I saw my mother outside the hospital.” The song goes on to describe the horrific life of being in a hospital room after your mother dies. He sings: “There’s nothing to do but leave / Follow the corners of the room / They gave me a knitted heart / I wash my hands and stare down the drain.”

“I was interested in being very literal and not having real metaphors, either musically or lyrically,” Haynes says. A hospital worker gave him a knitted heart after his mother died. “I really like [my work to be] To this point. There’s crazy beauty in that.

I He was keen to talk to Haynes about Essex Honey after he said in an interview how my book The Invention of Essex: The Making of an English County helped him look again at the place where he grew up. For me, Essex represents the social and political revolutions in the country more generally, from the landing of the Windrush at Tilbury to the rise of Thatcherism among the rising working class. I wrote the book to try to tell this story behind where I came from, how it became a separate place in the British unconscious after industrialization, socialism and war led to a mass movement of people from the East End of London starting over there. Hines and his family were part of a later wave of that movement.

He was born in Leytonstone, east London, in 1985, before his parents, Wendella and Lewis, moved the family east to Ilford, a town that is technically part of Greater London but which Haynes still considers Essex, as it was before the capital’s city limits expanded outwards in the 1960s. Wendella was a nurse and eventually became a health visitor around Dagenham, “coming back with these horror stories of teenage pregnancies and young people’s addictions and abusive partners, or older people who were somehow unattended and uncared for.” Lewis did many odd jobs, initially engineering work before becoming a maintenance caretaker at Marks & Spencer in Ilford town centre. Hines got his first job there, too, as a janitor, which he calls his version of nepotism.

He says Ilford was a “closed” and strange place to grow up, partly due to the fact that it had no underground transport lines (on his return to the UK, Hines was so amazed to find Ilford connected to central London by the New Elizabeth Line that he included a lyric about it in The Last of England).

Music entered his life through piano lessons with a teacher who would tap the keys with her pen if he played a wrong note. At nine he started playing the cello (played by Essex Honey) and joined the school orchestra. It was a private kind of solace, practiced in his bedroom as an escape; The guitar came later. Essex Honey channels this isolation, nodding to other formative cultural influences: The Field samples Vini Reilly’s gorgeous guitar from Durutti Column; While Westerberg incorporates a cover of an alternative song’s chorus; And the piano-led closing bars of Mind Loaded are like a barely-remembered hardcore tune that recalls his sister’s love of Ministry of Sound rave. Part of the opening track, Look at You, tips for the British Channel 4 sitcom Desmond: “The actor who portrayed Desmond [Norman Beaton] “I’m from Guyana, where my mother is from, so I’ve always felt a special connection,” says Hines.

Hines left home as quickly as he could, and immersed himself in London’s frenetic music scene of the 2000s, but felt a stark class difference between himself and his new friends in west London. “My background seemed different, and it wasn’t just based on cultural differences or being ‘first generation’ or anything like that. I actually felt like I was from a different place,” he says, meaning Ilford’s working-class background, not the media backgrounds of others in the scene. “Even my friends who lived in Forest Gate or Bethnal Green, and even that part of east London, which is still very close, felt disconnected.”

Test Icicles, a three-piece he formed as an 18-year-old in east London, was jokingly named for what they thought would be a short-lived thing (they were originally called Balls), and their energy outstripped their songwriting prowess. They broke up in 2006 before touring the US, but Hines kept his visa, moved to New York and, after naming himself Lightspeed Champion, paired country-style acoustic guitar with a baroque sensibility. However, his true revelation as a songwriter came when he began “Blood Orange” in the early 2000s. One of the first songs Haynes wrote for the project was Forget It, a masterclass in soulful simplicity: Young Marble Giants meets D’Angelo. The whole project was more emotionally present, more immediate, and more daring than anything he’d done before, and more directly influenced by black music..

Haynes had the title of Essex Honey, Blood Orange’s fifth album, years before he had any music – “I love the sound and how the words connect” – and he had unfinished business to think about back home on the Essex border. For years, his background bleeds into the songs as he focuses on the violence he experienced as a teenager, when he was beaten so frequently that his mother enrolled him in karate lessons. A song with Skepta, High Street, from the 2013 album Cupid Deluxe, had a lyric about Hynes “Racing down Ilford Lane go home / Thinking about should I try to fake falling” after he jumped. Negro Swan contains a Dagenham Dream, with a description of how “broken teeth and a bloody nose” led him to “cut a line” in one of his eyebrows to fit in and “act like others to get around”.

He learned to skateboard as an alternative to taking the bus because the 387 bus that brought him home from his school in Chadwell Heath could be so brutal. “[The threat] We will be building with all these kids in different schools and it will get very intense. There will always be some sadness or I will be absolutely terrified. His only currency was being a great footballer, playing at county level for Essex and for the Dagenham & Redbridge youth team, which meant that although the streets remained dangerous, he was not bullied at school itself. “Football really saved me,” he says. He still plays, meeting every Wednesday in New York for a five-a-side match with regulars including Strokes striker Julian Casablancas (Haynes has always played as an attacking winger, while Casablanca is a “fairly classic number nine”).

Another friend, Zadie Smith, his former New York City neighbor, appears on the album singing with powerful vibrato on Vivid Light. “She was back in town for some book engagements, and came over to my apartment to hear what I was working on,” he says. “I played her this song, and I put the microphone in her face. And I started doing announcements. It’s something we’ve done before, and we’d usually comment on her voice, sitting around her piano. So it all seemed very natural.”

Haynes’s artistic relationship with England in Essex Honey is complex, but keenly perceptive in a way that reminds me of Smith. He says he lives in a bubble in New York and finds it easy to distance himself from Trump 2.0 in general, but returning to the UK earlier this year with another New York football friend, photographer Adam Powell, was another matter. “He’s from Essex – he’s got swords [from the Essex flag] “It’s been tattooed, too,” says Hines. The couple were walking around and taking photos, including a stunning photo shoot in the Essex moors around Rainham. “And I couldn’t believe how many flags there were there.” Everywhere they went, they saw the English flag flying: a craze that had recently spread across the country and had taken on a racist and xenophobic tone, ongoing. On the principle of “us and them”. “I’ve been seeing him [online] And I knew that, but… it was really intense. “Honestly, it’s very scary.”

Hines used to cross the road to avoid pubs displaying trade union logos in Dagenham at a time when the far-right British National Party was on the rise – he knew what it meant – and feared today’s flags were a harbinger of the UK’s political future. “It doesn’t look good,” he says. “It seems like reform will do that. I don’t know if people fully acknowledge that, but it’s terrifying.”

But it would be an understatement to say you can hear the sadness for a country in Essex Honey. On the contrary, it is as if by registering loss he also provided a blueprint for connecting to place again. In that childhood bedroom, he stared at the streets outside and wondered how things remained as he had always known them, for better or for worse. “Looking out my window is the same. This street doesn’t change.”

Essex Honey is available now on Domino/RCA. Blood Orange’s UK tour begins on November 7 at London’s Alexandra Palace