Interview with Yasmin Coe: ‘Give Time is about unrequited love…I’ve turned it into a powerful song’

Hull-based singer Yasmin Coe has released a new single today, ‘Give Time’, a beautiful, mellow track that is delightfully rocky when it kicks off.

‘I wrote it sort of last year, I’ve been working with it for ages, to be fair. It started off acoustic. It’s about unrequited love and being messed around by boys,’ she said. ‘I’ve turned it into a powerful song and I’m really happy with how it turned out.’

As the song goes: ‘Give you time to make up your mind, is this too soon, shall I give you a little more room? Give you time to make up your mind, face the truth and learn to love someone like everyone loves you.’

Most of the song was recorded before lockdown, with drummer John Andrew – of Kingmaker fame – adding in extra parts during lockdown. ‘He’s a friend of my parents, so I was gigging with him when I was 12,’ she laughed. ‘It helped with confidence and I learned a lot from that and how to develop songwriting.’

‘My voice can sound different in different songs’

Incredibly, Coe started releasing songs about her friends when she was just 12 but appreciates that the nature of her songs – as well as her voice – has changed over the years. ‘I’ve noticed how my voice has changed since I was 16 (she’s 19 now). It sort of depends on the emotion in the song as well, so my voice can sound different in different songs.’

She has covered some important topics in her songs to date. One of her most powerful tracks is ‘Cheap Leather’, which came out in 2018, and which is very riff-driven. ‘It’s about boys in bands,’ she said. ‘They start out and think they’re all this and that. They take advantage of girls and do things they shouldn’t do. On the surface level, it’s just mussing them off but on a deeper level it’s about people talking about that because female artists don’t want to be pushed around any more. It’s also really important to feel comfortable when you go to gigs and to put the message out that what they do is not ok.’

The song attests to that: ‘But this is what love feels like from a rock star man in a rock star life, he can play a love song and you’ve waited for so long and this is what it feels like from a man who always takes his time to talk to the girls enchanted by his spell.’

Another track, ‘Sleep It Away’, deals with mental health: ‘I wrote it when I was about 15 about teenagers dealing with mental health. More people are talking about it but it’s still a big issue, with teenagers turning to alcohol and smoking as a coping mechanism, so it’s based around things I’d seen and experienced. We’re seeing it again on lockdown. Recently, I’ve experienced how much it can affect my friends.’

She acknowledges that at the beginning of lockdown, ‘everything was very scary to everyone’, not least for her and her friends because their A levels were cancelled and says she coped by going to the countryside a lot to connect with her emotions. Despite the government fiasco, which involved using an unreliable algorithm to determine students’ grades – rather than use the predicted grades given by the teachers – she got her place at Manchester university to study English lit. However, she is understandably irked by the whole experience, which caused ‘absolute uproar’ for everyone involved, not least because of the clear bias involved. ‘They see Hull as a deprived area, so the algorithm lowered our grades, even though I went to Wyke, a good college in Hull. By the time we could use our predicted grades, some of the university places had been filled, so people couldn’t go.’

‘Music is definitely the career I want to go into’

And while she says ‘music is definitely the career I want to go into’, she took the decision to study something else at university to offset the precarious nature of the business, thereby ‘gaining some extra skills’.

Hull was the UK City of Culture in 2017 and I ask her whether she thinks the pandemic is likely to erode the legacy of that in any way. ‘City of Culture put Hull on the map and the city had bigger and better acts coming here. I’m worried with COVID that people won’t be thinking Hull City of Culture anymore.’ We talk about Hull’s historic music venue The Polar Bear being saved from administration recently by a crowdfunding campaign, which we both find heartening. ‘We have some bands that keep coming back but now will there be the draw from the outside in? If we build it up enough in the community, maybe there will.’

She is a big fan of local quintet Low Hummer – ‘they’re doing really well’ – as well as indie acoustic guitar singer Jack Conman and garage band Fire (The Unstoppable Force). ‘They’re bonkers onstage!,’ she laughed.

Coe’s musical influences range from The Beatles – ‘I love loads of music from the 60’s’ – to Wolf Alice, Radiohead and The Strokes: ‘I was mainly brought up on indie music. My dad took me to Leeds Festival when I was 13 and that made me think, that’s the music for me.’ When it comes to her dream line up, she’s very reflective: ‘I’d have to bring a band from Hull with me, I’ll take FEVER (a five piece indie band). It’d be a dream to play with The Strokes, Wolf Alice and Black Honey (a Brighton-based indie rock band). After lockdown, I’ll create my own festival!’