She’s a self-confessed hermit who lives her life within six streets. She’s a misfit who wants to look like a ‘posh lady’. The Iranian-born Leila is strange, talented and scary. Graciously, she tells Richard Southern to fuck off…

“You cheeky fucker,” snaps electronic maverick Lelia, with a sly grin. “Stay here, I’m going to make you eat your words!”

Here is the perfectly appointed kitchen of her exiled Iranian family’s rambling Finchley flat. Just down the hall her father – a key figure in the opposition to the Ayatollah Khomeini’s Islamic revolution – peruses the Iranian press. The subject in question is her press photographs. It’s taken her two years to submit to this indignity and finally she’s produced a set of pictures of her reflection in a CD case. Jockey Slut has just suggested that these may be about as useful as a mop on the Titanic.

Leila Arab, it can accurately be said, does things her own way. She reckons she makes pop music, but the two albums she’s created so far are pop music that’s been royally fucked, buggered and turned inside out. To the R’n’B flavoured songs of regular vocalists Luka, Donna Paul and her sister Roya, Leila adds backing tracks where such old reliables as time signature and even key are less undermined than reinvented. “It’s like that Timbaland/Rodney Jenkins-type of American R’n’B,” she reckons. “The tunes and the visuals persuade you it makes sense when it’s actually quite bizarre music. It normalises whatever it is that’s a bit strange about it.”

When it comes to doing things her own way, with Leila, the music is only the half of it. She’s never done a live gig, created only a handful of remixes and told the two major labels chasing her that she’d go with whoever could get her tickets to Lauryn Hill’s exclusive London invite-only gig last year. Typically, she gave the private party tickets away and went with the label – XL – who’d only managed to get her tickets for Brixton Academy. ‘Bless’, as she’s prone to saying herself.

“I’ve been brought up to stand up for what I believe,” Leila explains, harnessing her mane of gravity-defying hair and clad in her favourite Iranian market trousers (“They’re so lush, and only cost a fiver”) and a white T-shirt. “Artists shouldn’t be so desperate. I can’t compete with people who have such an innate hunger for this thing they’ll do anything for you people. But I can’t be like that. Whatever little I’ve got that’s worth having is going to go if I behave like that. But it’s strange what people see as being awkward, with a lot of people you get all the packaging, but they don’t give you anything.”

In fact, rather like Lelia’s music, the contentious pictures shouldn’t work, but they do. “I want to look like a glamorous high society lady, not a 70s hooker,” she says of the curiously watery, wistful prints. “I’m old fashioned. Not many women make it without trying to look like a hooker.”

On our way out, we check out her ‘studio’, two doors down from the kitchen. By her own estimate it’s “No-Fi”. When long-term house vocalist Gerideau came by to work on an Adamski remix (“He goes to the same gym as my sister and she gave it away like a fucking day pass!”) he was horrified at the piles of clothes, random stacks of records (Prince, Aaliyah on red vinyl, Michael Jackson’s “Off the Wall”) and basic, if not actually malfunctioning, equipment.

“I was like: ‘Er, hang on, I’ve just got to find the right hole to plug in the microphone.’” But this set-up is at the centre of a uniquely individual sound that’s seduced everyone from Andrew Weatherall to former boss Björk and Aphex Twin (who signed her to his Rephlex imprint for her magisterial debut ‘Like Weather’).

“When XL first got in touch it was because they loved what I did with vocals, and they were wondering if I could get Jonny L in touch with some good vocalists,” she smiles. “And he ended up with Posh Spice. It’s all gone horribly wrong, hasn’t it?”

We head to an Iranian restaurant just up the hill and which, like everything else in Leila’s life, falls within a circle of six Finchley streets. Three streets down the hill from her parents is Leila’s rented flat, three streets the other side is the house she is planning to buy. “I don’t want to be far from my parents,” she explains. “In my culture respecting your parents and looking after them is just innate; it’s not a matter of choice or decision, it’s integral to your sense of self. The idea of putting old people in a home or something is unthinkable.”

That said, in the restaurant itself she claims “the food is the only thing I like about Iranian culture”. Yet she’s patently at home in here, flipping linguistic switches with ease, choosing food for Jockey Slut because we’ll be “too clueless to choose for yourself”. Like everybody else who comes into her ornery orbit, the restaurateurs are patently charmed. Of course, she doesn’t tell them to, “fuck off” as she customarily greets Jockey Slut’s questions (unless, of course she’s simply saying it
in Iranian).

Leila is predictably scornful of the current state of the music scene. “A few years ago there was all this interesting music around, like Portishead and Tricky, but now it’s all gone a bit poptastic, hasn’t it? We’re going through a bit of an economic boom, I suppose.”

As such she doesn’t feel there’s quite the same space for her to occupy as at the time of ‘Like Weather’. “Yeah, I have a problem with selling myself, but I’m not one of those people who makes bizarre music for the sake of it. I don’t sit there and think: ‘Oh, country and two-step has never been done, let’s give it a go.’ Quite often I listen back to what I’ve done and it doesn’t make that much sense to me either.” 

Take, for instance, the hectic cross-rhythms of ‘Brave’ on major label debut, ‘Courtesy of Choice’. Or her own favourite, the malfunctioning typewriter meets circus sideshow that is ‘Be Clowns’. She grabs another forkful of cucumber salad. “You either explore the kind of confusion of creativity or you limit yourself to one thing and pretend you know.” It’s clear which choice Leila’s made.

Within all this, the major label is something of an anomaly. “I did it because I’m a bit of a slacker and a bit spoilt,” she explains. “Signing to a major was a way of professionalising and adding a bit more pressure. That’ll make me work harder and more focused.”

So how much money did they offer you?

“They gave me enough,” she says slyly, before adding cockily “but I turned down more.”

Leila stays apart from the industry. “Because I’m a bit of a hermit I sidestep a lot of things other people would call interesting. I don’t go to industry parties. They all know I’m a bit hardcore and I’d trigger a cocaine paranoid psychosis in them.”

That’s Leila then. It’s not just her talent that’s scary.

‍