Eliza Shaddad is the stellar headliner of our gig this week at The Victoria, Dalston, raising funds for our friends at Resonance FM, in partnership with The Other Woman show. To get to know Eliza a little better, we asked her 10 questions ...

1. Who would you most like to cover one of your songs?
Maybe an astronaut like Chris Hadfield, somewhere up in space.

2. If you could collaborate with one artist – any musician, living or dead – who would it be, and what would you do together?
Nina Simone, though not sure if there’d be much collaborating I think I’d just ask her to play and then sit there and cry.

3. If your music could have a superpower, what would it be?
Umm … flight? Or World Peace.

4. What’s best: playing a big venue full of strangers, or a small pub full of friends? Big full venue.

5. Recommend a record and a book that you think our readers might not have heard of.
I’d recommend Alice Coltrane‘s Journey in Satchidananda – so good. And maybe Good Omens, Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett – v funny.

6. Tell us about the last song you wrote – where were you when you wrote it, how did it come about, and how did it develop?
I guess one of the most fun and most recent wasn’t one I wrote for me. It was on this all-female writing camp called ‘SheWrites’, the first of it’s kind. I got put together with two amazing artists/producers – Isabel Gracefield Grundy and Alyusha – and we had a day together writing and had so much fun writing two songs, one a real sexy slow-burn number and another a crazy half-Spanish minimal dance/pop track.

7. What’s the best thing about being a musician?
Playing live!

8. What are your musical goals?
Haha just getting to the end of LP1🙏🏻. Then we plot world domination, I’d like to meet a busker on the other side of the world playing one of my songs one day, that would be swell.

9. What’s the most important thing we need to know about you right now?
Playing the 7th Feb in Dalston (!!) and I’m touring the UK throughout March. Plus of course LP1 is nearly complete! 

10. Give your top 5 contemporary artists/bands.
Arg, my top 5 is always changing … so maybe easier to say this month I’m enjoying new releases from these guys:

ISLAND 

Childcare 

To Kill a King 

Leif Erikson 

Uncle Luc