So, what did you do? Could you stay at home with her? It’s hard, when you think to yourself - “how could my Mum do this to me?” It wasn’t true and it was so unfortunate, because she chose him, inevitably, over me. She got married to this guy, and this guy started telling her all these lies about me, that I was strung out on drugs. If you don’t mind me asking, did your mother pass away or… It really got me through my teenage years of having to be on my own.

I came from such a horrible place and situation, but I found peace in making music. I literally would use music as an outlet for me to release the emotions and all the darkness that I had inside of me. It kept me sane and therapeutically, I could vent about things, things that I couldn’t say to a therapist. At that point, it was about survival for me. It came from my childhood, because my Mum left me when I was fifteen. You say you had a hunger, where did that stem from? Because, when you know that people are listening, you feel more insecure about the type of music that you’re making. But it’ll always be my favourite body of work just because it was so innocent in the sense of making music for myself.

I put it out there, and some people caught on, and some didn’t. Right, because there was no outside perception. At that point, I was literally making music for myself. I didn’t care if it was publicised or if a lot of people heard it. And it was such a dope atmosphere, because it was all live instrumentation, you know? We made an alternative sounding pop mixtape thing. I wasn’t writing fully by myself at this point, he would create the sound, and I was the narrative. I was in a garage studio set up in Silver Lake, Los Angeles, and this producer, who was also a writer, had a lot of live instruments. How long did it take for people to get on board? But it was definitely hard to get people to believe in me and make music.

I grew up in church singing, so I’ve always had a background and foundation for it. I was on the track just gang banging, a little bit like “south side, left side”, you know? But it was really different to me. He wanted me to do this gangster style rap hook. But you look so cool to me” and I was like, “I make music” and he was like, “really? Oh, cool” and he invited me to his studio. He met me at a magazine event and he walked up to me like, “I don’t know what you do. It’s funny, because I first started off doing a rap song with a guy named Taz Arnold, when I was fifteen. Phlo: I love the gloom, I’m really not liking the sun a lot. Noisey: It’s really, really hot out here. Which made for a vintage type almost blind date, as opposed to today’s personals, where you can pre-judge someone via a myriad of relevant social networks before deciding whether they’re on the right side of mentally stable to be worth both an appetiser and main meal at Frankie and Benny’s. To make matters slightly more intimidating for my neurotic brain, I was to be meeting with Phlo Finister, an artist whom I didn't know too much about - beyond the realm of a few track premieres and a fashion spread in VICE - and had no time to prepare in advance for.

Phlo studio