When Hulme-born, Gorton-raised rapper OneDa was living in her car, it wasn’t even a low point in her life. She had just come out as gay, was a single mum with a young daughter and had very suddenly found herself with nowhere to go. “But I was happy,” she says. “Because I knew what was coming.”
OneDa, real name Onye Ezeh, was also in the first year of her Masters degree at the time. For most people, the timing would have been catastrophic. But not for her.
“Say you’re going on a journey to London on the motorway. You know you’re going to London, because you’re seeing signs, it’s telling you how many miles are left,” she says. “But if there was an accident, suddenly, on the motorway, you wouldn’t think ‘s**t’, I’m never ever going to reach London’. The accident will clear up in a few hours, and you’ll get there.
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“Or say the accident doesn’t ever clear up, you can get on a bus, on a train. That’s how I think about everything in life. The journey has changed, the destination has not changed. The only barrier that’s stopping you doing anything is the mind. You get over that one barrier, and you can do anything.”
Never once did she think that she wouldn’t make it. And she has, through absolute unwavering self belief. Last year, she signed to Heavenly Recordings, the hugely influential label that kicked off the careers of bands like Saint Etienne, Doves and Manic Street Preachers.
Last week, she was nominated for Mentor of the Year at the 2023 Northern Power Women Awards for her work on the Arts Council-funded HERchester project, a talent development program championing female artists via Manchester’s Reform Radio. It’s not her first rodeo, as far as mentorship is concerned, having spent years channelling troubled kids from Pupil Referral Units around the city into music production.
It’s all the more impressive given her own turbulent experience in the education system. After passing her 11 plus, she would trek daily from Gorton to William Hulme Grammar School on the edge of Whalley Range and Moss Side, and when she was kicked out of there, even further still to Stretford Grammar. She was eventually kicked out of there too. It was, she admits, probably fair enough.
“I just didn’t like the structure of school,” she says, with the hint of a grin and a heap of understatement. “I purposely messed about. I enjoyed it. They build you to be servants, to be menial. I’m not. I’m sorry, I believe I’m above that. I believe we all are. You’re gonna work for someone else? No. I am not.”
Yet still, while she was kept out of school for her disruptive behaviour, she sat her GCSEs at the same time as everyone else, and passed all ten. University followed and a Masters degree from Leeds Metropolitan in Social Work, her specialism being the use of music therapy with young people. She believes strongly in ‘hip hop therapy’, and wants to set up a school for it one day.
Like she says, she knew things would work out. But things weren’t always this positive. She says she has been through periods of deep depression, times when she thought she ‘didn’t want to be around anymore’. Home life - a strictly religious Nigerian household, her parents both being pastors - she found difficult.
“We didn’t have much,” she says. “My mum worked a lot, three jobs.” She found herself disappearing into the US rap and R&B her brother introduced her to, and also early grime and UK rap stars like Kano and Ms Dynamite.
She entered a contest called Urban Superstars aged 17, winning thousands of pounds of studio gear. Sadly, it wasn’t long before the equipment was sold at Cash Generators. She almost made it with her next project, Batz Inda Belfry with fellow Manchester rapper Envy.
Radio 1 gave them airtime, and they were championed by the likes of DJ Target and Tinie Tempah. But that too eventually dissolved, despite their gathering recognition, including a City Life Best Breakthrough Act award in 2015.
Despite those early knocks, these days she’s baffled by negativity. “What most people are scared of is nothing,” she says. “We put this on ourselves, and it’s all made up.” But there was a time when she was as scared as anyone. As well as suffering depression, she was riddled with anxiety for much of her life. She couldn’t sleep without the light on. She was irrationally phobic of insects.
One night, at 1.30am, she was wide awake, unable to sleep. A friend sent her a link to a YouTube video called 12 Laws of the Universe. It blew her mind. “I don’t normally like s**t like that, but I watched it, and after five minutes, I jumped out of bed to get a pad and a pen,” she said. “I started crying, more than I’ve ever cried in my life. I was shaking. It was like I suddenly knew how the world works. I’m not scared of anything now. A year and a half later, I was signed.”
Since that epiphany, everything has changed for her. She talks a lot about becoming spiritual, though it’s not a prescribed religion, there are bits from Buddhism and Hinduism in there. Around her neck is a silver Om sign on a chain.
She has also become a great believer in manifestation - in its most basic explanation, speaking or visualising things into existence. Taking aspirational thoughts and making them real. Her success and her utter self-belief suggest that for her at the very least there is something in it.
Things did indeed begin working out for her, though not without incident. Though all her life she’d been warned of the fire and brimstone that awaited gay people due to her hardline Christian upbringing, she came out four years ago, finding herself isolated and, for a time, homeless and living in her car.
But things worked out, as she knew they would. She began earning good money in social work consultancy, while pursuing her music career at the same time. She became part of hip hop crew The Mouse Outfit, and began producing her own material too. This saw revered Manchester DJ and producer Mr Scruff offering to work with her, as well as signing up with Scruff’s manager. She began working with electronic producer Gabe Gurnsey too.
As the stars began to align, the deal with Heavenly followed soon after. No exploitative major label advance and recoupment deals for her, she’s paid a salary instead, and next year will see the release of her debut album, following her first tracks for the label, Vibes and Busta.
Tonight, at new Oxford Road venue Canvas, she’ll be launching her Rude Girl Sound System event, a monthly night exploring all kinds of music from Nigerian funk to grime, but always championing female artists and DJs. The first finds OneDa joined by SNO, Jazzy Lioness, DJ Stylie, DJ Presh, Alkohol Republik, Superlative and her old Mouse Outfit cohort Metrodome.
Her catchphrase ‘Manny on the rise’ is a clarion call which not only affirms the city’s influence on the rest of the UK, but her own journey too, clawing her way out of negativity and into the light.
“What people do is focus on trying to solve their problems, and they just end up creating more problems trying to do that,” she says. “Walk away from all that, all the bullsh**t, the things that get you angry and frustrated. Concentrate on what makes you happy, and I swear down those problems will take care of themselves. Some things the universe takes care of for you.”
You can buy tickets for the Rude Girl Sound System event here…
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