The musician, DJ and broadcaster Nabihah Iqbal was born in London. She graduated from Soas University of London with a degree in ethnomusicology and history and trained as a human rights lawyer before turning to a career in music. In 2017, Iqbal released her debut album, Weighing of the Heart. She is currently rerecording the follow-up after an early version was stolen from her studio in London in 2020. Today and tomorrow, as part of the Purcell Sessions, Iqbal will perform new work at the Southbank Centre with visual artist and quantum physicist Libby Heaney, and she is currently working on a new album.
1. Book
London Labour and the London Poor by Henry Mayhew
I’m reading this book as research for my Southbank show, which uses the Thames as a focal point. It’s a comprehensive cross-section of what life was like for poor people in London in Victorian times. For me, as a Londoner born and bred and history being my favourite subject, it’s really interesting to read, because it’s so detailed. I’ve been reading about kids walking shoeless from Clerkenwell to St John’s Wood to sell flowers, and “pure finders”, who collected dog poo and sold it to tanneries.
2. Music
Jeff Buckley videos on YouTube
Jeff Buckley was one of my favourite artists as a teenager and I’m rediscovering his work. The first time around was pre-YouTube, so I’d never seen a video of him performing. Now there are so many amazing videos of interviews and live shows. The recording of him performing Grace on the BBC Late Show is one of the best live performances I’ve ever seen. I also found a recording of him in New York singing a Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan song in Urdu. The audience laughs at him at first, but then you can feel them getting captivated.
3. Museum
This is one of my favourite places in London – the Holland Park house where the painter Frederic Leighton lived. It’s like stepping into a secret world. Leighton travelled a lot around the Middle East and became a big fan of Middle Eastern architecture, ceramics and tile work. It looks like a normal Victorian house from the outside, but inside there’s a beautiful courtyard, with blue tiles imported from Iran, Afghanistan and Syria, and a fountain in the middle. It’s just so peaceful and amazing – I wish I could live there.
4. Cafe
Arôme is a really nice Japanese-Parisian cafe in Covent Garden that’s quite new. They bake everything from scratch. They have amazing croissants and Japanese-style pastries and really good hot chocolate. It’s quite near my studio in Somerset House, so I like to go in there to treat myself. There are so many big chains in central London, and finding good independent places can be tricky, but Arôme is really good.
5. Documentary
The Stolen Maharajah – Britain’s Indian Royal, BBC Four
This is a BBC documentary about the last ruler of the Sikh empire, Duleep Singh. His story is really sad. While he was still a boy, the British removed him from Lahore and he was later exiled to England. He became quite close to Queen Victoria and was accepted into the upper echelons of British society, but they wouldn’t let him go back to India. As he got older, he became really angry about his exile. It demonstrates how deeply the British empire affected people from the Indian subcontinent no matter their social status, rich or poor. It’s a really good documentary.
6. Place
I’m in Scotland at the moment, at an artist’s residency near Loch Long, about an hour north of Glasgow, trying to finish my album. I wanted to work on music without any distractions and this really is the middle of nowhere. It’s so magical – close to the water, with mountains all around, and really dark at night. If you live in a busy city and are trying to do creative work, I really recommend changing your surroundings. You can’t force creativity, but you can coax it out, and being in this sort of setting allows you to do that as much as possible.
