Osaro Azams: ‘I keep looking for a regular-shmegular job, but I keep getting a yes for a creative job’

Last month, at Daylight, one of the most vibrant venues in Dublin right now, 7of9 took to the stage for Flinta*Fest, an evening celebrating women and queer voices in punk. The band is Lizzie Fitzpatrick (Bitch Falcon, Coolgirl) and Osaro Azams.

“That was a really fun gig,” Azams says when we meet at Mind the Step, a late-night cafe near the Millennium footbridge in Dublin. “It was nice to be in a tight, packed crowd with people up close to you. That’s my favourite kind of performance moment, when that barrier breaks a bit. It reminds me of when I was in church. In church you’re always up close. The musicians are sweaty and heaving. The Methodist man is shouting with you. It creates that energy that I really enjoy.”

As well as being a poet, singer, performer and maker, Azams is the founder of the Fried Plantains collective and the producer of the Black Jam party nights; 7of9 is yet another fascinating turn in Azams’s practice, a compelling display of brilliant electronic sounds and beats. They first played in 2022. “I remember going to Lizzie, being, like, ‘Yo, let’s do a once-off music project together.’”

They played around with one of Azams’s poems, Seagull, a work that feels like what might happen if The Prodigy took on Robert Frost. “Seagull is kind of me ranting about seagulls, how boring Dublin is, how it’s not really our city any more, but the seagulls’,” Azams says. “And that’s a lot of people’s fault, including us as humans, for ruining their fish supply.”

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The first time Azams felt that a performance landed was at Squat City, in Grangegorman, “years ago. My friend Niamh Beirne, from [the spoken-word collective] Pettycash, and a few other mates at the time were putting on really cool events there, Words in the Warehouse. That was really fun. Half the lads were squatters; half the lads were theatre artists. We all shook hands, like, let’s do a thing: you make the home, we bring in the theatrical aspect, and together we’ll make a community, even if it’s just for one night.”

Azams clicks back into the feeling of that night, and the conjuring of a piece rooted in Yoruba legend. “It was sunset, dusky, almost an amber-like evening. It was an open, indoor amphitheatre space ... I started the story, just moving, and telling the story that in the beginning there was almost nothing bar rock, and in this rock sat Yemoja, with her split mermaid tail opening.

“As her tail opened, out poured the seas and the rivers that we know today. From the rivers came her children, which is us. We call them ‘yeye omo eja’, or ‘mother whose children are fish’. It was a way of saying that from her we came. And from her I began the story of the drowning god.” Azams snaps out of deep thought with a cheery “and that’s how we existed – the end.”

The work Azams programmes has a particular vibrancy. “What makes a good curator, I think, is going to different kinds of shows and being open to the experience. And just being excited. Look, I bitch about Dublin all the time, but if people ask me to go to things it’s a great chance to see what’s beyond my peripheral cultural vision.”

Fried Plantains was founded in 2016. “Black Jam and Fried Plantains came out of creating – not just through writing and singing, but creating communities. The first one we did was at a bar that’s now defunct, on Capel Street. We screened Born in Flames, a 1980s sci-fi, lesbian mockumentary.”

The first Black Jam music showcase took place at Fibber Magees, the rock bar in Dublin city centre. “I wanted to go to gigs where I could see loads of cool black punk artists,” Azams says. “I grew up listening to more rock than I did R&B. I mean, I listened to Aaliyah and Missy Elliott, but also Cradle of Filth and System of a Down. I wanted to be in a bar that honoured both types of genres. ‘There isn’t one? Let’s make one!’ At the time Blackfish Collective did R&B mixed with aggressive punk. They lived in Balbriggan at the time. I got them on board, [as well as] Bob Vylan, two lads from London who also did aggro black punk. I got Niamh and Helen from Spooky Beore. Rhythm Africana we had as well.”

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Azams has gone on to present work at Dublin Fringe Festival and at Live Collision festival. Azams’s audiovisual piece Obsidian Black dealt with loneliness and isolation in the context of the pandemic. In 2022 Azams was an artist-in-residence at the Irish Cultural Centre, in Paris, and was invited back in 2023, when Black Jam took over the centre as Jam Noir: Intime, presented in conjunction with the Romilly Walton Masters Award for Experimental Performance, which Azams won in 2021.

Right now Azams is following a creative path that almost insists on eclecticism. The next 7of9 gig is at the Open Ear Festival, on Sherkin Island, over the June bank holiday weekend. “I keep looking for jobs in general, you know, a regular-shmegular job,” Azams says. “But every time I get a ‘no’ for a regular job I keep getting a ‘yes’ for a creative job” – a commission, a residency, acting, a Super8 project. “I used to feel way more guilty – ‘I should get a regular job. I shouldn’t be doing this whole art thing.’ Yet it’s literally the only jobs I have prospects in ... So at some point I have to say that this is where I want to be anyway.”