Tosin Oluwatosin Bankole was 11 when a teacher at school in Dundalk asked everyone to hold hands. “Nobody wanted to hold my hand,” she says. “And when they did hold my hand, they would wipe their hands straight afterward.
This happened to me a lot throughout school and I will never forget it. That is one of the things that scarred me for life.
“My skin is the same as yours,” she says, holding out her hand for me to see.
At the time, she was confused. “I felt like maybe there was something wrong with my hands.”
When she told her parents what had happened, they told her there was nothing wrong with her hands and that she shouldn’t mind how some of the pupils treated her.
“But when it happened again in secondary school, it brought back memories of primary school. This time I felt unwanted, sad, and even more confused.
“I remember reporting one of the times to one teacher, who didn’t react the way I thought she would have reacted. She just said she’ll deal with it, but nothing was ever done about it because it happened repeatedly.”
Happily, things changed when she went to college in Dunboyne in 2014, as her college friends were different.
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“They never wiped their hands or reacted weirdly to being close to me,” she says. “It was the first time in my life that I felt like I was normal around non-coloured people, and I felt like I was part of a group that saw me as one of them.”
It was while at college that she formed her own group, the afro-soul ensemble Toshín and now she performs under that name.
“Toshín is my alter-ego. When I’m onstage I’m not Tosin, I’m Toshín. I like to hide behind her. I am not ready to be that raw as me. So Toshín makes me feel safe. I am telling people my story, but it is not really me – it is somebody else.”
Next month Toshín will perform the songs of Aretha Franklin at the Sugar Club in Dublin, while their debut album is scheduled for release this summer. The six-part ensemble has released an EP, Get Your Life and played at the Electric Picnic before the pandemic hit. There is a sense that Tosin is on cusp of becoming a star.
“I’m not being big-headed, but a lot of people have said to me that this is my year. I am very close to getting there. I can feel it.” So can the music industry.
Born in Lagos, Nigeria in 1997, Tosin and her family moved to Ireland when she was three. Her mother Funke was already here. Tosin can remember being on the plane with her big brother Femi and her father Sheyi, and wearing a pink jumper with yellow jeans that had red flames shooting up them.
She grew up in a council house in Dundalk, the second eldest of six siblings, with brothers Femi, Tobi and Tommy and sisters Timi and Tofunmi.
From an early age she was interested in music and singing. Her parents would take her to talent competitions around Dundalk, Carlingford, or Newry, where she would sing ‘Lean on Me’ by Bill Withers to a backing track.
“I never won any of the competitions. But they would always encourage me.”
Like her hero Aretha, she grew up with gospel music in church. At the age of 12, she sang in the choir at one of the Mountain of Fire and Miracles Ministries churches in Dundalk.
“I don’t want to say my mother forced me, but she did force me to join the church choir at MFM, a Pentecostal, born-again church. It was very upbeat and gospely,” says Tosin whose surname Oluwatosin Bankole means ‘God is worthy to be praised’.
“We were always singing. It was soulful. With the Irish Catholic Church and mass, you say your prayers and you kneel. You repeat what the priest says. It was very robotic. Whereas in my church there was a different energy. It was freer.”
She sang the lead in front of the entire church one Sunday. It was her first time in front of a big crowd. “Third song in, I started crying in front of the whole church I was so nervous.”
She began to grow in confidence. At the age of 14 she sang Leonard Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah’ (Alexandra Burke’s soulful R&B version) at the annual talent competition in the school hall. Everyone stood up and started to clap. She didn’t win but she did begin to believe she was a good singer. “I thought, ‘This is what I want to do with my life. I want to be a singer.’”
How did this affect the way other kids treated her?
“It was still the same with the ones who washed their hands after they touched my hands. Nothing changed.”
The following year, she won the school competition with a rapper friend called Anjie. The pair performed English rapper Tinie Tempah’s ‘Invincible’. That summer herself and Anjie did shows in the Morning Star Café in Dundalk. “That was my first proper gig.”
By the time she was in sixth year, she had won the competition as a soloist.
Still, that year, Tosin had felt anything but invincible. It was a year she wanted to erase from her memory. In January, one of her best friends had taken his own life. She knew him as ‘Taiwan’.
“We had a mass for him in school and I sang ‘Lean on Me’ and a song by The Script.
“I used to do athletics in school. I was a 100-metre sprinter and cross country and shot put as well. He would also come to competitions with me. He was a sprinter as well.
“He was from Taiwan, and I think he wanted to move back home. I thought he had a great life. But you never know what is going on in someone’s head. He was depressed.
“It was a really tough time. I still go back in my head and think about him. He was such a bubbly person. He is always in my heart.”
She didn’t fare very well in her Leaving Cert exams. “I was a rebellious, horrible student. My head wasn’t in it. My passion was music. That was my journey.”
That year, her parents and all her family moved to England, but Tosin chose to stay behind. She was 17. “I didn’t want to go to England. I was on my own journey in Ireland, and I wanted to stay on that path.”
Instead she enrolled in college and went on to graduate with a BA in music from BIMM Institute in Dublin. She also formed Toshín in 2016.
In August of that year the landlord of the house in Finglas she was sharing with some other students gave them their notice. She found herself homeless, sleeping on the mattress of a friend’s sitting room in Dorset Street for four months. “It was in a house with six other people. It was a tough year. I always felt I was in their way.”
She was working long hours as a pizza chef in a restaurant near the airport. She would come home at 11pm and then have to wait until everyone had gone to bed – “sometimes at 3am, as it was a party house full of students” – before she could roll out her mattress and go to sleep, exhausted.
She was constantly on the rental website Daft looking for somewhere to live or attending viewings.
“I don’t know if it was because I was black, but I always got rejected,” she says. “I feel like once people see the name Tosin Oluwatosin Bankole, they instantly just ignore my emails. It was not only me who was looking for a house.”
She and her best friend Nadine Brennan, who is white, would apply for the same house. Nadine, says Tosin, would always get a reply. “I would never get one because of my surname. We would literally apply for the same houses and my emails would even be better written. Yet Nadine would get a viewing, instantly, and I’d be ignored.”
How did that make her feel? “Upset. Unwanted. Especially when I was in this phase of my life where I hated my job as a pizza chef. I was doing 12-hour shifts and coming back to sleep on a mattress. I was really upset. I felt my life was a mess.”
Did she ever say anything to the landlords?
“What was the point? I didn’t have the courage. I was so defeated with everything. I really let it affect me, being homeless. I was just really defeated.”
She thinks her stage persona Toshín would be better equipped to stand up to racists. “Toshín is a stronger woman than I am. She probably would have called to the landlords’ houses who rejected me and told them: ‘I have the right to get accepted as well as Nadine.’”
She eventually found a house share with some friends who were renting in Crumlin.
“I understand racism now,” she says. “We live in a racist world. I didn’t know that then, back in the day. I was so naive. I was like, ‘everyone’s nice, everyone’s lovely’. I am aware of racism now. I was called a ‘n****r’ on Wexford Street not so long ago. Twice. But they don’t have to say something or call me a name for me to know it is racism.”
Still, she doesn’t believe Ireland is a racist country. “Ireland has helped a lot of immigrants in a lot of ways, and it is a very multicultural country as well,” she says. “But we could definitely be doing a lot better. I owe a lot to the Irish community. Most of my fans are Irish. Irish people have helped me with my career. There would be a lot more Irish people at my shows than people from the Nigerian community. The majority of my followers on Instagram are Irish.
“We’re a progressive country and as the years go on, I can see us making progress and room for change.” She mentions Black and Irish, an educational and cultural platform dedicated to empowering people of colour which was co-founded by her brother Femi.
“They are paving the way for a more diverse and educated Ireland.”
What does she think about the recent attack on 17-year-old Alanna Quinn Idris in Ballyfermot? She gives a measured response and says we don’t yet have all the facts so can’t say it is racially motivated.
“Regardless, the black and mixed-race community in Ireland is a close knit one. The incident has shaken the community and has influenced my feelings of safety as a person of colour in Ireland. My thoughts go out to her and her family. She suffered some life-altering injuries and the most important thing is for the perpetrators to feel the full weight of the law and for them to be prosecuted appropriately.”
Tosin has one of the finest, most sublime, voices in the country. It can conjure up sorrow and joy in almost the same note.
She says it is like a roller coaster. “It can start off very soft and chill and then, all of a sudden, it gets very intense and loud.”
Get Your Life was a five-track masterclass of vibrant acid-jazz and old-school soul that culminated with the gut-deep visceral anger of ‘Oh Lord’.
“Daddy this! /And daddy that!” she sings. “F**k this shit! /Just hear me out!”
Recently she was contacted by country music duo Foster & Allen. The legendary pair, who have played together for over 40 years and sold millions of records, filmed with her at her home in Kilmainham before Christmas.
“Tony [Allen] was quite quiet at first, compared to Mick [Foster],” she says. “Mick is bubbly and has a great sense of humour. Tony is reserved but still outspoken and can carry a great and wise conversation. He gives great advice. If I had grandfathers, they both would fit the category of great grandfathers to have. They are the kindest and funniest characters I’ve ever met.”
She is also collaborating with them on a version of ‘The Foggy Dew’, the traditional ballad.
“I was a bit anxious, because our music was very different, that it would have been a challenge to work with them both, but after visiting their studio in Meath, I learnt that our voices blended well together.
“They gave me some great music advice that I’ll take with me for the rest of my music career. I am excited to show the world what I have been doing with them.”
The programme, as yet untitled, is due to air on RTÉ in September.
Lately, Tosin feels she has been coming to terms with who she is.
“I hated myself when I was growing up,” she says. “I hated the way I looked. I would look in the mirror with fear. I hated to look at myself. I hated the gap between my teeth. I begged my parents to get me braces.”
But she learnt something about her African heritage last year that changed the way she saw herself. “I discovered that in Nigerian culture a gap in your teeth is a sign of beauty. Èjíwùmí means, roughly, ‘I love tooth gaps’,” she says. “I fell in love with my gap.”
She was also in love (the relationship has since broken up). “I suddenly realised there was no reason for me not to love myself like I had for all those years before. I started saying to myself, ‘you’re beautiful, you’re amazing’.” She learned to deal with her occasional moments of depression.
She also wrote a new song ‘She’, which includes the line: “Wearing the crowns does not make me a queen/It’s the flaws and the cracks and the gaps in between.”
At 24 years of age, the ‘flawed’ queen of Irish R&B is ready to face the music.
Toshín play the Sugar Club in Dublin on February 13
Green giants: Toshín’s top Irish artists
Shiv
“Shiv [aka Siobhan McClean] is an amazing, mixed race Irish artist. She was born in Zimbabwe and raised in Ireland. She is based in Paris, but she does a lot of her work in Ireland. She is very soulful, very sincere with how she writes and performs. Her 2021 EP The Love Interlude was probably one of my favourite releases of last year.”
Sister Fenix
“It’s a duo with Jess Kav and Senita Appiakorang. They are both incredible vocalists. Senita is from South Africa. She was in a band from Cork called Shookrah. She is phenomenal. Jess is probably one of the best vocalists in Ireland. She also did backing vocals for Hozier.”
Tolü Makay
“I love her. She is amazing, I look up to her a lot. I feel like she is paving the way for black female Irish artists to not be afraid to be vulnerable and open up about our feelings.”
Emily Jane
“She is the lead singer of rock-jazz band Vernon Jane. She has inspired a lot of my music. She went to BIMM [Institute] too. She was four years above me. We have stayed in touch. She would always talk to me about music and give me advice. She is one of my music moms.”
Zapho
“Zapho [Ele Breslin] is like the new modern Ireland. Her sound is the new sound Ireland needs. She is electronic pop. She has really inspired me. She’s from Rathfarnham.”
Cooks But We’re Chefs
“They’re absolutely hectic and a great group of people. They’re all vegans. My dream would be to do a double-headline show with them.”
The African Gospel Choir
“I am also part of the African Gospel Choir Dublin – oba Nla, Kaleidoscope, which means ‘big God, Kaleidoscope’. It is an amazing choir that definitely drew me closer to my faith and to God. It is made up of 18 fantastic vocalists. Instrumentalist/producer Niyi Allen-Taylor directs and leads the choir with his wife Tomilola, who is our music director. This choir has got me through some of my hardest moments and I am beyond honoured to be part of them.”
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