Eliza Rose is trying to give up caffeine. “I might be a bit sleepy,” she says over Zoom, with a Pikachu mug in hand. Her newfound tipple? Ginger and lemon, to help her voice. “I’m trying to be healthy.” It’s a strangely busy moment for her to give up coffee. In the last six months alone, she’s gone from underground gem to global superstar thanks to her infectious track “B.O.T.A. (Baddest Of Them All)”. Earlier this month, it hit number one in the charts – making Eliza the first female DJ to hold the top spot since Sonique with 2002’s “It Feels Good”.
Made in collaboration with Manchester-based producer and DJ Interplanetary Criminal, “B.O.T.A.” is just what everyone needed after two years of pandemic-induced hibernation. Eliza imagined arcades, the seaside and places she’d been as a child – “a bit trashy but kind of cute” – when she was writing the melody. The title and chorus, meanwhile, were inspired by a Coffy poster on her boyfriend’s wall that featured the tagline: “The baddest one-chick hit-squad that ever hit town.” “Pam Grier [the lead character] just gave me that energy. She really just put a little flavour on there and did something to it to make it fly. I feel her essence in the song.”
It’s become a favourite summer track of both the underground community and mainstream listeners alike. “It’s a strange kind of crossover, which I don’t think has really happened for quite a while,” says Eliza. DJs have spun “B.O.T.A.” at parties across Europe all summer long, while it was heard far and wide at Glastonbury, from the stages to the campsites. “It was a real pinch-me moment.”
TikTok-ers have even attempted to recreate the clubby music video, directed by Eliza’s friend Jeanie Crystal of Faboo TV. The brief? “Eliza in Hackney” (her own take on Alice in Wonderland), which pays homage to her beloved London borough, featuring friends, friends of friends and people she met in smoking areas. In the video, she strolls down Kingsland Road, Dalston, wearing a fuzzy candy floss-pink hat from Hat & Spicy, a cropped printed jacket from Versace and a blonde wig from Man Wigs. Then, she ends up in a club in a red dress made by her best friend Liberty Rose.
Despite Eliza’s seemingly overnight success, “B.O.T.A.” is actually the culmination of years of hard graft. She spent hours poring over ’90s and ’00s R&B, soul, jazz and garage records while working in a vinyl shop from the age of 15 onwards. “When you see Black people on the covers of the sleeves, you suddenly start seeing that ‘oh, these are my people’, and you feel a real affinity and a connection,” she says. “It was then that I really, really got into music.”
Still, she hit a wall at one point when it came to self-belief. Sipping from her Pikachu mug, she explains that she became convinced by a “stupid notion” that her voice wasn’t good enough and that she was too old, at 21, to pursue a singing career. “I didn’t have a manager, I didn’t know what I was doing, and I just stopped enjoying it,” she says. DJing, though, pushed Eliza to recognise her capabilities – and ultimately convinced her to try again. “If someone told me, when I was 21, ‘you will have a number one hit’, I’d be like ‘come at my face and stop lying to me’,” she says with a laugh. “I really did quit because I thought I was too old – and now look at me.” The Baddest Of Them All, indeed.
