Love Ssega: ‘If you’ve an opportunity to do something you’ve got an interest in, go for it’

For Love Ssega, there is endless potential in new beginnings. Despite a career spanning chart-topping pop, experimental solo work, orchestral commissions, climate activism and now a three-year Associate Artist role at the Southbank Centre, he feels, he insists, like he is ‘starting’ again. This is not false modesty; rather, it speaks to a worldview shaped by curiosity, patience and an insistence on thinking far beyond the next release, the next headline or the next political cycle.

‘I feel like I’m just starting,’ he says, ‘because everything’s in place. I’ve got the tools for the scale, the ambition – it’s right there.’ That sense of scale has always been part of Ssega’s musical imagination. Raised in a household where learning an instrument was non-negotiable – he and his siblings were all put through piano lessons, before he later picked up the cello – music was not just a pastime but a language spoken fluently. Funk and soul poured from the speakers, and his father, in particular, loomed large as a guiding force.

‘The first gig I took my dad to see was Prince,’ Ssega recalls, laughing. ‘We were near the front and I asked him what he thought. He shrugged, and was like, ‘it’s all right, I saw Isaac Hayes in LA in the 1970s.’ And then rolled off a list of all these amazing people he’d seen.’

Growing up with Ugandan roots also meant absorbing a wider musical geography. There’s a lot of Congolese music,’ he notes of Uganda, ‘that’s the base there.’ Jazz, too, played a formative role. His father’s love of John Coltrane, Herbie Hancock, James Brown and Parliament opened up not only a sonic palette but the idea of music as a collective endeavour. ‘I loved looking at the liner notes saying who was playing on Parliament records,’ he says. ‘Bootsy Collins, Maceo Parker – all these different people.’ What struck him just as deeply was the theatrical ambition of those groups. Parliament and Funkadelic didn’t just play concerts; they built worlds, complete with spaceships descending onto the stage.

‘That brings me to today,’ Ssega says. ‘Even when I started performing, I was saying, ‘Look, where’s the theatre?’ They were able to do that in the 1970s – these amazing Black groups, amazing Black labels. You see what they were doing – why aren’t we doing that now?’ This question has followed him through every phase of his career. And it’s also been shaped by a parallel life that, on paper, seems far removed from music. Before Ssega was known as a music artist, he was a PhD student in Chemical Engineering at the University of Cambridge.

‘One of the things which dragged me towards the type of engineering I studied was green technology,’ he explains. ‘I thought I was just going to be [at Cambridge] for four years, do a Masters in engineering, and that’s that. I told everyone there I was going to leave.’ But once again, curiosity intervened. Winning a university prize in his fourth year, led to a chance to continue his research and as he says, ‘if you’ve an opportunity to do something you’ve got an interest in, then go for it.’

Crucially, Ssega never saw academia and music as mutually exclusive. As a student he co-founded the band, Clean Bandit, and he continued to perform, tour and collaborate with them during his PhD. The future Grammy Award-winning electronic group emerged organically from overlapping musical worlds. Having started a funk band in his first year, Ssega invited Jack Patterson to play keys for him. Patterson, in turn, was dating cellist Grace Chatto, who had a string quartet and ambitions beyond the classical sphere. ‘They wanted to put a band together,’ Ssega recalls. ‘And I knew how to write songs, knew how to write music, knew how to perform.’ Early experiments included remixing a recording made in King’s College Chapel, which became the seed for the band’s distinctive sound.

Clean Bandit’s subsequent success – millions of records sold, global tours – unfolded rapidly. ‘When you start off as a musician, it’s your friends and family who come to the gigs,’ Ssega says. ‘But then you start going to other cities and you see someone who doesn’t look like you, might have a completely different background to you, singing back things you’ve written – that’s a trip.’

He would ultimately leave the band to focus on his PhD and his own artistic direction, but the experience left a lasting imprint and some surreal memories. ‘There was a weekend where I went from the lab to Wales to do a festival. We were supporting Laura Marling, and Martin Creed, the Turner Prize artist, was also performing. So, I’m in a yurt with Laura Marling, an artist who I absolutely loved, and we’re playing Cluedo, and then right after I’m going back to Cambridge.’

What he loved about academia was not so different from what he values in art. ‘It’s curiosity… you’ve got the time.’ A PhD teaches patience, an increasingly rare commodity in what he calls ‘this addiction economy… where everything’s super fast, fast, fast.’ As he explains, ‘in research [you’re given] time to do something. It might work, it might not work. And that’s the same with music and creativity. Where are you given that time of one, two, three years to do something?’ This philosophy found an echo years later when he sat down with the Southbank Centre’s Artistic Director Mark Ball. ‘That’s what was so exciting,’ Ssega says, ‘when he asked me to be an Associate Artist. He said, look, you need to have the time to do something, to have the space. How can we make this place exciting?’

That belief underpins much of Ssega’s subsequent work. Rather than engaging in polarised debates, he prefers to use music as a space for connection. ‘With music, art and creativity, there’s something very powerful. You can bring different people together, then you can have stories.’ Sometimes the message is explicit, as in Find Another Way, written in response to Black Lives Matter and the killing of George Floyd. At others it’s embedded in broader frameworks, such as LIVE + BREATHE, the arts-led clean air organisation he co-founded. 

More recent projects have seen Ssega’s ambition and theatricality brought to life on an even larger scale. There was HOME-Zero, staged on Earth Day 2022 as a promenade performance with an all-Black cast inside the three largest rooms of London’s National Gallery. And his composition Capes for Blue Skies, mixed at Abbey Road and recorded with musicians from the Philharmonia Orchestra – a collaboration which he was able to explore deeper as the Philharmonia’s 2022/23 Artist in Residence.

‘I wanted to make performance-based pieces,’ he says of his residency, which he concluded with PANGEA: Act 1, a small-ensemble performance which tackled narrative futures and climate migration, not as abstractions but as human stories. ‘The whole point with PANGEA was to bring in empathy,’ he explains. ‘It was to say: what if we become the climate refugees? How do we have that conversation?’

In a cultural landscape often dominated by speed and spectacle, Love Ssega is playing a longer game. He believes in institutions, in collaboration, and in art that imagines futures beyond the immediate horizon. ‘Imagine if people are still playing your music in 300 years,’ he says. ‘They’re not going to remember what political party was here. They’ll remember what you did to the world.’

For now, he is energised, grateful and still curious. ‘I’m privileged to be able to be a creative person and meet really interesting creative people,’ he says with a smile. ‘So if there’s a chance I can have these conversations, and get these ideas out now, great. We’ve got to do it whilst these people who’ve had amazing lives and done amazing stuff, are still around to collaborate with, talk to and push us forward. Let’s have that excitement and the fun – and let’s keep going.’