The Stool Pigeon music newspaper

Some people don’t get Ebony Bones’s sense of humour. “My lawyer called me the other day,” she says, “and was like [totally deadpan], ‘Right, Ebony, can we talk about ‘Don’t Fart On My Heart?’’ I said, ‘I can’t believe you just said that without laughing. I feel like I’ve failed.’ I wrote that title and I wondered if a person could actually say that without cracking up.”

A Stool Pigeon straw poll reveals that in 99.9 per cent of cases, the answer is ‘no’. Miss Bones can continue confidently in her quest to bring a little colour and laughter to the stages of Britain.

“I think it’s the humour in life that gets us through it,” smiles the resplendently mental 24-year-old. “I find everything quite funny. You can get away with a lot more when you say things with a bit of a sense of humour.”

And especially when you say it in songs as irresistible as Ebony’s, combining as she does the dark tribal post punk sound of The Slits or The Pop Group with modern pop panache (she’s worked with Richard X on tracks for her forthcoming album). You can, say, tackle prejudice with titles like ‘No Blacks No Irish No Dogs’.

But can you get away with a stage-school background? A graduate of the Sylvia Young Theatre School, alma mater of the similarly idiosyncratic and anarchic Amy Winehouse, Ebony is one of a recent rash of young pop stars (Winehouse, Kate Nash, Jack Peñate) who have (shock horror) been trained for the job.

The critical dictum is that if you’re an artist or an opera singer, formal training is fine, but god forbid the starry-eyed pupil of pop. Hypocritical hokum, of course - we don’t like to think about the smoke and mirrors that exist behind all musical acts, except when it’s in X-Factor.

Fine. But what about a background in soaps? For five years, Ebony Thomas played the role of the exuberant, glamorous, thrice-married Yasmin McHugh in channel Five’s Family Affairs, a series firmly pitched at those who find Hollyoaks too challenging. She was thrice nominated for the sexiest female award and once for best comedy actor at the British Soap Awards. Say what you like about soap fans, but at least they know sexy and funny when they see it.

Having left in 2005, Ebony renamed herself and embarked on a long-held ambition to perform the mad songs she’d recorded in her bedroom. But she’s not your typical soap star-turned-popstrel, this bouncing, yelling, candy-coloured carnivalesque creature, dancing to her own Delta 5-go-disco beat and yelling, “I’m your future ex-wife!” She’s about as far from Jennifer Ellison as you can get.

It took Kylie a decade to wash off the taint of Neighbours, but you’re not likely to find Miss Bones apologising or scrabbling for credibility. She embraces the naff. “I was watching the video for a song called ‘S-S-S-Single Bed’ by this seventies band called Fox the other day. It was almost like Pan’s People and I thought, ‘How cool is this! Why don’t people make them like this anymore?’ Well, I think I know why: because it’s appalling. But why don’t people embrace that? I don’t wanna dismiss anything because it’s ridiculous.”

Ridicule, after all, is nothing to be scared of. Today, even for Shoreditch, Ebony is a sight to behold, flying in the face of the po-faced with an enormous necklace made up of papier-mâché pizza and burgers. It’s only a taste, however, of the wondrous wardrobe that a visit to her neon-assault MySpace page reveals; a mind-melting riot of colour and shape, self-made dresses, insanely oversized jewellery, fantastic hats, voodoo chic and scary makeup. It’s more costumery than couture, though: Ebony doesn’t dream of swanning around with Kate Moss and Beth Ditto.

“I’m not that into designer labels or fashion,” she says. “It’s kind of just reflective of the music and audience - the girls all come to the shows dressed up. At Glastonbury this year, people wore the masks that the band sometimes wear. They like the idea of going out, dressing up and getting involved rather than just watching a gig.”

Ebony got her education in stagecraft not only from Sylvia Young, but also, in a very hands-on way, from one of her musical heroines. “I was at a Grace Jones gig two years ago,” she recalls, “and in the middle of ‘My Jamaican Guy’, she changed the words to “my Jamaican girl”, jumped out and started snogging me. And… it was a moment when I knew [laughs]… No, it was such an amazing show - I was just blown away. She’s got this aura - there isn’t a person who doesn’t look at her when she’s on stage. And she commands that. It’s really powerful for a female to see other females like that.”

Firing up the womenfolk is a keystone of Ebony’s policy. “I think there’s this effect that goes on in society and sometimes you’re not even aware of it,” she explains. “You kind of accept girls walking about in little miniskirts and bras and just think that’s normal. But I don’t think it is. I embraced Annie Lennox in a male suit, and that was far more of an inspiration to me than skinny girls on their backs rolling about in the sand in a video.”

As well as knowing her way round what makes a strong frontwoman, Ebony’s well-schooled in backstage graft: she writes, plays and produces all her songs. “I’m not that interested in getting up to the mic,” she says. “I really like to be involved and approach the whole thing with the innocence of a child, like, ‘What happens if I do this or that?’ It’s that whole punk ethic of not really knowing what you’re doing, but making something out of that anyway. I’d like to see more girls embrace that and get behind the scenes.”

And she’s more than ready to lead the charge with her debut single, ‘We Know All About U’. “The song was initially based on George Orwell’s 1984,” she says. “It started when I was driving in my car and heard this report on the news that there were gonna be new CCTV cameras set up around London that would shout at you if they caught you doing something criminal or wrong. And I literally had fits of laughter - I was dying. I thought, ‘I can’t believe no-one else finds this slightly intrusive, if not downright hilarious.’”

A typical Ebony song, then - danceable, silly and serious all at the same time. Best of all, there’s a whole album’s worth of them currently being finished, due out next spring. “In a way, I find it really strange seeing something that’s blossomed from your brain - seeing that inkling grow,” she muses.

And grow and grow it shall. Everyone’s going to want to jump this Bone.