Los Angeles is a long way from the English seaside town of Aldeburgh, where ISABELLA “THE MACHINE” SUMMERS, 33, spent her formative years before landing on the West Coast last year, by way of London. “I’ve always been ‘L.A.’ I told my mum when I was 7 that I’d have a house in the Hollywood Hills, and she’d have to visit me there,” says Summers. “She reminds me of that all the time.”
So here she is. It’s a gray and drizzly Sunday morning—the kind of weather English girls know all too well—and Summers is hunkered down in her cozy recording studio on the Eastside of Los Angeles. “Flo calls it my cupboard,” she says. Flo is none other than Florence Welch, with whom Summers founded the hit-making band Florence and the Machine. And the cupboard joke is a nod to her former recording space in London during college—a converted bedroom closet. But the DJ and music producer has come a long way since then, with Grammy nominationsfor the band’s albums Lungs (2009, Island Records) and Ceremonials (2011, Island Records). And currently, her studio is part of Echo Park’s Bedrock complex, home to the likes of fellow musicians Flying Lotus and Eagles of Death Metal’s Jesse Hughes. A far cry from a cupboard.
Looking back, Summers’ first musical epiphany came to her at 12 years old in Aldeburgh—a coastal destination that bustled with tourists in the summer and dwindled down to the local fishing community in the off-season. “Two older neighborhood boys who lived next door and were kind of intimidating gave me a cassette tape and, in a scary way, said, ‘You gotta listen to it,’” she laughs. The mix contained Snoop Dogg and Gravediggaz. “I was so in awe of the rude boys next door, I listened to it over and over,” adds Summers. From that moment on, she was hooked on hip-hop.
But it was also her actor-turned-fisherman father’s obsession with recording sound bites from the radio since the 1970s—everything from shipping forecasts to Bob Dylan and a Bavarian opera—that turned Summers on to the idea of creating her own sounds. “He has over 150 mix tapes and they are all brilliant,” muses Summers of her dad’s “batshit crazy” works and soundbite mashups. “I think that’s why I got into sampling and hip-hop. Everything can be sampled down to one kick.”
So it’s no surprise that when she turned 18, Summers acquired her first set of decks. “If all the boys are doing it, why the fuck can’t I?” she recalls thinking. And once she was admitted to the prestigious Central Saint Martins to study art—initially part time, then full—she began spending more time in London and focusing her energies on her passion for music.
“I was desperate to be weird and creative,” says Summers, who nabbed herself a DJ residency at a local club under the moniker Laydee Isa. “It would be a challenge to go and DJ at this really scary place called The Jam in Brixton, and I would force myself to go there. It was a real endurance to go and deal with all the thugs, but I loved it.” Summers’ cocky attitude fueled her drive to take her talent to the next level and quickly helped her land a gig spinning on the local radio station’s Saturday night hip-hop show, in between earning a fine art and film degree. Local DJ Dan Greenpeace took her under his wing, and before long Summers found herself hanging out with hip-hop icons such as The Game and the late Guru.
Driven by the desire to become a well-known name in producing, Summers purchased an MPC (Music Production Controller) and spent the next year holed up in her recording space, learning zow to use it. “I was making it up as I went along,” she says. Tired of recording with rappers whom she had encountered during her DJing stint, she approached her friend’s girlfriend, then aspiring singer Welch, about a possible collaboration.
“This girl is going to be a megastar,” was Summers’ first thought when the duo began recording and writing songs together in her new studio—an upgrade from her previous spaces and “the first place I could actually invite people to that wasn’t in my cupboard or my bedroom,” she jokes. “We’d try to write a hit in half an hour—write the lyrics and record a beat. We’d do whole days like that, making music in our underwear.” The strategy clearly paid off for the best friends, who wrote the hit “Dog Days” during this time period.
By 2008 the fully formed band had a manager and a recording contract and went back to Summers’ studio to revisit some of the earlier material Summers and Welch had created. “I was coming from a hip-hop perspective, she was coming from an indie perspective, and we were making this weird sound together” says Summers—a sound that both rocketed them to fame and launched six years worth of touring around the world with Summers playing keyboards in the band. That ended in 2013 with Summers firmly planting her roots in Los Angeles.
But that’s just the tip of the iceberg for the music-world darling, who is now turning her focus toward producing a slew of artists and re-upping her hip-hop game. In between traveling to London to record Florence and the Machine’s next album, Summers (whose current obsessions include ’60s and ’70s music and rapper 2 Chainz) has worked with everyone from Rita Ora to Juliette Lewis, all while falling for her new hometown. “I fucking love it here,” she says. “The guys are really hot, and there are loads of people to make rap with, which is what I really want to do. I’m going to make it happen.”
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