From Jagger to Her Own Stage: Yolanda Charles on Her Bold Move with “Acid Funk”

For decades, Yolanda Charles was one of the most in-demand session bassists, working with some of the biggest names in music—Mick Jagger, Eric Clapton, Paul Weller, Van Morrison, BB King, and Roger Daltrey, to name a few. But after years of shaping other artists’ sounds, she decided it was time to fully embrace her own.

That transition wasn’t instant. Charles had always kept a band in some form but remained in the background while her session career took priority. It wasn’t until the pandemic unexpectedly accelerated her timeline that she finally went all in. Now, with her new album Acid Funk and a clear artistic vision, she’s making music completely on her own terms.

We spoke with Charles about her time as a session musician, the shift to leading her own band, and how she’s redefining her career.

Acid Funk is out now on Bandcamp.

This is kind of a newer band for you, right? How long has Project pH been around?

We started in 2018, funnily enough, but very low-key. It was done around my session work. So I wasn’t really doing much else besides my session work—a tiny bit of teaching here and there, and then PH was in its fledgling. I had tried to start a new band for some time because I’ve had a band since 2003 or 2002, but I had these breaks and I thought every time, “Do you know what? I’m going to start a new project.”

So, I had three project names over the last 20-odd years. It’s all just me, basically, which is kind of funny. Project pH was the next attempt, but it was half-hearted. I wasn’t fully committed at the time because I was still heavily touring. So I just got together with my guitarist at the time, and we did some stuff from my back catalog from my other bands.

I was primed to write new material and record, and that was the end of 2019. We’d started to go into the studio to demo some songs.

In 2019, I had just had a chat with Sting about joining his band. My plan was to do five more years of session work, in the meantime just gently work with my band in the background, and after five years of sessioning, I would quit session work forever and focus properly on the band.

During that time I would have been building it up in a gentle way because it wasn’t a business move. It was a passion, a love. Obviously, COVID changed all my plans and so I just dropped the session work early, five years earlier than I had planned. In fact, 2025 would have been the year that I would have quit sessioning.

I ended up just quitting session work in 2022, and I’ve been working on my band since then. So it feels like a new thing because it took us so long to get the record together and for me to figure out what I was doing. Effectively, the band’s been gigging quietly at Ronnie Scott’s in the late show, where we’re not really the main attraction. There, we’ve been shaping the band’s sound from 2022, and the album came out at the end of 2024.

Do you keep a large arsenal of basses? I mean, if you’re not doing session work anymore, maybe you don’t need it as much.

No, I don’t now, actually, because I’ve basically found my sound. I need my sound. I don’t need a sound that somebody else really likes. I need to make sure that I’ve got my sound, so I’m not playing anything else really apart from the Dingwall and the Sandberg.

My whole career approach has been led by what other people have requested of me. I do feel that I’ve been, you know, a session player for others to be happy. Now, I’m choosing what I want to sound like. I’ve got a massive range of sounds just from those two basses.

I’ve still got my Fender Elite, which is great. It’s just that it doesn’t have that refined neck. The other two have a very refined neck and I’m playing more fusion now, so I need to get around the bass even more effectively. The Fenders are very kind of chunky, heavy basses in terms of when I want to really go in and attack, but it doesn’t have the refinement on the upper register the way that the other two basses have.

That’s it. I’m covered with those three basses. I’ve got everything I need, you know?

You wrote the lyrics for all the music, right?

Yes, I wrote all the lyrics. The only two things I did well in at school were music and English, so I have a bent towards writing and writing music. The two things come together when I compose songs, so I tend to write more songs as opposed to instrumental music. I also write poetry and I write essays. I have a Substack. I don’t actually post as often as I want to, I’m just so busy.

I put some of my poems on there, my essays, and think pieces on some music business stuff, some of my experiences. And then I also—I’ve got a very good kind of developed skill at summarizing grandiose ideas. You need that to write songs. If you can say it in 500 words in an essay or whatever, you need to be able to say the same thing in three verses, two verses, a middle eight, and a chorus. If you can do that, then you can write songs. Lucky for me, I can do both. It means I can have fun with writing it. I’m not a tortured writer who gets writer’s block. It just flows.

I brought that up because since you have your basses, you mentioned you’ve got your own sound now. A lot of the lyrics seem to be about identity and being true to yourself.

I think a lot of the lyrics that I wrote on this album were written during lockdown. It’s no surprise that a lot of the lyrics reflect a kind of questioning about what I’m about and what’s important, what’s important to focus on.

With “Until My Dying Day”, and the line “I will fight for my rights until my dying day,” that is about trying to stick to what it is you believe in, and even if you’re getting questioned, just to stand firmly in your position and be confident that you’re doing something right for yourself, even if people are disagreeing with you. There was a lot of that during lockdown, people disagreeing with each other. I found it quite distressing. People turned on each other quite a lot and that was tough.

“No ID” is me getting frustrated with how people are using identity as a kind of badge for others to understand who they are based on identity. I think that we base our knowledge of people on how they treat us and what they do. What we do is more important than what we say a lot of the time. And so by calling yourself this, that, or the other, it’s how you show up.

Be sure to check out part 1 and part 2 of our interview.