The Halfway Kid, British-Sudanese singer and songwriter Saeed Gadir makes music for communing, and finds himself in the midst of a new folk tradition — one that he’s writing in real time. After four sold out headline shows in 2023 he recently sold out his 5th and biggest headline show to date at London’s Bush Hall (450 capacity). At Radio X new single “Depressed with an Accent” was named as Record of the Week by John Kennedy and has also been added to the X-Posure List.
For fans of: Hak Baker, Morgan Waller, Sturgill Simpson
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Ashaine White Just when you thought every genre mash-up had been done, Ivor Novello Rising Star Nominee Ashaine White arrives with a brand new hybrid: grunge-soul. Ashaine’s moody, spellbinding approach to jazz harmony and melodies, wrapped with a brash garage-band sensibility and storytelling at the focus of her songwriting form a unique and exciting soundscape, putting you right in the middle of her world.
“I want my music to represent me being myself” she says. To her, as a young Black woman in music, that mindset isn’t defined by a specific hairstyle, or the makeup she wears or even restricting the sonics of the music she creates to fit neatly within any one subculture. Instead, her dream is to connect people to themselves through her music, and do so by existing as freely and authentically as she possibly can. Reared on a musical diet of everything from the reggae and Lover’s Rock of her Jamaican heritage to the pop trappings of afterschool MTV Base sessions or bedroom dance parties to the original soundtracks of Cheetah Girls and Bratz Dolls. At college, she studied the technical intricacies of jazz vocalists like Ella Fitzgerald and Nina Simone played a huge role in the growth of her own voice. But arguably, it was the contagion of her older sister’s emo and indie music obsession that became the most definitive influence for the 26-year-oldsongwriter. “It just felt like me,” she says of the likes of Paramore, Fall Out Boy, Panic! At the Disco and Arctic Monkeys who went on to score her very own teenage growing pains and fuel her love of all things guitar.
FFO: Mary In The Junkyard, Pixies, Lianne La Havas
https://www.instagram.com/ashainewhite/
Ashaine White
