FREYA RIDINGS
SHE’S been flatteringly compared to Florence Welch, Adele and Laura Marling, so it’s safe to say Londoner Freya Ridings looks set for a bright future.
And her single Lost Without You was the first entirely self-written song by a female artist to hit the top 10 since Kate Bush reissued Running Up That Hill in 2012.
Ridings fan and Game of Thrones star Lena Headey directs the video for new single You Mean The World To Me, which stars fellow GoT star Maisie Williams.
Freya, whose actor father Richard provided the voice of Peppa’s Daddy Pig, wrote the song for her mother after a medical emergency.
“I wrote the chorus just after my mum was taken to hospital with multiple pulmonary embolisms,” she says.
“It was two years ago, a few days after I signed my first record deal, so it was a huge shock to almost lose the person I cherish most – she could have been gone in a heartbeat. It was such a shocking low after the biggest high of my life.”
Happily, mum made a full recovery but had an understandably emotional reaction when she heard her daughter perform the song her near-death experience had inspired.
“She had no idea the song was about her until I dedicated it to her at my first headline show.
“Even though we are beyond close, and always have been, it felt like a huge emotional cliff dive to make such a public statement about how scared I was at even the thought of losing her.
“We both cried after that gig and now she’s so proud every time I play it.” Growing up “dyslexic, tall and a redhead” Freya says Maisie Williams and (right) Freya she struggled at school. But in her coolly incisive songs and performances she has found a way to make her “otherness” and dyslexia work to her advantage. “Hugely,” smiles Freya. “I write in keys I have no idea are technically ‘hard’ to write in because I was never taught that it wasn’t right. “Sometimes you write and play in a way that you can’t even anticipate and I love that.”
She’s honoured to be compared to Adele but the pair have yet to meet. “She was one of my biggest inspirations as a female writer and fiery redheaded Londoner.
“We have mutual friends who’ve said they think we’d get on, but I think I’d be too stunned to speak, to be honest.” ■ Single You Mean The World To Me is out now Defiant outsider artist Herndon, a Radiohead favourite (but don’t let THAT put you off), reaches a new futuristic peak with her third fulllength album. Collaborator/partner Mat Dryhurst and a host of internet associates helped her develop an Artificial Intelligence entity, fetchingly called The Spawn. Ravishingly disembodied autotuned voices, strangely sensual synths, intoxicated beats and samples do a glorious job of letting human impulse loose in cyberspace. A cut above.
My mum’s illness was such a low after biggest high of my life