We discover why Billie Eilish, Michelle Obama and Lily Allen are all fans of Arlo Parks

TEDDY JAMIESON

THE question is, do I really need to introduce Arlo Parks? Because for a 20-year-old just at the beginning of her career, she already seems to be known by an awful lot of people.

Jodie (Killing Eve) Comer and Lily Allen have both declared their love for Parks’ music, Michelle Obama, no less, has added Parks to her playlist and Billie Eilish, the most feted teenage artist of her generation, has praised the singer-songwriter in the pages of Vanity Fair.

Even Parks was taken aback by that one. “You never expect that stuff to happen,” she tells me on a grey

London Thursday afternoon.

“You never expect to turn your phone on and then have Billie Eilish sending you a message . That was definitely a beautiful one.”

Still, if you are not Billie or Michelle or Lily or Jodie, here’s what you need to know. Arlo Parks, known to her family as Anais Oluwatoyin Estelle Marinho (“I’m all good with Arlo,” she says when I ask her what I should call her), is, as previously mentioned, 20 years old, about to release her first album and is already having to fend off claims that she’s the voice of her generation.

Right now, she’s in her bedroom at her family home in west London. On the wall there are prints of Jimi Hendrix and David Bowie and a poster of the late MF Doom’s Operation Doomsday album. She is surrounded by books and candles and guitars and synths and bits of paper (“organised chaos,” Parks says) and she’s counting down the days until the release of her album Collapsed in Sunbeams with a mixture of nerves and excitement.

“It changes every day. I just hope, especially in times like these, it’s going to bring people some comfort. But you never know how people are going to receive your work. All you can do is produce the best work that you can and see how the world receives it. I am excited though.”

Truth is, if it gets even half the acclaim her singles have in the past year, she should have no reason to be nervous of the album’s reception. Collapsed in Sunbeams (the title is taken from a line in Zadie Smith’s novel On Beauty) is a confidentsounding, of-the-moment debut that speaks to Parks’ facility with melodic lines and beats and her big-hearted empathy as she turns her gaze on her not-long-departed adolescence and Gen Z life.

It’s an album that tackles insecurity, anxiety, bisexuality and mental health with an openness and honesty that’s beguiling and, no doubt for some, consoling. She’s writing about what she knows.

She once said she went through school “feeling like that black kid who couldn’t dance for s***, listening to too much emo music and crushing on some girl in her Spanish class.”

Her very fine single Black Dog, meanwhile, references The Cure’s Robert Smith while offering support for a friend in despair: “I would do anything to get you out your room,” she sings in the lyrics. “It’s so cruel what your mind can do for no reason.”

“I think the main reason I share music is the desire to connect to others and help others,” Parks suggests.

“If you create a piece of work that has the potential to make other people feel understood and seen, then it makes sense to put it out, and that was my thinking behind it.”

Little wonder, perhaps, that Parks was made an ambassador for the suicide prevention charity CALM last year.

On its release last May, Black Dog was embraced by both Radio 1 –

Annie Mac labelled it the “hottest record in the world” – and 6 Music. Or kids and their wannabe hipster dads if you prefer (you can guess which demographic I fit into). It’s a reflection of the broad appeal of her music.

Parks’ rise has been vertiginous.

When she was 14, maybe 15, she says, she picked up a guitar and started teaching herself how to make beats on GarageBand. She started off putting music out on Soundcloud and playing gigs with her friends. “And then I put out my first song properly as recently as November 2018.”

Since then, she’s toured with Loyle Carner and Jordan Rakei and even played Glastonbury last year, albeit a Glasto missing an audience.

“I’m still definitely at the beginning of my journey,” Parks says, “but it’s been a wild ride.”

Her dad’s from Nigeria, while her mum was born in France. Music was an ever-present soundtrack growing up. “My dad is a big jazz lover, so there was a lot of Miles Davies and Thelonious Monk playing, and a lot of soul; Minnie Riperton, Otis Redding.

“And then my mum is French, so there was a lot of eighties French pop. And Prince.”

That eclecticism is reflected in her own tastes and influences. After writing poetry as a young teenager, it was the joint influence of a punk icon

See www.celticconnections.com

First publised on Monday