Hit rewind

The 1950s soul train is back on track, and it’s being driven by the 26-year-old singer-songwriter Leon Bridges.

Iwas in Paris recently,’ Leon Bridges tells me. ‘And after coming off stage I just broke down. I got very emotional and suddenly became incredibly nervous. Sometimes I wake up and look at Twitter and then my schedule and it’s just scary. You know, I had never been overseas before all this happened.’ Leon Bridges is from Fort Worth, Texas. He sings and writes soul music paying the sincerest respect to the songs of the 1950s and 1960s that inspired it. His debut album, Coming

Home, was recorded in a makeshift Fort Worth studio using period equipment and local musicians. No instrument was allowed to be less than 50 years old. His appearance offers further tribute: he wears vintage suits, starched-collared shirts tucked neatly into high-waist trousers, and natty loafers, and has a razor-sharp parting. Fittingly, he is back home for a few days to celebrate the release of his album. Coming Home immediately entered the top 10 in the UK album chart and has received blanket positive reviews, with Rolling Stone describing the album as ‘the best kind of nostalgia trip’. It has placed Bridges as the poster boy for a soul revival.

‘I think I’ll always live in Fort Worth,’ he says, drinking a glass of water in Shipping and Receiving, a concert venue and bar linked by a short corridor to Niles City Sound, the studio in which he recorded Coming Home. ‘It’s great that I can now go anywhere I want to play music, but I love coming back here. I can roll down the streets and just reminisce. Just reminisce about how nine months ago I used to walk down Magnolia Street playing my guitar. Not even busking. I just wanted to be out playing because I wasn’t getting any shows. There are a lot of bands who would get really big in Fort

‘You look back to the 50s and 60s and how much tension there was and all the racism, I feel very thankful that I can walk down the street with my band – and my band is all white’