“One of the ways I learned about how to sing, really how to improvise on stage, was through listening to a lot of jazz music. I started listening to jazz when I was about 15, which is obviously a very influential kind of age for everybody and I picked a HMV compilation of Nina Simone tracks and was really blown away by her voice and her incredible piano playing. So there’s a song on that called. It Might As Well Be Spring. Towards the end of the song, she starts playing with the melody, with her voice and playing along with the piano. She was kind of just really leaning into it, drawing out different beautiful twists. It’s a song about coming of age. It really struck me at the time speaking to a lot of the things that I was feeling as a teenager, these kind of strange yearnings for adventure that you haven’t maybe felt before and starting to feel like you’re not a child anymore. That’s a moment that really touched me musically. And Nina Simone has been a huge influence on my music and my singing.”So when I was seventeen, I was studying maths, chemistry and theatre, and I was very fortunate enough to go and watch the Trainspotting show version down under Bristol Temple Meads Station. I was heading towards the life of accountancy and number crunching and stuff like that, then I went to watch this show. Within the first five minutes, I was just drawn into these characters in a rave just giving off so much energy and giving off so much life. They were moving not like anything I’d seen before. They were telling a story with their bodies and just setting up the play in such a perfect manner and then the next hour of the show I was just on the edge of my seat enjoying myself like I’ve never done so before while watching a piece of art. It has really influenced my practice going forward. From that moment on I knew that I wanted to be in theatre.