Meet Our
Music Grant
Winner

In October 2020, we announced the Fred Perry x Nicholas Daley Music Grant, designed to help one unsigned musician hone their craft and get the support they needed to thrive.

“Music is the unifying force between our brands and plays a key role in each collaboration collection. That is why during a time when the music industry is under great threat we decided to pull together and offer the music grant to support the next generation of musicians here in the UK.” Nicholas Daley

Thanks to everyone who applied – the standard of talent was incredible, and we can’t wait to see what you all get up to in the future. Special mentions for our runners up – AMOS, Casey Tufnell, feeo and Wilfred.

Our winning singer/songwriter aden will go on to receive a two-day masterclass at legendary Metropolis Studios, where they will record their music with the help of industry experts. We caught up with aden to get a taster of what’s to come.

“I am a musician of no particular home. If you take the midpoint between my Ethiopian roots and my American Midwestern upbringing, you'll find yourself in the middle of the Atlantic. But that's okay - I try to make music that can travel places with you, through time and space, in your mind and heart and soul. I try to build landscapes and poetics of sound that haven't been built before - if anything, so that we might feel something, old or new, more deeply and together.” aden

Just…surreal. I feel very honoured and excited!

I heard about it thanks to one of the judges - Zakia, who I’m a great fan of. What made me enter? I don’t know, it just felt like one of those circumstances where I might as well shoot my shot.

Despite having a mother who's tone deaf (I'm not kidding) and a father who I've never heard carry a tune in my life - somehow I came out of the womb and was singing before I could put proper sentences together. So, I guess this means my music started with some strange recessive gene, which thankfully was supported by my family and various music activities in primary school. After a series of quite serendipitous opportunities I began to think seriously about music, as something beyond just a hobby I really loved. This was around the beginning of my undergraduate studies; there, I soon found myself splitting time between an astrophysics/maths degree and a conservatoire jazz performance programme. In this dual environment I began intentionally song-writing/composing and producing for the first time. There were aspects of my own artistic voice, finally beginning to emerge then - and, I think, a growing curiosity in how expression of feeling through sound could be experimented with. That curiosity brought me to London for a creative practice programme and for the incredibly rich cultural life here. And it sustains me now as I work and collaborate on musical projects, attempting to explore the directions they can travel: what heart they can carry in different but still impactful ways.

Well, the musician (and artist in general) lives an astoundingly precarious life; this held true before the pandemic, and it has only been intensified throughout this year. For as much as artistic work profoundly impacts our societal culture and collective conscious, it is constantly devalued and exploited. You see this, for one, in the general lack of social infrastructures or mechanisms to sustainably encourage artistic work - or power dynamics within the music industry, which take advantage of, control, or exclude those without social or financial capital.

Anyhow. In the midst of all this, I think grants play a critical role in empowering and protecting musicians who otherwise might have no other means of support - whether in relation to their art-making or their physical livelihood. Frankly, grants have served as essential creative/material lifelines in the face of those who routinely doubt (and materially undermine) the viability and significance of artistic careers. I’ve been deeply heartened by how people have rallied together in the current moment, to not only devise new means of supporting vulnerable artists and venues, but to also mobilise and fight for longer-term social and political interventions. I hope it can lead us all to a place where the safety and stability of an artist or artistic space, across all levels of professional experience, is better ensured.

Maybe if expressionism was mutated by leftfield pop and infused with a sort of ethereal/cosmic soul.

I’m not sure if I have a concrete process; my music making usually feels very circumstantial, or I suppose reactive to a particular moment, interest, sensory experience, etc. But whenever I compose there is often an emotional intensity I try to place at the centre. Making something that’s meaningful to me will always require an extension, exposure, or interrogation of myself. And because such an undertaking can be intense or tender, I think I also approach music in a fluid and patient way. If something needs space/time to evolve then I try to respect that.

As for inspiration – I am deeply inspired by the human capacity for growth, love, resilience, connection, and creative thought. I am also inspired by history, and the stories of those who have struggled and fought for the liberation of all peoples. I find questions of living – how we struggle through each day to live, or be, the best we can – extremely important and complex and humbling. There is so much about our existence and surroundings in this universe that is awe-striking, brutal, confusing, euphoric...the adjectives go on! To me, just being present for and moving through it offers an endless stream of things to explore.

There are many, but for the sake of brevity I'll list the first five(ish) that come to mind!

Ethiopian music, specifically religious protestant music, 50s-70s Ethiopian jazz, and contemporary music (e.g. Gigi, Aster Aweke): this is just a sound of home and history I carry in my body, always.

American folk music: one of the first cultures I connect to that showed me how lyrics can be poems, and the emotional effect of just a single instrument or a single voice.

Romantic classical music and Anglican choral music: I'm amazed by the treatment of harmony within these genres, the ethereality and passion and longing they can so powerfully represent.

Jazz and R&B: ooof, the inspirations are great...as a socio-political force, as literal revolutionizers of popular music, as an expansion of how improvisation, rhythm, harmony can be wielded as vehicles of expression.

Experimental music: this is obviously a very broad category, but is united by an ethos and creative approach I deeply try to reflect in my own artistic practice - of pushing the boundaries of musical structure/genre and compositional convention.

The song I wish to record is called, 'because emotion is a kind of motion.' I intend to include it on my next project. In short, I'm attempting to record a sort of circumstance: of being alive, of finding one's aliveness. Of coming back from a faraway place, already looking forward as well as looking back. I thought I would choose 'because emotion' as I'm especially interested in how it could evolve under Metropolis Studio's engineering expertise. It’s extremely dynamic is terms of texture, timbre, frequency range, space - and this dynamism is certainly central to the spirit of the music, but I know and hear it still needs to be meaningfully sculpted. Furthermore, I've never had a chance to record my own music in a professional studio before, or work with professional engineers on my music in person. It would be very special for the first such experience to be here, particularly with this song that I hold dear and believe needs particular care.

Listen to aden’s playlist below –