He’s got a striking look and a startling voice but somehow you don’t quite connect the two. And yet it’s true: that young man singing his way up and down the vocal range from tenor to falsetto with the power and grace of a Smokey or a Prince is actually a 23 year old from Manchester.
Meet Daley, the new wunderkind of modern R&B. You may already be familiar with him from his two visits to the charts, either via the Gorillaz single ‘Doncamatic’, a collaboration with Damon Albarn who invited him to write a song with him after watching him on YouTube, or from ‘Long Way Home’, a standout track on Wretch 32’s Top 5 album Black and White. You may also have seen him in the BBC ‘Sound of 2011’ poll earlier this year, a ranking he secured without the plugging of a record company. Or you may have heard his mixtape, Those Who Wait, a recent showcase for his mercurial vocal talents and songwriting prowess – after all, it has been downloaded over 20,000 times.
As a teen, he would make bedroom recordings inspired by the likes of Prince, Maxwell, Imogen Heap and Jill Scott, but he had nowhere to perform in Manchester’s live scene, one still dominated by indie bands. So he moved to London and built a reputation on the black live music circuit. Daley’s track ‘Rainy Day’ found its way to Mistajam and Ronnie Herel at BBC Radio 1xtra, who started giving it heavy rotation.
“I had people talking and it felt great but I still felt I had not made a statement about who I am as an artist, so I recorded my mixtape, ‘Those Who Wait’, and gave it away on Twitter and Facebook,” he explains. He adds that his mixtape might surprise some people. “If you’re expecting a straight-up soul singer,” he warns, “it won’t necessarily be that.”
The lead track from it is ‘Smoking Gun’. “It’s about an emotion I went through, rather than an actual situation,” he explains. Daley is currently working on his debut album with production so far from Andre Harris of Dre and Vidal (Jill Scott, Mary J Blige), former Suede guitarist Bernard Butler (Tricky) and Shea Taylor (Ne-Yo, Beyonce).
It’s about time a soul man took his place alongside the many globally successful UK girl singers. “We’ve had great female artists like Amy Winehouse, Adele and Jessie J. But the men have been slacking,” he laughs. “There hasn’t been a great male soul artist for ages. I want to make it up there.”
Good things come to Those Who Wait. Make way for Daley.
