After being one of social media’s earliest (and unexpected) viral sensations with a cover of Kesha’s TikTok, somehow leading to Channel 4 commissioning a series, Southwest London’s Stefan Abingdon now finds himself writing songs by sampling his Domino’s orders. This might sound like some sharp fall from grace, but it’s quite the opposite. Working under the solo artist/producer name St£fan, Abingdon has utilised the extended indoors time to conquer the live-streaming platform Twitch, and expand his songwriting work.
That aforementioned parody and television series are both the efforts of The Midnight Beast, Abingdon’s musical comedy troupe, completed by close friends Andrew Wakely and Ashley Horne.
Following the success of the TikTok parody, the trio released a string of singles including Booty Call and Just Another Boyband that would see them touring the UK and eventually putting pen to paper with Channel 4.
“I tried to make the simplest way to live stream every Thursday,” he says on using Twitch.
“I think I've probably done nearly 50 in a row every single Thursday since I started. I've been creating songs from scratch with a live audience watching. The original ideas would be, ‘can I order a pizza and make a beat with the conversation between me and the pizza guy?’ Or can me and my wife write a song about garlic bread while she's cooking it? Now it feels like every Thursday we've got this little clubhouse of music creatives hanging out and seeing what I'm gonna do next and it's been so nice.”
Much earlier in his career, thanks to The Midnight Beast taking up a decent chunk of space on the internet, his music was discovered by a certain Selena Gomez, who needed a songwriter and producer to collaborate with on her song When The Sun Goes Down. Hence why you can see Gomez and Abingdon dancing around together for The Midnight Beast video for Just Another Boyband.
“I was taking Selena to go and watch Bo Burnham and she said, ‘would you mind if my boyfriend came along? Could you let security know?’ So I had to say to them, ‘Justin Bieber's gonna be coming with us too’. But little did I know that Bo Burnham had a song called Repeat Stuff which slagged off pop stars, and he actually started talking about Bieber!
"But luckily, it was cool. Justin ended up driving me home, which was incredible! I got back to the hotel and all of my mates back home were in bed, and I’m thinking ‘what just happened?’”
I then ask Abingdon how his mini-mothership of a studio is looking nowadays, which he’s packed a pair of Genelec 8020s into.
“They've been great, I’ve had them for a good few years now. What was a real game-changer for me was getting the correct stands for them so that they could point upwards at my ears. I think it's very easy to think you can just get some speakers and chuck them on a piece of foam and that'll be fine. But very rarely do producers have them pointed at their ears, which is actually so important.
"I sent a picture of my desk set up to a friend and he said, ‘I know you're gonna hate me for it because they're expensive, but get some good speaker stands because it will change everything’. And he was so right. It's such a game changer!”
