We’re often told in life to go with our guts, and rising star St Lundi took this advice to something of an extreme when he one day left his remote island life off the South Coast of the UK, buying a one-way ticket to London with little money or plan. Some might interpret that as madness, but for this young man it has already led to collaborations with the likes of Kygo and Seeb. He released his first single in March 2020, yet his streams are already in the millions. Headliner chats with St Lundi to get to the bottom of how a very spontaneous decision led to a burgeoning career in pop music.
“I'd always lived on Hayling Island, which is a small island of about 15,000 people,” St Lundi says (or Archie Langley in real life).
“It’s connected to the mainland but you can see the Isle of Wight from there. Imagine if you were walking to France, you'd go through there. I lived there my whole life until I was 21. And then I made a dash to London to do music, and I've been here ever since.”
You often hear the argument these days that, thanks to the ubiquitous nature of the internet, you can have a music career anywhere as long as you have a broadband connection. But you’d perhaps be stretching that argument quite a bit with someone living on a tiny island at the literal bottom of the United Kingdom.
St Lundi found his love for music by learning acoustic guitar, and began cutting his teeth playing small gigs around nearby Portsmouth. However, he found life on the island isolating, and adding to this, his huge desire to go and play music in a big city led to a quite fateful decision.
“I’d always dreamed of doing music in London, and I wasn’t in the best mental state on the island,” St Lundi says.
“It was the 31st of May 2017, 9:30pm. And I just thought, ‘I'm going to go to London’. I had a job and a car on the island. I said to my grandparents [who he was living with] that I was popping out to the shop for half an hour, because I knew they wouldn't let me go otherwise. I jumped onto a train to London.
"The following night I played an open mic in Shepherds Bush and I met a group of Australians who said, ‘Come back to ours’ when I told them I had nowhere to stay.
“It’s not something I’d ever advise someone to do, running away from home in the middle of the night with no money. I know it’s dangerous. I just wanted it enough and I got very lucky at the same time.”
