Michael Kiwanuka: Satisfying his soul

'The songs turned out to be a bit too personal, so I started singing them myself'. Photo / Supplied

Rising British singer-songwriter Michael Kiwanuka talks to Lydia Jenkin.

The BBC might have named him as the winner of their "Sound of 2012" poll, but there are heavy echoes of years long past in the music of Michael Kiwanuka.

The understated jazz-tinged soul-folk of the 25-year-old Londoner's debut album is now making waves outside Britain. TimeOut gets him on the line in New York on a few days before his appearance on Letterman, his international promotional foray bringing him all the way to Auckland this week.

It's all part of a career breakthrough for the Londoner of Ugandan parentage who first picked up a guitar as a teenager, inspired by the likes of The Strokes and Nirvana. But it was the older albums that really struck a chord with him through their vocals. "The singing I liked was soul music, that's what excited me about singing. And singer-songwriters as well, they made me want to write songs, so there was an amalgamation of both."

Marvin Gaye, Otis Redding, Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, and Bill Withers are all mentioned as inspirations, and he'd spend hours digging through stores, or friends' CD collections looking for something to spark his imagination. It was through this he also found his way to jazz.

"I got into jazz quite heavily, listening to a lot of Miles Davis and John Coltrane, and their CDs were cheaper, so I could buy more. I'd go up to the top room at HMV where they would have all the jazz for five pounds an album, so I would just buy stuff based just on the cover sometimes. That's what was fun about it, it was my own little journey."

With a few guitar lessons to set him on his way, from the age of 16 he played in various bands, in and out of school, and found the response was generally positive. And when he began writing his own songs, the positive comments seemed to keep coming, so he kept writing.

"Originally I thought that maybe another performer would like my songs and would sing them, and I could earn money that way, but the songs turned out to be a bit too personal for that, so I started singing them myself."

In order to practice, he turned to the records and artists that had always inspired him with their vocals - Marvin Gaye, Otis Redding and the like.

"I thought it sounded good, so I thought I'd better listen to it and practice to that, because they knew how to do it. It's the same as practicing guitar I guess, you learn riffs that other people play, like a Hendrix riff, or a chord progression from the Beatles, so that was how I worked."

Through gigging around London while in his early 20s, he attracted the attention of Communion Records - the alt-folk label part run by run by Mumford & Sons' Ben Lovett - which put out two EPs. Then he set to work on his debut album Home Again.

It was released earlier this year to much anticipation, Kiwanuka having made quite a reputation for himself in the past 12 months, doing things like touring with Adele (he laughs that some of the venues may have seemed small for her, but they were huge for him, having only played pubs before).

Lately he's been doing other fairly rock-star sounding things like recording the track Lasan with The Black Keys' Dan Auerbach, but Kiwanuka remains entirely unassuming, humble about his achievements, and simply happy to find there are lots of people out there who love his songs.

"I guess when I'm playing them live, they take me to a peaceful, relaxed place. Kind of like the same way that finding those CDs when I was younger would take me to a little magical, creative, peaceful place of satisfaction."

LOWDOWN

Who: British soul-folk singer Michael Kiwanuka
What: Debut album Home Again out now

- TimeOut