At 22 and with little over a year in the music industry under her belt, Skye Newman is already completely sure of what she wants to get out of it. “A James Bond song,” the south-east Londoner says without taking a beat, in answer to my question about ultimate career goals. It’s not cockiness —spend five seconds with Newman’s singing voice and you’ll not only see why it makes total sense for her, but also why it’s genuinely possible she might achieve it one day.
Newman has plenty of endorsements to back up her ambition, however nascent her career may be. She’s earned herself consistent accolades and comparisons with artists including Adele and Amy Winehouse, something that still flabbergasts her (“But it would be silly not to take that [compliment] with every bit of happiness,” she says) as well as two Brit award nominations. Her first two singles charted in the UK top 20, making her the first British female solo artist to achieve such a feat in more than a decade. SE9 Part 1, her debut EP — named after the postcode she grew up in — reached a peak of 18 on the UK albums chart, staying in the top 100 for seven weeks in total.
While these metrics might all sound very lofty and grandiose, Newman is anything but. Today, she’s talking to me from the passenger seat of her sister’s car, sitting cross-legged with her phone propped up against the dashboard, fiddling with her rings as she speaks. I can just make out a fresh tattoo snaking down her forearm, covered with clingfilm. Fitting, for a girl who wears everything on her sleeve.
It may be Newman’s singing voice that makes the first impression — a mix of rasp and power that triggers goosebumps, like it’s being sewn under your skin — but it’s her unapologetically honest lyrics that have drawn the most attention. Her second single, Family Matters (released last May and peaking at number five in the charts), dissects her turbulent upbringing with a raw, unflinching numbness.
In the song, she sings about her family’s substance abuse problems, being aware of lines of drugs since she was five, and how a no Caller ID flashing up on her phone screen almost always meant the police were calling her again. The song’s final refrain begins pointedly: “Yeah, I’m f***ed up. But you haven’t met my family.”
Which is why Newman found it particularly funny when she was asked to sing it during a recent performance for the King’s Trust, where the King and Queen were in the audience. “I was like… maybe I shouldn’t sing Family Matters,” she laughs, “but [the event team] were like, ‘They want Family Matters.’”
Meeting the monarch was “pretty strange”, she smiles, but she also found the royals to be pleasantly easy conversationalists. “[The King] was like, ‘Oh, your voice is so big. How’d you get it so far?’” Newman giggles. “He was like, ‘Does it not strain? Do you not lose your voice?’ I was like, ‘Nah, I’m all good, we’re good’.” The Queen was surprisingly silly, too. “Camilla said to me, ‘I was so scared your dress was gonna fall down’, and I said, ‘Imagine, wouldn’t wanna flash you! But I bet you understand with your own dresses’, and she was like, ‘Yes, I’m used to it’.”
“She was the first person I got to witness in front of me make magic in a room”
Newman discovered her love of music through her aunt Moona, a jazz and blues singer who died when she was nine. “She was very much like me,” she says, “very loud, very rowdy, loved to smoke, very boisterous”. Growing up, her aunt would take her to museums, galleries (“Anything to make us curious and to make us want to learn,” she says) and often the recording studio. “I got to watch her write music and see the love and passion she had for it. That sparked the fire in me to do it. She was the first person I got to witness in front of me make magic in a room.”
When we talk about Moona’s death, Newman’s tears come thick and fast. Like many who have experienced trauma at a young age, she remembers the day it happened with absolute clarity yet struggles with other childhood memories. “I don’t have any,” her voice wobbles, catching teardrops with her sleeve. “But I remember her.” In a way, Newman’s aunt was a surrogate mother, caring for her during times when things at home were particularly painful. Her elder sister Charlotte, who I now realise is sitting in the car seat next to her, holding Newman’s hand in support, occupies a similar role these days as her manager and closest confidante.
Seeing the inside of a recording studio as a child might have helped prompt Newman’s obsession with music, but she is no nepo baby. Having grown up in and around council estates, she is part of the new wave of working-class musicians who turned to the internet to boost their careers in place of a classical education or professional connections. She did attempt the well-trodden path, applying twice to the BRIT School, a move inspired by her aunt, but her failure to get in was a deeper cut than mere rejection — Newman felt as if she was being kept away from Moona’s memory, not being allowed to follow in her footsteps.
She looks back on it now as a blessing in disguise. “[Moona] actually ended up leaving,” she says. “She had done it for however long, and then she left, because she was just a mess at times herself. She was obviously young, but that’s why I wanted to go. [The rejection] really broke my heart, because that was something that I wanted to do to be closer to her, and the fact that I didn’t get that, that was the first big ‘no’, and it obviously makes you question [yourself]. But then I just thought, ‘If you’re going to tell me no, I’ll figure out another way to do it.’”
Lewis Capaldi is a little bit shy, but once he gets going, he is so f***ing funny
And so she did. After building a presence on TikTok and Instagram (she has a combined 2.1 million followers on those two platforms), Newman was signed by Columbia Records in 2024. Since then, she has performed with Ed Sheeran and toured with Lewis Capaldi, two men she wholeheartedly adores. “What you see of them is how they are,” she says. She has plenty of funny stories about Capaldi, but “not ones I can tell here”. “He’s just the most bubbly, cutesy f***ing man ever. He’s not bubbly when you first meet him, he’s a little bit shy, but once he gets going, he is so f***ing funny. He’s just an abundance of joy.” When she and Capaldi met people at parties on tour, he always redirected the conversation to her. “He’s like, ‘Yeah, Skye’s a really f***ing good singer, she’s so amazing.’ He will always big me up in front of other people.”
You might think that compliments from Capaldi, nominations at the Brits and chats with the King could be going to Newman’s head, but she’s got a secret antidote to the glitz and the glamour: her home, aka “the cabin”, an outbuilding in her sister’s garden, where she lives in south-east London. “It’s the best place,” she says. “I have all my friends over and it’s my little safe space where I go to just be calm, and I’m just normal, and I’m just Skye.”
The inherent privilege that runs through the music industry still occasionally causes her to baulk, whether it be overt displays of wealth or secret nepo babies (“There are some that I didn’t even know that I find out about and I’m like, ‘Wait what?’” she laughs), but she’s also realistic about it. “I’m not blind to the fact that with me entering this world, my kids might have privilege growing up,” she says. “But it’s just about understanding and taking accountability for the fact you’ve had that upper hand.”
For now, Newman is taking it all in her stride and preparing for the release of her second EP, SE9 Part 2. “People ask me: ‘What does it feel like to be famous?’ And to me, it feels like a dream, like it feels like I’m constantly waiting for someone to pinch me, and for it to end. But every day I wake up and I get to live this life, I get to do everything I love.” I offer that perhaps after everything she grew up with, it might be time for a little bit of karma. She beams: “Well, it’s paid me back tenfold.”
E9 Part 2 by Skye Newman is out on May 29
