Music
Watch Jorja Smith perform Tomorrow at her 21st birthday party
The rising UK R&B star teamed up with Red Bull Music to present a special intimate show in London.
Jorja Smith doesn’t usually make a fuss over her birthday, but this one deserves a proper celebration. It's a hot summer evening in June, and at midnight she’ll raise a toast to commemorate her 21st.
3 min
Jorja Smith - Tomorrow, live in London
Performance to celebrate Jorja Smith’s 21st birthday and debut album launch
Watch Jorja Smith perform Tomorrow in the player above.
Tonight's party also caps off the weekend that launched her debut album Lost & Found – a cohesive collection of silky soul tracks for a generation who are proudly in tune with their emotions. The album campaign has seen Smith adorn the cover of a number of magazines, and Lost & Found reached No.3 in the UK Albums chart. The record has since been shortlisted for the 2018 Mercury Prize, the winner of which will be announced Thursday September 20 at a ceremony in London.
The Walsall-raised, London-based singer’s career has been a whirlwind. After initially uploading the single Blue Lights on Soundcloud at the age of 18, Jorja Smith quickly became one of the UK’s most talked-about new artists. Fortunately she feels she has the support she needs to stay steady during the hype. “I’ve got really great people around me – my band, my crew,” she tells me, curled up on the dressing room sofa before the guests arrive. “I’m with these people all the time, because it’s crazy right now. They’re like my close friends.”
The party is at Omeara – a cavernous club near London Bridge with a 350 capacity room to host Smith’s intimate performance. Present are recognisable figures on the UK scene. Stormzy, Little Simz, Ella Eyre, activist and model Adwoah Aboah, Smith’s stylist Leah Abbott as well as AJ Tracey, Big Zuu and members of their MTP crew are among those mingling around the venue, dancing during her set and eating wedges of a cake with Lost & Found’s cover art printed on the icing. In between songs, Smith apologises – with a touch of self-deprecating humour – for being much more nervous than usual because she can see so many of her mates in the crowd.
Jorja Smith's Lost & Found birthday cake
© Jon Stone
Jorja Smith receives her cake
© Jon Stone
Jorja Smith on stage
© Jon Stone
Jorja Smith performing
© Jon Stone
But the party's performance is a confident showcase of Lost & Found. The song February 3rd already sounds like a classic, and the crowd cheers encouragingly when Smith raps on Lifeboats (Freestyle). But Smith and her four piece band still treat us to a couple of non-album crowd pleasers, including Imperfect Circle from 2016’s Project 11 EP, the UK garage-styled Preditah collaboration On My Mind as well as a cover of No Scrubs and a brief rendition of The Fugees' Ready Or Not.
Although she’s not been in the limelight for long, Jorja Smith and her band are an impressively slick act. Not long before Lost & Found's release, they completed a 14 date US tour, which kicked off after a performance of Blue Lights on Jimmy Kimmel Live! “The US are really welcoming,” Jorja tells me. “And I feel like they just want to listen. I love it over there.”
Jorja Smith seems to have had as much praise from US magazines as publications from her home country. It’s probably fair to say her success across the pond has been helped, in part, by the support of Drake – who invited her to support the Birmingham date of his 2017 tour and collaborated with her for two songs on his More Life project. In February this year, Jorja Smith’s international profile was boosted again when she appeared with her own track on the Black Panther soundtrack – a project helmed by Kendrick Lamar – alongside the likes of The Weeknd, SZA and Travis Scott.
“I was in Camp Flognaw – the Tyler, the Creator curated festival – and I got a message saying ‘Do you want to work with Kendrick Lamar?’” Smith says, smiling at the memory. “And they said ‘can you get to the studio for half seven?’ I met Kendrick, Sounwave, his engineer, his manager Dave [Free] and that’s how it started. We wrote it together. [Kendrick] left me in the room with a beat, I sang on it and came up with some melodies. He listened to it back and we wrote it from there.”
Still in the early stages of her career, Jorja Smith exudes the confidence of a seasoned star, having scooped up collaborations with the biggest hip-hop artists in the world by the age of 20. But how does she feel about her solo material? Lost & Found is a personal and very intimate record. is it nerve-wracking that the people in the songs are going to hear the lyrics, now it’s out? She thinks for a moment.
The song Goodbyes, which written for a friend who passed away, is a special one, and Smith wrote it with the hope of making those affected feel better. “But if it’s a song where I’m talking about an ex or something, I don’t care,” she shrugs. “I wrote that for me. It’s for me to get things out, so I feel good.”
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