She’s the social media phenomenon who has grow to be one of many UK’s most promising pop singers after final week successful the BBC’s prestigious Sound of 2022 ballot.
But regardless of her success and multiple million TikTok followers, little is understood in regards to the 20-year-old protegee other than her stage identify: PinkPantheress.
However The Mail on Sunday can reveal that the star’s actual identify is Vicky Beverly Walker and that she is the daughter of a statistics professor and a Kenyan-born civil servant.
She was born in Tub in 2001, the place her father Stephen labored within the maths division on the metropolis’s college. One well-connected diplomat described the singer as ‘posh’.
Roaring success: Singer PinkPantheress
Alongside along with her mom Elza and older brother Christopher, the household moved to Kent in 2010, the place house was a £500,000 townhouse in Canterbury.
She attended the selective and high-achieving Barton Courtroom Grammar College, throughout which period she says she stacked cabinets on the Co-op grocery store.
Ms Walker’s showbusiness profession started on the age of 12, when she danced in a faculty manufacturing of Bugsy Malone, however music was her ardour and he or she started to jot down songs in her bed room and plan her unorthodox strategy to her profession.
Over the previous 12 months, she has been releasing music whereas dwelling in London and finding out movie at college, however there may be time for different pursuits together with futsal, a football-based sport performed on a tough court docket.
Her stage identify was coined after watching the ITV quiz present The Chase, the place host Bradley Walsh requested a contestant what a feminine panther was referred to as.
Ms Walker says the reply – pantheress – was to be her identify, however after realising there was already an individual utilizing that on-line, she put ‘pink’ earlier than it.
Talking of her want to be mysterious, she mentioned: ‘I discover it simpler to not lay each single card on the desk. I like my privateness and I felt like, if I’ve my music out and my face in all places, it might begin getting an excessive amount of for folks.’
She was born in Tub in 2001, the place her father Stephen (pictured) labored within the maths division on the metropolis’s college
That didn’t, nonetheless, cease her from attending to work on rising the variety of her followers on TikTok. Her technique of following 1,000 folks each hour paid off and shortly her reputation was seen by document label Parlophone, house to artists resembling Coldplay and Sir Paul McCartney, which signed her.
In October, Ms Walker launched her debut album To Hell With It and per week later she was unveiled by US dressmaker Marc Jacobs as his new muse alongside younger fashions Iris Regulation and Bella Hadid.
Regardless of her shyness over her actual identification, Ms Walker is well-connected, networking with Kenya’s Excessive Commissioner to the UK, Manoah Esipisu, who described her as ‘posh’ and revealed she is a daily customer to Mombasa, the port metropolis in her mom’s native nation.
Final Thursday, Ms Walker was unveiled because the BBC’s tip for the long run after 130 music business consultants voted for her, together with singers Sir Elton John, Jade Thirlwall of Little Combine, Ed Sheeran and Billie Eilish.