Freya Ridings: ‘I was a song-writing nerd and now I’m playing Glastonbury’

Freya Ridings can barely believe she will be playing Glastonbury this summer – as she “wasn’t cool enough to go” as a teenager.

The 25-year-old Londoner, whose 2018 single Lost Without You hit the UK top 10 and has racked up nearly 200 million Spotify streams, describes herself as a “piano and song-writing nerd” who spent summers practising rather than hanging out at festivals.

But this week Glastonbury announced the rising star would play a 40-minute set on its John Peel stage after the festival founder Michael Eavis, 83, personally attended Ridings’ recent show in Bristol. She spotted him dancing and clapping, then they chatted backstage. “I can’t get over that,” she told the Standard.

The singer, whose latest single Castles was aired for the first time on Radio 1 this week, is also set to play Wilderness, Latitude and the Isle of Wight festivals this summer. 

She said: “I’ve never been to Glastonbury before… It’s the first time I’m going to so many of these festivals, I’ve heard such legendary things from so many people. These are the festivals I wasn’t cool enough to go to as a teen, and now I get to actually play at them and it’s very, very surreal.

“I was the really uncool girl at school who wrote piano ballads, and now I’m playing Glastonbury. It makes absolutely no sense.”

Studying at the Brit school in Croydon, Ridings spent four years playing open-mic nights across the capital before getting her break in the industry. Now she is touring so often – including a US tour last year – that she has not been able to officially move out of her parents’ “bohemian” north London home. 

She said: “Coming home is the most grounding thing in the world… my brother is 17 and he will always tell it like it is.”

The singer-songwriter hopes her work inspires young women to write their own music. 

She said: “It wasn’t even really about performing when I started, it was about writing…  little girls come up to me after shows and you can see it in their eyes, they’re genuinely like ‘I want to play guitar now’, ‘I want to make my own songs’ and it literally makes me emotional. Getting to champion song writing to young girls, that means the world to me.”