LiveOne
Born on 18 April 1994 in London, English songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Freya Ridings had her career-changing moment in 2018 when she received news that her torch song "Lost Without You" had been used to soundtrack an emotional moment during the hit reality TV series Love Island, and within a few months the track notched up more than 47 million streams on Spotify and reached number nine in the UK Singles Chart. Growing up in a creative and musical household in Palmer's Green, north London, she is the daughter of writer Cathy Jensen Ridings and actor Richard Ridings who found fame playing the voice of Daddy Pig in children's TV show Peppa Pig and was first introduced to music through their Carole King, James Taylor and Elton John records. Following a camping trip where tunes were played around the log fire, she wrote her first song at the age of nine, but struggled with dyslexia at school and was taught at home for a time, before her dad started taking her to open-mic nights at local pubs. From the ages of 16 to 18, she attended the BRIT School. A school friend who was interning at Good Soldier Songs helped her land a record deal with the small independent label, enabling her to develop her soul-baring piano ballads gradually, before releasing her first live album Live at St. Pancras Old Church in 2017. She also grew as a performer, thanks to support slots on tour with Ray Lamontagne and Tears for Fears, but it was Love Island that brought her to mainstream attention and led to her tracks being played on BBC Radio 1. Love Island also featured her singles "Blackout" and "Maps" (originally by Yeah Yeah Yeahs) and she collaborated with producer MJ Cole on the haunting, electro-soul lament "Waking Up" and performed at the BBC Sports Personality of the Year Awards Show, before releasing EP You Mean the World to Me and her self-titled debut studio album in 2019. The LP yielded her international big-hitter in "Castles," which helped to open up her profile to a wider audience. The "Love is Fire" single followed that year before the arrival of her second studio album, Blood Orange, in 2023; a collection of pop-rock ballads and disco-lite numbers like "Weekends."
Please enable Javascript to view this page competely.
