Max Pope

Born in Crystal Palace in 1995, Max moved to Brighton aged five and following his parents’ separation much of his youth was spent travelling between his parent’s homes on the coast and his nan in South East London.

A constant in his world of uncertainty was music. In part, this was thanks to his music obsessive father, who would expose him to an abundance of genres whenever he visited. Max soon developed an insatiable musical appetite of his own. The urgent poetry of Gil Scott-Heron resonated, as did Nick Drake’s intricate folk and the Beatles’ pristine pop. Bill Withers, Graham Coxon, Donny Hathaway and Jimi Hendrix also hit home. Max’s musical church has always been startlingly broad, counting funk, bossa nova, blues, jazz and rock and roll amongst its number and explains why many of these styles surface in his own material.

Max’s half-Arabic half-Austrian mother always encouraged her son to embrace his emotions. She believes in passion before anything else. She follows her heart all the time. The music she played at home when Max was a kid was always quite moving: Roberta Flack, Aretha Franklin and Stevie Wonder… “The soul aspect of my music is from her as a person and not just the music she played. That has massively influenced the sound of my music.”