Holly Humberstone Artistfacts

December 17, 1999
Holly Humberstone's first musical obsession came courtesy of her parents' CD collection - a large pile kept in their bedroom, which Holly would raid as a small child, picking albums purely by cover art. One of those lucky dips landed her Madonna's Music (2000), which she and her sisters would blast constantly. "I feel like when I listen to it now, I can almost smell our house and the dolls that we would play with," she told Stellar magazine.
Humberstone was spotted by a manager after performing on her local BBC Radio Lincolnshire Introducing show - a platform that showcases unsigned talent - while she was still in school. That one performance set off a chain of events that led to a slot at the Glastonbury Festival in 2019, where Lewis Capaldi caught her set and was immediately taken with her music. Capaldi invited her onto his European arena tour, and one of her first-ever shows as a professional artist was in front of 12,500 people at London's Wembley Arena.
Sam Fender is another high-profile admirer. Humberstone collaborated with the Newcastle songwriter on an acoustic version of his hit "Seventeen Going Under," and the two have toured together, with Holly opening Fender's sold-out homecoming shows at St. James' Park.

She found out she had won the 2022 Brit Award for Rising Star while she was literally in the studio with Fender recording that duet. "He was like, 'Also, here's a Brit Award,' and I was like, 'This has to be a joke, come on,'" she told Paste magazine.
Humberstone and her three sisters grew up in what she calls the Haunted House - a sprawling gothic cottage in Grantham, Lincolnshire (birthplace of Margaret Thatcher and half of Sleaford Mods), where her parents, both NHS medics, encouraged their children to be creative and make a mess. The house had a dungeon, rooms full of meat hooks, and a climate so damp mushrooms grew out of the walls - friends were known to make excuses to avoid sleeping over. It inspired her 2021 piano ballad "Haunted House."
Her second album, Cruel World (2026), was sparked when she returned to the Haunted House to help her sisters clear it out before her parents retired to Wales. Sorting through childhood possessions, she found an old Brothers Grimm fairy tale book, her ballet shoes from three years at the Royal Ballet School, and a musical jewelry box with a spinning ballerina - all of which fed directly into the album's dark, gothic fantasy universe.

"I had this weird epiphany, where I was like, 'F--k it, I can make pop songs and I actually love pink and I love ballet and this is the album that I want to make,'" she told Rolling Stone UK.
Holly's close-knit family is woven throughout her work. She works with her sister Eleri Humberstone as her creative director, and her songs are populated by the women around her: "Scarlett" "Lauren," and "Lucy" are all named for friends, built from laser-sharp personal detail. "To Love Somebody," the second single from Cruel World, was written for one of her sisters who was going through the wreckage of her first real relationship.
Her longtime producer and close friend Rob Milton was a figure of hero-worship long before the two ever met. Milton was frontman of Dog Is Dead, a cult Nottingham indie band that Humberstone idolized as a teenager growing up in Lincolnshire. "Someone once asked me if I've ever been starstruck and I was with Rob when we first worked together as I was such a huge fan of Dog Is Dead," she told The Forty-Five.
Before music took over, Humberstone spent three years training at the Royal Ballet School in London between the ages of 8 and 11 and was also a violinist with the Lincolnshire Youth Symphony Orchestra. That classical background informs the disciplined emotional precision of her songwriting, even when the music is firmly in the indie-pop world.
She makes, by her own account, the perfect jacket potato. When BBC Radio 1 asked her for a recipe she knows by heart, Holly cited the humble baked potato - specifically the challenge of achieving crispy skin with a soft, fluffy inside - and said it is the one thing she craves every time she comes home from tour.

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