Bonnie Kemplay gets her wings

It’s 2005. The camera catches her, confused. Her mouth stays closed. “Three years ago my dad got all our VHS home videos digitised,” she tells me. “It was like 40 hours of footage, from when me and my brother were newborns to like age ten or something.” It is from this footage that “Paper Angel”, track four from her EP Someone, somewhere, was born. It’s a set of songs that are so lyrically luminous they could be VHS tapes themselves.

Kemplay spent a long time with the footage, watching herself grow up in retrospect alongside her brother, noting character traits that remain today, whether amplified and quietened. “I remember, as a kid, rejecting the fact that I was a kid quite a lot,” she says. “I felt really goofy dressed up like that – put on a stage and told, ‘You’re going to perform for all the parents.’ I’m not a little doll, you know. That sort of shyness and uncertainty – maybe I’m more equipped to deal with it as an adult. I still like performing and stuff, but it doesn’t feel super natural to me.”

Kemplay has a knack for collecting these small ideas and mythologising them in her songs to tell a story. Pulling out images that are quietly direct, like stills in a film reel, and linking them piece by piece until, by the song’s end, we are left with a feeling we can almost – but not quite – grasp. Intertwined with flickers of clarinet and fiddle, her memories bloom and shutter before our eyes. “Light floods from the cracks in the blinds,” she sings on “Bones”, “swaying on the floor / golden lines.” “Dandelions” runs, “I was picking up clovers / in the garden bed / static / like dust on my shoulder.”

I ask her about playfulness, whether the songs were always meant to be this way, and she tells me about her writing process, where she begins by singing gibberish over the guitar. “You can say a bunch of words together, and you don’t really know what they mean at the time, and then you listen to them and are like, oh, that’s how I feel about this,” she tells me. “It’s beautiful, kind of growing unconsciously from some strange place, coming to life.” 

The songs feel accidental, organic, growing, their lyrics fitting around Kemplay’s intricate guitar work, which stems from her studies in classical guitar at the City of Edinburgh Music School. “Many of my songs have started from learning a piece of [classical] music,” she says. “There’d be a really beautiful chord within the piece, and then I’d spend the next hour of my practice period just bending off the piece and exploring that voicing and writing a song out of it.” These are songs written in the subconscious place, felt out, and formed shining. 

This playfulness is impressive, considering the industry scrutiny she has been under since her entrance onto the scene in 2021, winning the Radio 1 Live Lounge competition against 10,000 entries and signing soon after to Dirty Hit, before heading on tour with The 1975. 

“After the competition, I came back to my uni flat in Manchester with all these Dirty Hit vinyls and totes,” she says. “There were a lot of eyes on [me] after everything happened so fast. People were watching. It makes you think, like, I need to write another song like that – that there needs to be a level of upkeep and that suddenly you’ve got a lot to lose.” 

Despite this, Someone, somewhere is Kemplay’s first release in three years, a break caused partially by a repetitive strain injury in her hand which left her unable to play guitar, and caused her to drop out of college. “I think a lot of people thought I dropped out because I got signed… but it was actually because I had quite a bad injury and couldn’t finish my studies as a guitarist,” she explains. I ask her if the space and time afforded by those three years changed the songs she was writing. “The EP is a bit more reflective. I was in a headspace of feeling very nostalgic and thinking about who I am and who I want to be and where that all comes from.” 

“Bones”, the EP’s oldest song, charts those three years. “I just couldn’t really do much. I felt like the only reason I was leaving the house was to go see physiotherapists, and the song is about moving around between those people’s care, and then the strangeness of moving on and never seeing them again. I got on really well with my physio. We’d lend each other books and have really good chats and he felt kind of like a friend. I guess the song is about that experience, the injury, and being cared for.” 

From the space between pulsing guitars Kemplay sings, lazily, softly, “Call a friend / to be told again / it’s okay to miss her /  and there’s somebody out there who cares.” The song is a quiet monument to letting people into your world, and it’s a trust that has made its way into Kemplay’s creative process, which is freer and more collaborative than before. 

“I was so pedantic about everything,” she says of her time in the studio. “I’m definitely less of a perfectionist now. I like recordings that feel a bit imperfect.” For Someone, Somewhere Kemplay worked with good friend and producer Sean Rogan, who wouldn’t let her record more than six takes on a part, before enlisting musicians Owen Spafford and Alex Lyon, who she told to play the music they felt was right, rather than instructing them more closely on parts. In allowing her music to be cared for by others, in passing it between friends, Kemplay has created a sound that feels intuitive and open. 

Back in the nursery nativity, a paper angel is leaving the stage. “I didn’t sing a word,” says Kemplay. “I was the only kid who didn’t sing a word.” With the release of Someone, somewhere, she is, without doubt, now fully in control of her artistic voice, and it is a voice that feels both quietly joyful and completely self-assured. Curtain up, audience hushed, the camera shakes, silver halo flickering. She opens her mouth….