Michael Kiwanuka on the 'wake-up call' that changed his music

When Michael Kiwanuka was nominated for the Mercury Prize in 2020, he thought he knew the deal.

He'd been up for the prestigious album award twice before. Like most artists, he said it was an honour to be nominated. A win would be nice, but not particularly life-changing.

He was wrong.

When Annie Mac ambushed him on The One Show to reveal it was third time lucky, a switch was flipped.

"It sort of woke me up," the singer-songwriter reveals.

"I'd been desperately looking for approval from my peers and certain [media] outlets - and the Mercury freed me from that desperation.

"It allowed me to feel that, actually, I just want to make the records that come naturally."

The realisation was particularly powerful because his winning album, simply titled Kiwanuka, had grappled with his sense of inferiority as a musician, a black man, a partner and a friend.

External validation didn't silence the voices in his head - but it gave him a healthy dose of perspective.

"When you have impostor syndrome and you’re busy beating yourself up, you're actually using up all your energy doing that, as opposed to being like, 'Wow, how amazing it is to be making my own record?', or, 'How amazing that I'm playing the Pyramid Stage [at Glastonbury]?'

"The list is so long of how cool this job is, and I spent most of my time moaning. Winning the Mercury kicked off that feeling of, oh, I've got to sort this out."

You could see that newfound freedom when he played at Glastonbury in June. Basking in the late afternoon sun, the 37-year-old took to the stage wearing a bright white kanzu robe - a traditional tunic from Uganda, where his parents are from.

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And when a malfunctioning synthesizer forced him to abort a performance of his new song Small Changes, the former perfectionist just laughed it off.

"I could hear my friend Joe laughing, and I sort of forgot I was on the Pyramid Stage," he recalls.

"A second later, I heard the crowd cheer, and it lifted me up off the ground.

"It was an amazing feeling. I felt like I had a massive battery pack from these people. I could do no wrong. Wherever I went, they would hold me up."

Afterwards, the musician realised that one simple moment of fallibility had put the audience on his side.

"They saw the real me for a second, rather than what I thought people wanted to see," he reflects. "It was really eye-opening."