Fresh from receiving her Brit Rising Star Award, Griff is on a fast track to superstardom. She talks to Richard Godwin about sky-high ambition,
foster siblings and taking inspiration from Taylor Swift and Jesus
If you’re finding the return to society post-lockdown a little surreal, spare a thought for poor Sarah Griffiths. When the pandemic began, the newly anointed Brit Rising Star was a resourceful, introverted, slyly competitive Gen-Z teenager with a silken voice and a secret stash of killer hooks. She tended to keep her mind-blowing levels of ambition to herself.
She told no one at her school about the record deal she landed in 2019, in the middle of her A-levels, on the basis of a few self-produced songs on her SoundCloud page: ‘Everyone was like: “Sarah why are you not writing your personal statement?” I was like: “Because I’m gonna be a f***ing pop star?”’
But this wasn’t something she said aloud. In fact, this time last year she had played precisely one gig: a small industry showcase in Hoxton. And for the past 15 months, she has barely left the bedroom of her childhood home in the sleepy village of Kings Langley, Hertfordshire.
So when a ‘bougie, flashy chauffeur car’ arrived one morning in May to escort her to her second gig — the Brit Awards —she found the experience a little hard to get her head around. ‘Let me think’, as Alice asked in Wonderland. ‘Was I the same when I got up this morning? That’s the puzzle. If I’m not the same, the next question is, who in the world am I?’