I’ve said it before, but this year’s Mercury list really was genuinely brilliant, for the first time ever. And Kiwanuka a fantastic winner. What a record. Here’s @SarahMLee47’s portrait of him to celebrate

I interviewed Kiwanuka a few years back for Q. This was a the time of Black Man in a White World. I wish I could reprint it here, not for my own vanity, but because I'd love people to read what he said about his experience of being a black musician in a painfully white industry.

I asked if he'd ever been interviewed by a black journalist. He hadn't.

But similarly he said he didn't actually fit in the places people expected him to either — Studying jazz at RCoM, for instance, and raised C of E meant he didn't know how to join in with other black session musicians he knew at Pentecostal church services.

Anyway I just dug out the piece, and found this paragraph:

What he found is that he didn’t quite fit in anywhere: the world of the barber shop or the music college or the session musician. “Which I’m quite into now … I’ve had a chance to make my own little spot, to be my own little artist. I’ve felt like I can finally be my own self.”

I really hope he's feeling like his own self today.