Amy Wadge

Mahalia interview: 'I was ready to quit music in 2017'

• Mahalia asks to meet me in the bar of The Connaught Hotel in Mayfair and I think, well, of course, if you were 20 and had been signed to a major label record deal since you were 13, you’d hang out in places like this all the time. “I signed young and thought this must be it,” she tells me of joining Asylum Records, a subsidiary of Warner and home of Ed Sheeran, Rudimental and Charli XCX, in her early teens. It’s only now that the singer born Mahalia Burkmar in Leicester is making real inroads.