A Singing and Dancing Man
Vincent Davies
“It’s not like I just came out of nowhere… they were playing all that music to me from the start.”
A glance at Vincent's social media will tell you he is a musician. When asked to describe himself, he avoids reducing himself to a single label and settles on something less rigid. “I’m a singing and dancing man,” he says, half in jest, half in truth. He avoids calling himself a poet, even though he writes constantly. There’s a sense that, to him, poetry belongs to another world, something reserved for scholars and academics. Music, by contrast, feels grounded and accessible, something that can be universally understood without study - an accessibility that drove his own ambition.
Vincent grew up in London, though his roots lie elsewhere. His father is from Blackpool, his mother from Kent, both seemingly set on fixed paths until a chance meeting upended them, sending their lives in a different direction, one that led to London and a fresh start. It is a familiar story, moving to the city in search of opportunity. For those arriving from quieter, more rural places, London can feel like an abundance of it. However, when you are born into that environment, as Vincent was, those opportunities and influences become harder to recognise.
His parents both had creative tendencies, though not in a formal or career-driven way. His mother had performed stand-up, could sing, and had explored creative writing. His father, while not an artist by trade, filled the house with music, Springsteen, Queen, Meat Loaf, and carried a kind of natural theatricality. His sister, Harley, serves as further evidence of the creative environment in which they were raised. Now an actor, she spent much of her childhood making homemade films alongside Vincent. For a long time, Vincent thought music had manifested entirely from within himself, but looking back, the influence had been there since birth.
Vincent Davies
Seeing is Believing
"To see someone doing it… then it’s real. It’s possible for you.”
Vincent recalls that his earliest conscious connections to music came through seeing Jimi Hendrix on television. “To see something like that… Something powerful, something great that you can relate to, it changes everything”. The sounds echoed the music already playing in his home, but this time it felt personal, something he had discovered for himself - he found himself drawn not just to the music, but to the image. Recognising that interest, his parents bought him his first guitar at eight years old, turning music from something that drifted through the air or was trapped behind a glass screen to something tangible.
If Hendrix sparked the initial interest, it was Jack White and The White Stripes that made a career feel possible. Introduced through a friend, what began as curiosity quickly became something far more consuming. Vincent describes watching their ‘Under Blackpool Lights’ live performance repeatedly, drawn in not only by the music but by the personal connection to the place itself, his father’s hometown.
“I watched it every day,” he says. “It completely changed my whole outlook.”
He also showed me the music book during our interview, the same one that first taught him how to play. Instead of traditional notation, it translates chords into simple images, allowing kids who couldn’t read music to follow along. Vincent recognises a generosity to it, a sense that Jack White understood his audience's reality and, rather than gatekeeping, chose to make it accessible to anyone.
Perhaps most importantly, there is the ticket stub he has kept from 2005, still in near-perfect condition, preserved between the pages of that same music book. A few nights prior to his tenth birthday, while returning home from the shops, Vincent and his father happened to pass the iconic Hammersmith Apollo. His father paused and looked up at the bold letter that read ‘The White Stripes’. “My dad’s a frugal man”, he tells me, “but he just looked at it and went, ‘Should we go?’” They hid their shopping behind a wheelie bin and went straight in. Vincent still calls it “the best night of [his] life.” It mattered not just as a bonding moment between father and son, the two of them in cahoots, but because it made music real. It freed Vincent's musical heroes from behind glass screens or the pages of his music books, placing them directly in front of him. “To see someone doing it…,” he says, “then it’s real. It’s possible for you.”
It is worth mentioning the friend, Sonny, who first introduced Vincent to The White Stripes, because his influence didn’t stop there. The next shift came not from a stage, but from proximity. Through Sonny, Vincent was introduced to a family that didn’t just listen to music; they lived it. “His mum and his sister had beehives,” he tells me, “they used to wear matching clothes, little red leather jackets… and [Sonny and his dad] had long hair.”
It made an impression. “I thought Sonny was cool. They [his family] were cool.”
This commitment to a particular aesthetic that isn’t performative feels genuine in a city like London. For decades, the city has cultivated and nurtured subcultures; punks, mods and rockers, each generation reshaping identity through music, fashion, and attitude. Even as trends evolve, traces of those movements remain. Like architecture, newer designs are often built on or inspired by older foundations, and Sonny’s world felt like one of those surviving threads, a continuation of something that had existed long before, still being lived out in the present. For Vincent, it brought music closer still: he had heard it, he had seen it, he had learned it, and now, finally, he could live as it.
Vincent Davies
You cannot find anything without losing it first
“Coming back was what gave us identity.”
Like most people trying to reach the pinnacle of the music industry, the journey wasn’t easy. There were false starts, bands that didn’t work, and moments where stardom felt close before falling apart. At one point, Vincent’s pursuit of success took him beyond London to Los Angeles with a band, drawn by the mythology that surrounds music there. What initially felt like a step forward quickly revealed a different reality. The romanticised version of music abroad, particularly the image of UK bands, does not always hold once removed from its natural environment. Outside of London, that punk-driven self-expression becomes something more controlled, shaped by commercial expectations and filtered through industry structures that prioritise polish over instinct. What is admired from afar can lose its authenticity when it is taken out of context.
“There’s something about UK bands,” he says. “There’s a rawness to it. A kind of honesty.”
Vincent alludes to the pressure that consumed him during his stint in LA. His aversion to expectations led to a falling out with his management team. He describes being on the cusp of something darker: drinking too much, late nights, overworked and over-touring. That darkness lies dormant in the music industry - a familiar and recognisable path that so many artists have walked before, only seemingly attractive to those who understand the complexities of its pull. At worst, those on the outside might even romanticise it, expecting real artists to endure suffering to produce something authentic.
That realisation and disappointment in LA made the pullback towards London almost inevitable. Returning wasn't just about geography; it was about creativity. It meant rebuilding and reconnecting with a version of music that felt unsullied by expectation, more instinctive and organic to him. Looking back, he doesn't romanticise the turbulence of those years. “At the time, it felt like everything. Like the end of the world. But now… You realise it wasn’t that big. It just felt like it.” There’s an understanding in his reflection that when you’re young, everything feels definitive. “I’d probably just tell myself to chill out,” he says.
On the opposite end of that spectrum, as Vincent recounts, is the tendency to pull back, or to sit quietly. It shows up most clearly in the story he tells about meeting Jack White. Year after returning to London, he would find himself recording at Third Man Records, the studio founded by the same musician he had once watched from the crowd. But when the moment came, Vincent didn’t say much at all.
“I ignored him,” he admits, laughing. “Not in a rude way. I just… didn’t want to ruin it.”
Vincent worries Jack might have taken it as indifference, but to him, it felt more like respect. By that point, Jack White had already given him so much: a sense of possibility, a direction. Vincent felt as if there was nothing more Jack White should offer, and he didn’t want to force it either.
Vincent Davies
Letting ‘It’ Find You
"There’s always something real happening.”
Somewhere between those extremes, the pressure to make something happen and the instinct to hold back, he seems to have found a middle ground. One that feels less concerned with perception and more focused on the act of making music itself. That return to the core now sits at the centre of his approach to his work. It’s something you can see reflected in certain moments on his social media: small, intimate gatherings, musicians sitting close together in someone’s living room, guitars in their hands, all eyes directed towards him. Completely stripped of ego and pretence, just creative calm and respect for music.
“To just sit there and play,” he says. “That’s the best part. When you forget everything else.”
That instinct to strip everything back to the act itself feels increasingly hard to achieve with the introduction of social media. Visibility does not always align with substance, but all artists are expected to keep up. When I ask him about the current music scene, he pauses.
“It’s changed,” he says. “It’s softer in some ways. More… presentational.”
“There are so many people doing it now,” he adds. “And that’s a good thing, but it also means the people who aren’t shouting as loud sometimes get missed.’ He then observes,
“There’s always something real happening, you just have to find it.”
It’s when you move into his tagged photos - the images other people have taken of him - that a different picture begins to form. Behind that intangible curtain, you see just how embedded he is within the London scene: parties, gallery openings, private exhibitions, and private members’ clubs catering to the invitation-only underworld of the London creative scene. His collection of tagged photos feels more like an exhibition of those rare, expensive, vintage photographs people collect: grainy, slightly chaotic black-and-white photos of musicians and artists hanging around blissfully unaware of how impactful this moment might be - either that, or the photos you show your kids one day as definitive proof that you were indeed cool at one point. Nevertheless, there is a humility to it. It doesn’t feel constructed by Vincent himself, but rather how people wish to associate with him. It is almost as if, by no longer chasing it, the scene has found him instead, and through his humility, I am left with the feeling that he doesn’t quite realise how compelling his life is.
This impression is further reinforced when Vincent is asked to describe his music. He moves away from categories and genre entirely, speaking instead about instinct and moments where songs arrive fully formed, rather than being carefully assembled.“The best ones come all at once,” he says. Tracks like Days Like These and Stepping Out (Of The Darkness And Into Tomorrow) carry the same sense of reflection that runs through his journey. They deal with restlessness, change, and the uncertainty of moving forward, yet they remain undeniably catchy. You find yourself singing along almost without thinking, only later realising the weight of what you’ve been echoing.
In true Vincent style, his songs transcend genres, with traces of blues, garage rock, reggae, and even soul. It gives his music a sense of intrigue, keeping you slightly unsure of where it might go next, while still remaining distinctly his. If you want to hear it for yourself, the true experience isn’t just about listening online or through your headphones. It’s in the rooms he performs in: small venues, late-night sets, jazz bars, and places where the music still feels intimate enough that the proximity makes you feel like one of the band. It’s in these rooms that Vincent will give his all, his gift to you, and what the audience gives back drives his enthusiasm to keep making music. His advice to new artists, in the end, is simple: “You love it. That’s the main thing. Just keep going.”
Hearing his music now, his appearance on that back street finally makes sense. He lives and creates comfortably within his own world, an accumulation of influences, not least Sonny’s family, who first gave him permission to be himself, but it’s his passion for music that has shaped him. His music blends genres, and so does his style. He is, in many ways, a personification of his sound, none of it random, all of it considered.
It’s easy to overlook moments like the one that started this, a voice calling your name in a crowded street, an old friend reappearing out of nowhere. We’ve slipped, perhaps, back into a version of London where we hesitate again, where we walk past each other more often than we stop. Those small interruptions still matter, and I highly recommend reaching out to old friends when you can. Reuniting with an old friend like Vincent is a bit like catching up on a great series by cheekily skipping straight to the end, only to realise it turned out better than you hoped.