Mackenzy Mackay

Live Nation presents

Mackenzy Mackay

Benjamin Steer

Tom Cooper

Back at the end of 2022, Mackenzy Mackay celebrated reaching 10,000 followers on Instagram by posting a snippet of a new song he was working on. Filmed against a white brick wall and featuring nothing but Mackay’s soulful vocal and some plaintive piano chords, it was a clip of a track called Venus. It was only 34 seconds long but it sent the York-born, Scottish-raised 29-year-old into a whole new realm.

The world suddenly woke up to this startling singer-songwriter who could meld urgent, hip-hop-style delivery with a rich, emotional croon. His socials went crazy. Within a week, 10k followers became 100k. Rabid new converts were eager to know when the full version of Venus would be released and the numbers kept going up: 200k by January, 300k by March. Soon he was matching his online rise with success the old-school way, hitting the road, the venues getting bigger with every tour, his diehard fans packing out rooms and singing his words back to him. Under two years since playing his first ever live show at the Troubadour in 2023, this year he sold out London’s 2,300- capacity O2 Forum. His songs document relationships, making sense of life in your twenties and sticking to your dreams even when everyone tells you to snap out of it. They have connected on a huge scale – he’s already amassed over 250 million streams.

It must feel like it’s all happened very quickly for the affable, charismatic 29- year-old. Except it hasn’t. His is a success a lifetime in the making, and Mackay’s tale is unlike any other artist you might find on festival bills this summer just gone. Behold: Mackenzy Mackay is a singer-songwriter who actually has a really interesting story behind him.

Mackay’s songs are about who he is and where he’s from, his lyricism rooted in a poor upbringing, when his single mum raised Mackenzy and his three siblings. They are also about the hurdles he’s overcome on the way, including periods of being homeless and trying to make music in between endless shifts to make ends meet. There is no silver spoon in this story.

Take new single Broke. A yearning, hip hop-adjacent acoustic-pop anthem that might be considered melancholic where it not for a honeyed vocal lifting it skyward, it sees Mackay looks back to his youth.

“The verse is about where I’m from, my mum and how we were brought up,” he says. “When we lived in Scotland, a lot of the time the meter had run out and we’d have to sit in the dark for a while, put the fire on, but my mum would make it fun and make toast for dinner on the fire. Back then you think, ‘It is what it is’, until later on in life and you realise what it actually was. It’s touching on that.” “I wanted to write about who I am and where I come from,” he continues. “I feel like there’s a lot of people in the industry that are writing great music and making great songs but I don’t know what their backgrounds are or where they come from – for my siblings and me, we grew up with absolutely fuck all. To be here now and in a place where people actually listen to my music, I think it is important to share that because there’s so many people from similar backgrounds to me that will relate to that shit so well.”

Brought up in Scotland before the family relocated to the small town of Boroughbridge on the outskirts of York, he was a 90s hip hop-obsessed teenager, forging his love of Bone, Thugs And Harmoney and the indie-rock band vibes of Arctic Monkeys when he started writing his own songs aged 15.

He’s a restless soul who has moved around a lot, from York to London, where he attended BIMM Music School (a friend’s parents lent him the money to make the move, a gesture he describes as “incredible”), and then to New Zealand, where he got stuck during Covid. There have been times, too, where he’s found himself with nowhere to live. “There was a period I was staying at York train station quite often,” he says. “People have it worse than I had.”

But whatever turmoil was in his life, he was always writing and, after the breakthrough with Venus, he signed a deal with indie label FRTYFVE and released 12 songs over the course of a year, the tracks collated on two EPs, No Fixed Abode and a sister EP titled Love, Life & Upsets.

He’s an artist seizing his moment. Having recently signed with Sony/Relentless, he’s about to release his best run of songs yet. The lithe, uplifting grooves of This Life was the first to be unveiled. It’s a song about savouring the here and now. “Life is supposed to be for living so enjoy it,” he says. “Why are we always worrying so much about small things, stressing out over so much shit we don’t need to stress out about?”

The release of Broke, meanwhile, will be followed by the downtempo beats and mellifluous hooks of Cats & Dogs, an ode to growing up in Britain. ”People talk a lot of shit about the UK and a lot of the time it’s people from the UK talking shit about it, but actually the UK has so much beauty to it, pockets of gorgeous places,” he says. The new batch of tracks are completed by Dukes Head, a folky singalong saluting the wonder of the pub.

The tracks will no doubt form part of the setlist when Mackay heads out on a specially priced tour this autumn where all tickets will be capped at £10. “We’re trying to make it accessible and go back to that vibe of smaller rooms, smaller towns,” he says. “When I was growing up, we couldn’t go to any shows cos, one, we lived in a town in the middle of nowhere and two, my mum couldn’t afford it, it wasn’t really doable.”

The one constant in Mackenzy Mackay songs are that they sound injected with the warmth and wisdom of a songwriter old beyond his years. Broke is about growing up poor, but it’s also about something else, Mackay’s determination to make this moment count. “This is my whole life that I’ve worked towards this,” he says. “Broke is saying, ‘I want to do this the way I want to do it and I’ll be fucking damned if I let anyone ruin this for me’. I got me to here. Everything has led to where I am now and I really want this all to work out. I want people to resonate with this, I want people to understand that people from normal backgrounds can be in the industry, even come from no money and still get in there as much as it feels like, it just might take a bit more but you can get there, you can keep cracking on.”