Elvin
Sometimes leaps of faith pay off. Sometimes it's worth buying a piano that you don't know how to play with a credit card that you can't pay for, and running home and writing songs until your fingers bleed.
Not that Elviin hadn't written songs before buying the piano - he grew up listening to his St Lucian parents' Caribbean records, and his dad even built a home studio. Elviin and his cousins would always be holed up there, rapping and singing and recording, inspired by Michael Jackson and Timbaland and old Police records. But after art school and getting halfway to becoming an accountant - no he's not sure how that happened either - all his talent had got buried.
Until one day, knowing he was on the way to getting sacked anyway, Elviin found himself almost sleep-walking into an instrument shop. "It was a digital stage piano and I had no idea how I was gonna play it, or pay for it, but I just knew. Something had changed. I was going to go back to music and never leave."
He wrote some songs, started gigging and met up with his longlost childhood friend Jack Penate, who had also become a performer. "And I had something I'd written on my iPod, so I played it to him and he said 'You've gotta get up there and keep doing it.' So I just went out there and did it."
He played his first gig so fast he nearly passed out during one song, having forgotten to breathe - he wanted to get it over with before anyone noticed he was playing piano with only two fingers.
Yet it went down brilliantly, and after finding some other musicians to work with, and improving that piano technique, he wrote more songs. A healthy MySpace following came next, Elviin got signed to Virgin and then he toured with Jack. Within a short space of time he was sent to LA to make an album.
Although still putting the finishing touches to his debut, you can feel that all-American positivity throughout the music, though Elviin's sound is a very English one. Remember what happened to music after the Great Depression? The hemlines went up and the flappers came out.
That's what this country needs now - so all hail the leader of the sunshine soul revolution 2009. There are tracks on the album about greed, power and human nature, like his first single, 'In Colour', where he questions just what price humans are prepared to pay.
But even when Elviin sings the words "it's do or die" he sounds inherently uplifting, giving a human battle a positive spin. Like a London soul troubadour, Elviin was born with sunshine in his voice.