FKJ (16 and Over)

It takes a certain kind of talent to convince Santana to play on your album, but FKJ has that je ne sais quois. The 31-year-old French musician grew up listening to the guitar legend’s music and during the making of his new album, V I N C E N T, he wrote Santana a letter thanking him for his inspiration. “I told him I would listen to the radio as a young boy, in the days before Spotify, waiting for his song ‘Smooth’ to come on so I could tape it, and that he plays his instrument like it has its own language and it speaks to me,” he says. “I just didn’t think he’d end up saying he’d be happy to play on my track.” That track is ‘Greener’, a sultry neo-soul jam that in many ways hints at what that je ne sais quois might be: FKJ is a virtuosic multi-instrumentalist and producer with one foot in the new world and one in the old, making soulful, limitless music for a restless, genre-fluid generation. His songs blur jazz, soul, folk, rock and experimental beats with an intricacy and intimacy that puts him on a par with the likes of Tom Misch, James Blake and Jacob Collier. V I N C E N T is his second album and signals a new dawn for FKJ, as an artist who sells out venues across the world and is stepping up to take his place at global soul’s top table. French Kiwi Juice, or FKJ for short, is the moniker of Vincent Fenton, a nod to his Gallic mother and New Zealander father. He grew up in a small French village outside of Tours, isolated from his friends, and so he turned to music for company. He got hooked on his parents’ records by Pink Floyd, Billie Holliday, Nina Simone and Queen, and took up guitar; then, aged seven, the saxophone. “I would play with whatever toys were around, and that helped develop my imagination, and then that evolved into making instruments – I found whatever I could and started putting it together,” he said of his rudimentary one-man bands. That one-man-band mentality has persisted, collecting instruments as he goes, though he’s never been…