A talented – and very ‘grounded’ – Derbyshire singer-songwriter has just released her first single, as Barrie Farnsworth reports.
LOCAL singer-songwriter Amy J Bannister has just released her first single, called ‘Grounded’, written a few days before the worsening news about Covid-19 heralded the UK lockdown. The 20-year-old music student, who is also a proficient guitarist, has written many songs and has been performing in a wide range of venues for more than a decade… until lockdown came along. In fact, since March, she has had just one ‘gig’… singing and playing in the beer garden of the Blue Stoops in Dronfield a couple of weeks ago. “It was so lovely to be performing again,” said Amy, who lives in New Whittington. A former pupil of St Mary’s Catholic Primary and High School in Chesterfield, Amy says she had lots of support and encouragement to pursue her musical talents both at school and at home – and recalls writing her first song, called ‘fish in the sea’, around the age of nine! After gaining three A-levels in 2018 – an unusual combination of maths, physics and, of course, music – Amy took a year out from academia and, instead of the usual ‘gap year’ world tour, she became a youth worker at a residential youth centre at Whitstable, in Kent…