The Luton kid who quit the day job

Myles Smith releases his debut album, My Mess, My Heart, My Life, this Friday, 19 June, on Sony UK. If the name has only half-landed, the song will have: Stargazing, the best-selling British single of 2024, which seems to have soundtracked every other advert and montage since. He is 27, from Luton, and a year ago most people had not heard of him.

The part of his story I keep turning over is the bit before the music worked. Smith taught himself guitar at nine and was playing open-mic nights in Luton pubs at twelve. He went to university, graduated, and built his own business — a real one, profitable within a few years. By the usual measures he had won. He has said, plainly, that he was successful and not happy, and gave it up to chase the thing he loved. During lockdown he started posting covers online, went viral, signed to Sony in 2023, and the rest came fast: Glastonbury, a billion streams, the BRIT Rising Star award.

That is a tidy fairy tale, and I distrust tidy fairy tales, so here is the harder note he struck himself. Collecting that BRIT, Smith used his moment on stage not to thank a list of people but to round on venue owners and the government about grassroots venues — the small, unglamorous rooms where artists like him learn to hold a crowd before anyone is buying. His point was blunt: if the arenas are filled by people who started in tiny venues, what is being done to keep those venues open? It is the right question. More than half of Britain's grassroots music venues made no profit in 2025, and thousands of jobs have gone with them.

The singles out so far suggest where the album sits. Drive Safe, with Niall Horan, and Hold Me in the Dark are folk-pop built for the big communal singalong — songs made, in the best way, for a field at dusk and forty thousand people who know the words. Whether that scales across a whole album without tipping into sameness is the open question of Friday. To my ear the strongest moments are the quieter ones, where the busker is still audible under the production.

What makes him worth your evening is not the size of the numbers. It is that he is a working example of the thing this paper keeps asking about — a person who had the secure, sensible life and walked away from it to make something, because the making mattered more than the salary. That is either the luxury of the talented or a clue about what people reach for when the day job stops being enough. Probably both.

Listen tonight: before Friday, start with Hold Me in the Dark and Drive Safe, then go back to Stargazing if you somehow missed it. And if there is a small venue near you still standing, consider that it is where the next one is currently learning to play.