The music industry’s always on the lookout for a new generation of talent, and one promising individual can be seen in British-Zulu musician Nandi Bushell. She’s only 11 years old but has had great success so far covering a variety of classic rock songs, playing the drums and uploading the performances to social media, a place where she has hundreds of thousands of followers.
Optimism being in the air for 2022, the young musician posted a New Year’s message on Instagram about some of her hopes for the future. She wrote, “My New Years Message to you all is keep trying! Never give up! You CAN do anything you put your mind to!“. Not being one to dream small, she said she’d “LOVE to jam with Billie Eilish and one day be Prime Minister of Great Britain.“
Now, becoming the leader of a country might seem a rather unconventional move for a budding musician (although Bill Clinton’s notorious sax might beg to differ), but Bushell seems well on her way with her first wish. She’s already played with some of the most well-known industry figures, such as Dave Grohl and The Foo Fighters last August in LA, or with Lenny Kravitz at The O2 Arena back in 2019. She’s also been getting a bit competitive with some of the biggest names in drumming, doing ‘drum-offs’ against the likes of Grohl and Queen’s Roger Taylor, and she even has the tendency to win apparently. Grohl has gone so far as to say she’s the “best drummer in the world“, which is lucky since he’s her favourite too. Bushell started out posting her cover videos after her parents bought her a drum kit due to her good grades at school. Soon things began to take off, appearing on a John Lewis advert in 2018 and being noticed by the likes of Lenny Kravitz and American musician Questlove. Her viral cover of Nirvana’s “In Bloom” (which gained over 10 million views on Twitter within a week) caught Grohl’s attention, and the rest is history as they say. Despite usually focussing on rock classics such as The Rolling Stones’ “Gimme Shelter“, Linkin Park’s “Numb“ and Slipknot’s “Duality“, she’s recently made a foray into dance music as well, covering Fatboy Slim’s 1999 track “Right Here, Right Now“ only a few days ago, saying “I watched Nelly Cook, (daughter of Zoe Ball and Fatboy Slim) DJ’ing on YouTube and was inspired to have a go at improvising over a #dancemusic song. It was a lot of fun and nice to try something different on my musical quest.”
If you want to see what Bushell’s composing talents are like, you can listen to this collaboration she did with Roman Morello (son of Tom Morello), called “The Children Will Rise Up“, about climate change. Either way, it seems like she’s set for a good 2022 so far.
