As culture shocks go, they were pretty seismic. When rising US soul sensation Jalen Ngonda first left his Maryland home to study music in Liverpool in 2014, he flew via Dublin, where he required a 24-hour stopover. “I’d never seen vast amounts of Irish people, going from, like, a black and Latino neighbourhood in Maryland to seeing just white people. That’s a shock but in a very inviting way,” the 32-year-old explains. “I just felt so enamoured. I was, like, ‘Oh man, I’m in a different part of the world. I’m out of America.’”
As if that wasn’t enough, his next stop-off en route to Liverpool was on the Isle of Man, an island that would fit into his home state 56 times.
