Rina Sawayama by Ethan Hart for ES Magazine | FENDI shirt, £850; corset top, £1,350 (fendi.com). SPORTMAX skirt, £295 (sportmax.com)
(Picture: Rina Sawayama by Ethan Hart for ES Magazine)Most pop stars start out saying they are going to change the world. Rina Sawayama is one of the few who can genuinely say they have. When her critically acclaimed debut Sawayama was deemed ineligible for entry into the Mercury Music Prize, it was because of her lack of British passport, despite having lived and then worked in the UK since the age of five when her parents relocated the family to London from Niigata, Japan. The underlying message seemed to be that if you were not born in the UK, you were not British enough to qualify.
‘I think it was just this feeling of being othered and misunderstood. It was this sense of injustice where I’ve been in the UK longer than some of the nominees have been alive, so I just felt that it was wrong,’ she recalls. ‘At the beginning it felt like the private conversations weren’t being listened to behind the scenes and it felt really unfair, but then it turned into this amazing moment.’ Sawayama, a Cambridge graduate with a degree in political science and one of the country’s most exciting new pop stars, was having none of it. Speaking out about the rule, the story soon spread throughout the press. Her fans, lovingly dubbed Pixels, started the hashtag #SAWAYAMAISBRITISH, which soon began trending. Ahead of the following year’s nominations and as a direct result of the campaign, the BPI (British Phonographic Industry) amended its eligibility criteria to include artists who have been a resident of the UK for more than five years — not just for the Mercury Prize but for the Brit Awards, too, where Sawayama immediately swept her way to a 2021 Rising Star nomination.
