FKJ – 2023 U.S. & Canada Tour With Support From Richie Griner

V I N C E N T is his second album and signals a new dawn for FKJ, as an artist who sells out venues across the world and is stepping up to take his place at global soul’s top table. French Kiwi Juice, or FKJ for short, is the moniker of Vincent Fenton, a nod to his Gallic mother and New Zealander father. He grew up in a small French village outside of Tours, isolated from his friends, and so he turned to music for company. He got hooked on his parents’ records by Pink Floyd, Billie Holliday, Nina Simone and Queen, and took up guitar; then, aged seven, the saxophone. “I would play with whatever toys were around, and that helped develop my imagination, and then that evolved into making instruments – I found whatever I could and started putting it together,” he said of his rudimentary one-man bands. That one-man-band mentality has persisted, collecting instruments as he goes, though he’s never been formally trained; instead developing his own ear. Prestigious music colleges were too expensive and so he eventually moved to Paris to study the sound and film, which helped give him grounding in cinematic arrangements. He fell into the city’s nightlife scene, playing live instruments in clubs in Paris, and became known as a Soundcloud producer who blended house and jazz, as on his vibey 2013 Time For A Change EP.

V I N C E N T is a marvel – and testament to the magic that can happen when you dig deep. “This was a challenging record,” he says. “I’m a perfectionist and it’s hard to shake that off. But once I did, and I let the music take over, I felt totally free.”