One of Caity Baser’s early successes almost never happened. In 2020, experimenting with Tik Tok, she uploaded a video, but she almost deleted it. ‘It was so random,’ she says. ‘I was in the M&S car park with my friend. I turned my phone off and when I turned it on the video had been seen 100,000 times.’ The next day, Baser was approached by somebody at her current management company.
By Miles Salter
Baser’s style is like a mouthy Lily Allen – lots of swagger, lots of London/Brighton attitude, and no small amount of humour. Her songs are like little moments of gossip – she whispers in your ear (often with a few swear words) about some daft moment that has just occurred.. Her latest offering is a ‘mixtape’ which she has called Still Learning. It brings together old songs and new songs. It’s not an official album as such, but combines various anthems. Very much on the rise, her first tour of 2024 has sold 30,000 tickets. She was recently nominated in the Brits as a ‘rising star’.
Baser is only 21, but has already formed a philosophy of fearlessness that abandons self-consciousness and shyness. It’s impressive in somebody so young. In one of her self-made videos, she sang on a train, then copped loads of comments saying things like ‘how embarrassing’. In videos and interviews, Baser is very relatable and comes across as confident. Was she always like this? ‘I’ve always been an extrovert. I’ve always been quite loud, but when I got to secondary school and college, I sort of lost all of that; that’s the age when things get weird. Everybody competes with each other. I wasn’t really myself. Some of the other kids at school were mean to me. My mum would tell me it was because they were jealous. I did stuff to fit in – I wore the clothes to fit in. But it wasn’t who I was. I wanted to sing and dance and be annoying. Now, I feel like I can be my complete self.’
When lockdown happened in 2020, Baser found herself separated from her not-so-friendly friends. Released from a need to fit in, Baser decided to focus on pleasing herself. Her first radio play happened through BBC Introducing (BBC Radio Solent) that year, and her experiments with online video started to gain traction.
Musically, Baser’s ancestor might be Ian Dury, the London geezer who matched rhyming slang and daft humour with a solid groove to create songs like Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick. Dury’s line of influence extends through Madness, Blur, Lily Allen and now Baser. ‘I love Madness and I love Lily Allen,’ says Baser. ‘I love the sound of Britishness.’
One thing that marks her out from other singer-songwriters is her humour. While some singer-songwriters come across as a bit poe-faced, Baser has a laugh at, well, pretty much everything. Pretty Boys takes a pop at good-looking young men who have nothing to say, while Why Can’t I Have Two is a cheeky song about having more than one bloke. ‘Have you never heard of menage-a-trois?’ she sings, before (apparently) retracting her interest. There’s plenty of swearing, a cavalier attitude born of Baser’s ‘what the hell’ approach. Her songs sound like mates gossiping. ‘No matter how sad I am, or how serious the situation is, if I sit and have a giggle with my friends, everything feels better.’ Teenage girls love her relatable, big sister persona. ‘I want to be the person whereby if you’re afraid to say it, I will say it for you,’ she has said.
Away from music, Baser likes to ride her bike by the sea in Brighton. ‘I feel free and happy,’ she says. ‘I would always ride my bike from the train station to my house. I’ve always loved to cycle and love the outdoors. I love the ocean. I love trees, plants. It’s great to be in the midst of it all.’ Baser considered working as a marine biologist or vet before music took over.
She got her first break through BBC Introducing. BBC Solent played one of her songs in 2020. Since then, she’s rocketed upwards. In 2022, she performed to 3,000 people at Reading Festival. When she returned a year later, there were 20,000 people in the audience. She has a strong work ethic. She co-wrote all of the songs on Still Learning. She recently said she wants to be as big as Taylor Swift. Well, that’s ambition for you. I enjoyed talking to her – she’s unpretentious and fun. It’ll be interesting to see where she goes from here. I have a feeling she’s going to do well.
Caity Baser’s tour starts on 21 March and she plays Leeds O2 Academy on 26 March.
Miles Salter is a writer and musician based in York. He co-hosts the York Calling podcast and is the front man of Miles and The Chain Gang.
