Bradley Marshall: "Numbers are important to your label, sure, but if I can change somebody’s perspective on life in one song, that’s success”

Bradley Marshall is a gentle soul with a sledgehammer voice. Lyrically and sonically, the 24-year-old’s songs heave, digging into subjects not often traversed by men his age with such frankness. His latest tune ‘Terrified’ is a case in point, putting the magnifying glass on feelings of dysmorphia.

“I had a really bad skin condition which caused psoriasis all over my body,” he explains. “I was seeing somebody and I was afraid to wear short-sleeved clothes in case they’d see it. I wrote the song in a way that it doesn’t have to necessarily relate to the condition. I was terrified of showing who I really am to somebody I love. Writing is enjoyable, but when you dive into the depths, it’s tough. It takes a lot to open up, but that’s where the best songs come from.”

Before he could arrive at this point of transparency, Marshall reveals that his early days as a budding artist were almost derailed by the toxic masculinity he experienced as a teen.

“Men struggle to talk about anything, because they’re afraid, or they think it makes them lesser,” he says. “I’m from Kingswood in Dublin, which itself is quite nice, but the surrounding areas can be quite tough. It wasn’t really easy to be a singer. I remember posting YouTube videos when I was younger and kids would slag me in the corridors in school. That was really tough. I feel like where I came from, if someone was trying to do something different, they were put down.”

The bittersweet irony is that the same young fellas giving Marshall a hard time are currently in his DMs, expressing their support now he’s made something of himself.

“Everybody makes mistakes”, he opines, stoically. “I was with the wrong people. I was going out a lot, drinking on the weekends, messing about. I realised deep down I wasn’t happy. There was something missing, and that was the music which had stopped. I woke up one morning and said, ‘I’m not going to listen to anybody anymore, this is what I want to do.’ I put my head down and started writing my own music, which changed everything. The things I never spoke about, I was putting on the page, and that really helped me.”

 

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He’s since gone from uploading covers of his heroes James Arthur and Bruno Mars, to relishing his own fans’ renditions of his tunes posted online. One track, ‘You’ll Be Okay’, left a particularly indelible mark on a young listener.

“I remember getting a message not too long ago about that song,” he says. “A girl messaged me. She told me she was in the car, on the verge of taking her own life. That song came on the radio, she heard the lyrics and it changed her perspective. She stopped doing what she was about to do. Those messages are what success means to me. You can’t beat that feeling. Numbers are important to your label, sure, but if I can change somebody’s perspective on life in one song, that’s success.”

While he says he’s putting off dropping an album before he’s garnered a “solid enough fanbase”, Marshall has nonetheless been very busy. At the time of our chat, he’s just back from a songwriting trip to London with Lewis Capaldi and Noah Kahan collaborator Ed Holloway. It could have been a very different, less organic scaling of the ladder for the Dub though, having tried out for The Voice UK in 2019. It didn’t go great, he admits, but in the end, that was for the better.

“I was 19 at the time,” he explains. “I didn’t get to choose my own song. I wanted to sing an Adele song or ‘All I Want’ by Kodaline, because I thought I’d really smash that. They made me sing some Justin Bieber one instead – they wanted me to look young and fresh. I’d never do something like that again, but the experience itself was amazing. I think it was a blessing in disguise to be fair. It made me push myself and be more honest.”

• 'Terrified' is out now.