Toni Sancho only began to realise what music meant to her when it was taken away. The singer was born in London before moving to her mother’s native Trinidad aged 10.
During Sancho’s time in the Caribbean, her mother gifted her a range of musical instruments, but it was the ukulele that stuck. When the pair flew back to London when Sancho was 21, her instrument was seized at the airport and left behind. “I didn’t realise how upset I’d be,” she says now. “I needed it.” Soon after they returned to the capital, Sancho’s mother bought her a replacement ukulele, and the rest is history.
During the few years prior to their move, Sancho had been writing songs as a way to make sense of — and to try to move past — a debilitating depression. “What I’m realising now with getting older is that it’s very spiritually healing to be able to process that and have the mirror reflecting these extreme feelings of misery and shame,” she says.
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