Interview Daydream Believer: Caity Baser

Caity Baser isn’t normally one for prolonged silences - or silences of any length, really - but if you’d have spotted the 20-year-old singer at this year’s BRITs, sat on a table with Matty Healy a stone’s throw to her left and Maya Jama to her right, you might have thought the gregarious popstar-in-waiting somewhat reserved.

“When the music was going on I was alright, but the rest of the time I felt really weird, like how on earth am I here?! I was just sitting there, which is very rare for me because I’m quite an erratic person and I talk all the time. But as the night went on I thought, ‘I’m meant to be here and I need to own this’,” she recalls, dialling in a few days after the ceremony from her management’s Piccadilly Circus offices. “I wanna be there next year performing, so it was a spoon-feed of what I could have and what I could be. I visualise everything, so maybe the reason I was so quiet is because I was scheming everything in my brain… In the end, though, I was running around the afterparty in my socks because my feet were hurting so much; it was iconic.”

Born in Southampton - a town and a youth experience that she “hated more than anything in the world” - dreaming big and manifesting it into reality has been something of a thread through Caity’s life so far. When she was eight, her mum took her to Katy Perry’s bubblegum fantasy ‘Teenage Dream’ tour at London’s O2 Arena; despite being sat in the top tier nosebleed seats, a young Baser immediately felt her entire world shift. “I remember being in this enormous room and thinking, ‘Why do I feel connected to everyone here? Why do I feel like everyone knows each other? How has this person made everyone cry and understand what she’s going through?’” she says. “I remember she flew out onto a cloud into the audience, and I just wanted to be that person that connects the dots for everyone and makes them feel safe and heard. It’s such a special feeling.”

Caity began to write her own fledgling songs and, as the years went on, much better, much less rudimentary offerings - bright and brilliant pop tracks filled with conversational lyrics that she hopes “sound like FaceTime calls, [where] what you’re hearing is probably what I called my best mate about and said exactly like that”. One - last year’s friends-with-benefits-shunning ‘Friendly Sex’ - went viral on TikTok; Caity seized the opportunity and moved to Brighton. “I saw a chance that I could move to a different city and get out of [Southampton] and it’s the best decision that I ever made.”