Arlo Parks Lights up Koko for Frieze Music 2024

‘I feel like I fell in love with playing music again this year,’ says Arlo Parks in this interview ahead of an exclusive one-night-only show at Koko for Frieze Music London 2024 in partnership with BMW.

The night was the last show of Parks’s tour in support of her widely acclaimed second album, 2023’s My Soft Machine, and a poignant moment for the Londoner who explains in the video that the last time she was at the Camden Town venue was as a 17-year-old in the audience. This closing of the circle has seen Parks win the Mercury Music Prize for her debut album Collapsed in Sunbeams, release a book of poetry, receive a writing credit on Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter LP and get nominated for several Grammys.

Parks is conscious of her her roots, though: ‘London is home,’ she says. ‘There’s such a specific culture to this place.’ She talks candidly about the reflective, ‘inward’ process of making her second album, and her joy at getting creative inspiration from Frieze London this year, calling it a ‘beautiful creative soup’.

And the track she was most looking forward to performing at Koko? ‘Devotion’, of course.

See her smash through it and hear more from Parks in the video.

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^{Main image: Arlo Parks at Frieze Music 2024. Courtesy: CK Morrison.}