CONTRIBUTED BY BEV JORDAN
At the age of 19 Tamsin Lancaster is currently topping the triple j unearthed chart with her song SOS which also happened to win the 2020 International Songwriting Contest ‘Unpublished’ category, beating entries from around the world.
If those highlights weren’t enough, singing with Delta Goodrem and the Sister2Sister choir before 80,000 people last year at Sydney’s bushfire relief concert Fire Fight Australia was a huge experience for the talented singer, songwriter and dancer from Cherrybrook.
Tamsin Lancaster was 9 years old when she migrated from England with her family in 2011. She attended John Purchase Public School before attending Cherrybrook Technical High School.
Singing was always in the background. “While I used to sing in my parent’s bedroom when I was a little London girl (and secretly record it on my dad’s camera), I only started official singing lessons when I moved to Sydney,” she told the Hills to Hawkesbury Community News.
“It was just after my 10th birthday and I wanted to try EVERYTHING. I started jazz/funk, acro, private singing, group singing, girl guides, and later on swimming. However, funnily enough, when my mum said that I had to limit the activities, I wanted to cut out singing.”
Tamsin Lancaster says she hated her voice when she was in the school choir in England, fortunately her mum loved it. “She told me to stick to it so I could improve my confidence levels. Well, I did and It was the only activity that I’ve stuck to over the years till I’ve recently started dancing again.”
Tamsin Lancaster has spent nine years at the Sister2Sister school of singing with Award winning sisters Sharon Muscat and Christine Muscat and has performed quarterly open mic performances Dural Country Club over that time.
Her first attempt at song-writing was at 16 when she penned Blooming Flower. Her winning song SOS was produced by Chris Arnott. “I’ve written with plenty of producers over the past 2 1/2 years, yet I find when writing with Chris I have to push myself (which is great!). “Generally, I tend to speed write and use the first melody that comes to mind then tweak it a little, melody and lyrics-wise. “With Chris, once we start a song we like or think has potential, we work on singling out the weak points and drilling over the imperfections. If it’s not good enough, we scrap the topline/lyrics/production and start again.
“It’s great because it forces me to be able to figure out the inconsistencies and weaknesses in my songwriting.”
Following up from her successful debut with SOS, Tamsin released Shadow at the end of last year, despite it being one of the first songs she wrote, it took nearly a year to release.
“We had difficulties during COVID trying to organize shoot dates for the music video and so ended up only releasing Shadow in November 2020. It was quite a long process,” she says.
Since graduating from High School Tamsin Lancaster has done several courses including music production and interior design and has signed up for Korean language classes. She is also working two jobs, one in retail at Castle Towers and the other as a music tutor and she is dancing again, Hip-Hop and K-Pop.
On top of her busy schedule she plans to release an EP of her songs in October or November.
Both SOS and Shadow are available on all music platforms including Apple itunes and Spotify.
