The Halfway Kid

As The Halfway Kid, British-Sudanese singer and songwriter Saeed Gadir makes music for communing, and finds himself in the midst of a new folk tradition — one that he’s writing in real time. 

Having experimented with rapping over dubbed out, electronic-heavy R&B, Saeed picked up a guitar in his early 20s and figured out his own way around its six strings. He’d pore over Bob Dylan tabs, soon learned the harmonica, and took on songs by Nina Simone and Joni Mitchell and scores of old blues players: offbeat solo performers who could lift and carry a room with the power of just a song. He obsessed over Elliot Smith. Above all, he realised it was the stories these writers told that kept him and others coming back — the way they’d spin kitchen-sink melodrama into universal truths, and in such a way that you couldn’t help but listen in. 

“Those songs give you a sense of warmth,” says Saeed. “They’re welcoming, and open, and you don’t feel like there’s a barrier to you listening to them: they’re happening as you listen to them. That’s what I try to aim for.” Like all the best storytellers, Saeed knows the value of humour and intrigue too; the title of his debut album — If I Don’t Come Home (Go To My House And Burn My Things), released in April 2023 — exemplifies the way he can extract drama and knowing winks from just a handful of words.

His writing is shot through with the stoic, blackened humour of Sudan — a place of shifting, splintering borders that today slides once more towards civil war. In this context, storytelling becomes even more important: it’s Saeed takes the minutiae of everyday life and blows them to an even bigger stretched canvas: reflecting his own reality, but drawing out the in-between spaces that let his audience pour themselves into his tales. Bringing people together involves meeting halfway. Saeed Gadir, guitar in his lap, is already there and waiting for you.