VERONA

Croydon, South London, UK · b. 2001 · FARA Records

VERONA (Simone Adeyemi-Clarke, b. 18 December 2001) grew up in Croydon, South London — a town with a serious dance-music underbelly (dubstep was born a few postcodes over) and a school-corridors-and-house-parties adolescence. She was the kid who loved English class and the kid who lived for the function, and never saw why those had to be different people. She'd have a Shakespeare set-text open on the bus to a warehouse night. That collision — the canon and the club, the sonnet and the sub-bass — is the whole artistic idea. She's clever and a little mischievous with it: her instinct is to take something everyone thinks they already know — a poem drilled into every British teenager — and make it hit somewhere it was never supposed to, at 128 BPM, on a dancefloor.

House parties and pirate-adjacent dance radio, then a laptop and a cheap controller making tech-house edits in her bedroom. The lightbulb was realising that a ‘vocal sample’ in a house track could be anything — a film line, a voicemail, or four-hundred-year-old iambic pentameter — and that the cheekier and more unexpected the source, the harder it landed in a club. She built a lane out of flipping unlikely text into hypnotic dance records. Her influences run the UK tech-house and house lineage — the driving, sample-led, club-first tradition where a spoken or found-text vocal becomes the hook — plus the South London dance-music underground she grew up next to, and a running, slightly literary sense of humour about what you're allowed to sample.

On stage she's cool, dry and in control — the DJ-artist who knows the joke is smart and lets the groove do the work. Not a belting front-woman; a selector-vocalist who runs a relentless, hypnotic set and drops the sonnet hook with a straight face. She used to read her Shakespeare set-texts on the bus to warehouse nights — the whole act is basically that bus journey. Clever, cheeky, driven.