Fairhazel is the moniker of 23-year-old British / South African singer songwriter Hugh Macdonald. Born in Brighton but raised in London, Cape Town and Paris, Hugh left Berklee College of Music in Boston in 2018 returning to London to work with Communion Music under the name Fairhazel, releasing his first single 7×7 in February to great critical acclaim.
Roisin O’Connor of The Independent described it as having “tender, whispering vocals that recall the likes of Villagers, Ben Howard and Sufjan Stevens”. Inspired by artists France Gall, Harry Nilsson and Andy Shauf among others, Fairhazel has established himself as a musical storyteller blurring the lines between fiction and true stories. At his London studio, he works on creating all aspects of his music himself from singing, songwriting, arrangement, production, mixing, mastering and engineering. Although Fairhazel is a solo venture, a band often accompanies him at shows.
Fairhazel has opened for Agnes Obel, Banfi and Juanita Stein, as well as played Counting Crow’s New York festival and Underwater Sunshine (twice), and Whispering Bob Harris’s Under the Apple Tree. After much success on his first album, “I’m A Friend of Fairhazl”, he released his second full-length album, “I Sold My Soul For Fairhazel” during quarantine which now has over 80,000 streams and counting.
