“For most of my life, I’ve lived with enormous, driven agony. Now, I wake up and I’m okay. Someone dies – I grieve, but I’m still okay. I could lose everything – money, reputation – and I’d still be okay. Something in me has healed, at a core level.”
Go on there: forget everything you thought you knew about Daniel Bedingfield.
What you thought you knew was only the sudden glint on the surface of something far deeper, freer, and more alive.
You probably got the memo: he appeared, seemingly fully formed, back in 2001, an unknown Kiwi-Londoner with a UK garage monster that levelled the charts like Godzilla on 2-step. Then came the stadium-scaled ballads and the script flipped. Heart-on-sleeve pop star. Christian. Chart mainstay. And then: silence. Retreat. Absence. For years, the world spun forward, while Bedingfield – no longer interested in playing the game – slipped from view. In the midst of that vanishing act, he survived a near-fatal car crash in New Zealand; an event so singular it triggered 300,000 Christians to crash a prayer server on his behalf. It was a moment equal parts bizarre and oddly symbolic: the world watching, the world praying, while he lay caught between what was and what could be.
Now, the man who once soundtracked breakups and school discos alike returns, not as a throwback, but as a force, urgent and anything – everything – but undiminished. This isn’t a “comeback”: it’s a full-bodied transmission from the other side of the fire, from a creative soul who didn’t merely step away, but wielded that time to unmake, remake and recover himself; spiritually, musically, and myriad wondrous ways still unfolding.
That “living with enormous, driven agony”? It wasn’t an aside. It was a pivot point, faced down over years. Over the past two decades, Bedingfield has poured himself into every imaginable path – therapy, psychedelics, meditation, music and radical unlearning – to reach the place his soul had been pointing to all along. He’s deliberately stepped away from traditional models of success, choosing instead peace, presence and what he regularly calls – with outright ownership – resonance. He has resided in New Zealand, London, Los Angeles, the desert and deep in the intricate architecture of his inner world. The public narrative? He let that go long ago – and wrote a new one, entirely on his own terms.
At his most effusive (which is close to always) he sounds like someone who’s time-travelled back from the future just to deliver good news. At others, he’s a man calmly catching his breath after walking through a squall few of us tangible access to. But through it all courses the rarest of clarity – not least in the relative world of pop: the goal was never to return but to realign. Not to reclaim anything, but to arrive – fully, and finally, on his own terms.
“I make music for resonance,” he tells me. “When I’m singing, I want to feel your energy. I want the song to become ours.” Not least as recent live shows prove, this isn’t performance in the conventional sense: it’s communion. It’s presence. And perhaps most radically, it’s a decision made with full ownership, to step away from the spotlight not out of fear but out of integrity. Like Enya retreating to her castle in Killiney, Bedingfield removed himself from the noise, the circuitry, the theatre of visibility, not to disappear, but until the moment called him back.
The imminent new material – led by tracks like ‘Borderline,’ co-written “with a man [he] loved about a girl [they] both loved” – lands with the visceral clarity of someone breaking free in real-time. It’s not kneejerk nostalgia. It’s not even legacy. It’s the perfectly timed crystallisation of presence and love. Self-love. Real love. The kind rooted in years of unlearning, in radical acceptance, in choosing joy over performance. Which is to say: a refusal to be anything but exactly who he is – open-hearted, neurodivergent, queer in the truest sense. Not a phase, not a persona but a fully integrated return to self.
He says he’s never been more full of ideas. It pours out of him with a kind of velocity that feels more invocation than intention. A visionary pop savant; a fast-talking, faster-feeling thinker whose every sentence lands like a refrain, a provocation or a truth just beneath the surface. Renaissance, not return: the kind that arrives not a second too soon, carried by a mind burning with creative wanderlust that’s getting where it needs to go.
“I’m doing really good, thanks – just still jet-lagged,” he says, waking up in San Francisco, where he has lived and worked for the last few years. “Honestly, I don’t recommend moving to America, but I do deeply recommend living here…”
It’s a fitting place for a mind like Bedingfield’s: disruptive and boundless. He’s back playing shows in Ireland for the first time in a decade and it’s no fluke. “I’ve got Irish and Scottish roots – most New Zealanders do,” he tells me. “I’ve done a lot of shows in Ireland, and honestly, they’re some of my favourite performances. I insisted that Dublin and Belfast be part of this tour.”
Daniel riffs, luminous, on shared energy, mutual vibration, music as communion. It’s a current, he says, that flows between our people too. “There’s a real resonance between Irish people and New Zealanders,” he says. “It’s not about outdoing the other person with wit, like in England. It’s more: I make you laugh, you make me laugh, we keep the good time rolling. It’s very supportive. I really like that.”
If he sounds like someone who’s travelled deep into himself, it’s because he has. Meditation, grief, psychedelics, compersion, polyamory, musical exile: all of it feeds into this second life. “I spent ten years trying to meditate and got nowhere. It only started working when my life got painful enough that I had no choice,” he says. “After three months of sitting in the bath for an hour a day, breathing in the pain and letting it go on the out-breath, something shifted.”
“I went to Burning Man and discovered compersion,” he adds. “Being happy that someone you love is in love with someone else. I saw it and thought, ‘Holy fuck, this is what I was dreaming of at nine years old.’ Back in Christian spaces, people talked about love, but this… this was real. ‘I don’t own you. I just want you to be happy.’”
He’s blunt about his past experiences with psychedelics in the UK and Ireland. “I’ve never once seen responsible drug use there – not once,” he says. “Here in California, people hold circles, set intentions. It’s not about hedonism, it’s about becoming free to enjoy life.”
Mushrooms. Ayahuasca. DMT. Ketamine therapy. Especially when used in therapy. MDMA pushes you forward, mushrooms take you deep and ketamine calms everything. In the middle of all that, he found real relief.
Much of that healing has been rooted in learning how to love himself. “I never found anything about self-love in the Bible, aside from ‘love your neighbour as yourself,’ but how do you do that if you don’t know how to love yourself? Good selfishness is a beautiful thing.”
‘Borderline’ is, I’m pleasantly informed, the tip of the iceberg. Perhaps unsurprisingly for such a towering ambassador for the genre, a drum & bass version might surface first but it’s the intent that matters. “Drum & bass and garage – that’s the sound of my childhood. Reggae, ragga, dancehall, hip hop. I was beatboxing every day from eight years old. That’s my home.”
“When I hear garage or drum & bass, everything in me lights up. It’s gospel. You’ve got this nasty, evil bassline, then these gorgeous strings and melodies – that contrast is my heaven. What’s happened is: drum and bass is back, and that’s everything for me. Over the last 20 years, I’ve written hundreds of songs. Now, I’m making music in the UK but living somewhere no one recognises me. I need that anonymity. I need realness, not performance.”
And the return? It’s movement, not just memory. “I’ll be doing a bunch of the old stuff, but I’ve got a new band I’m really happy with. There’ll be a few new songs out before the shows in Ireland.”
He knows his voice lingers in the collective subconscious. In his world, hooks don’t just matter: they’re akin to scripture for the airwaves. I tell him I think that it’s his pre-choruses that set him apart. “Exactly, that build-up is what makes the chorus hit,” he says. “That’s what I’ve always aimed for. My mum showed me King David’s psalms, how they rise from agony into glory. That’s what a song should do. That’s the art.”
“But I’m not making art,” he adds. “I’m chasing shared experience, shared vibration. I’m a channel. I’m in a state. It’s submissive and dominant at the same time, giving everything I’ve got to make you feel joy while steering that energy carefully. There is no Daniel when I’m performing. I’m in service.”
Coming back after two decades was easier than he expected. “I was shocked by how visceral it felt,” he tells me. “My body remembered. Instantly. It was like surfing on butter. Full-body experience. Like making love, it can be ruined the moment you start thinking about it. You should never think on stage.”
Mastery, to Daniel Bedingfield, isn’t myth. It’s muscle memory. It’s map. It’s marrow-deep. “10,000 hours isn’t the end,” he says. “I’ve got over 30,000. I sing every day. Beatbox. Hum. There’s something beyond mastery that nobody talks about.” You get the sense he’s not boasting but inviting: to go further, to ask more of art, of discipline, of yourself.
That same spirit has pulled him headlong into the frontier of AI. “We’re leaving the age of skill and entering the age of imagination,” he tells me. “It used to take 10,000 hours. Now it’s 10. A six-year-old today could make the most amazing music you’ve ever heard.” He’s been feeding his own songs through audio AI remix tools. “I can’t stop listening to them. I’ve never heard anything like it. I can hum a string part and AI turns it into Vivaldi. Within minutes.”
The tech isn’t perfect yet and – of course – it’s somewhat divisive, but he sees what’s coming. “Once attribution is sorted – once artists are paid when their voice or melodies are used – everything changes. You won’t care who made the song, if it makes you cry or dance or sing.”
He doesn’t seem precious about it – authorship, genre, ownership. What matters is feeling. Connection. And that can happen with or without AI in the room. “After a mind-numbing 20 years of pastel gloss,” he says, “real emotion is finally returning. People are in pain again because the world is dangerous. And we’re all gonna die, because we can’t stop killing ourselves. So now, real music – pain, anger, aggression, fear – they’re back. It just takes a whole world to be in pain for me to be happy,” he laughs. “It’s not like I want much!”
For all his wry futurism, Bedingfield is just as devoted to rebuilding the old bones of what music culture once was: intentional, grassroots and fiercely scene-driven. “I want to find people pushing garage and drum & bass forward. Let’s build something.” His voice gathers steam. “After 1999, something shifted. Pop culture got stuck in a loop. Movies, music, fashion: nothing’s really changed. There are reasons for that: Clear Channel bought out all the radio stations, shrunk playlists to 50 songs. Then Napster. Then Pop Idol. And record labels didn’t adapt. Spotify did but labels clung on. So for 20 years, we’ve had shit popular music. There’s still amazing music but the scenes died. Scenes come from intentional people, men and women bringing others together with purpose. I’m looking for anyone that wants to do that with garage and drum and bass.”
The industry, once something to be conquered, is now something he understands more deeply and forgives more fully. “When I had my first hit, I thought musicians were assholes,” he admits. “But now I realise they were overwhelmed. Neurodivergent. Sensitive people pushed too hard by a parasitic industry. The industry’s designed to ring every drop of blood from your art and sell it. These musicians weren’t mean. They were frightened. They were anxious. And I misread them. That was a huge shift in perspective for me.”
Now, something is shifting and this time, it’s moving fully in his favour. “People come up to me on the street and say, ‘Bro, thank you. Give me a hug.’ I’ve never had that before. Not in the UK. Maybe in South Africa. But now, there’s warmth. Something’s changing.”
That warmth isn’t just around him. It’s within. “I’m not in pain at the moment, weirdly. I’m being encouraged. I feel delighted by the music that’s coming out of me and the response I’m getting. It’s not like people are fangirling.”
And that particular shift, he says, speaks to something larger. “It’s warm. And that’s strange: for English people to be warm. But maybe that weird circus around fame is going away. I never liked it. It was fake and weird.”
As was always meant to be, something real has taken its place.
Daniel Bedingfield isn’t back. He’s forward. The rest is resonance, for real. Brian Coney
Daniel Bedingfield plays the Limelight in Belfast on 20th May (tickets) and Dublin’s Button Factory on 21st May (tickets)
