Fringe of Colour's Jess Brough connected us with Nadeem Din-Gabski in June. He was building a UK tour and looking for help booking Scotland, wanting to work with artists already here rather than bring his own support. When I asked him about that decision, he was precise about what bothered him about how touring usually works.

"When you come to someone's city that's not yours, oftentimes when people tour they are just bringing themselves to the city," he said. "I wanted to do something that would highlight the talent that is present in those spaces."

It's the kind of statement that sounds obvious until you actually think about how music moves through this country, particularly how it moves through Scotland. London-based artists can roll in with their entire setup sorted, their support acts booked months in advance, their PR machinery aligned with national outlets. They play their show to the people who already knew about them and leave without ever engaging with the artists actually building something here. It's not malicious, but it's extractive.

OFFSHORE arrived in August 2025 on Moshi Moshi Records and it announced itself boldly. NPR, The Fader, The Quietus naming it one of the year's best albums. It's a record built on research, on Nadeem sitting down and tracing his family lineage through colonialism, discovering that his name, Macaulay, connects to a Scottish statistician and abolitionist who governed British Sierra Leone. That's not incidental information, it shapes everything about how he approaches this moment, how he thinks about Scotland specifically, how he understands complexity in a way that most music won't touch.

For this album, he made a deliberate shift. With his earlier work, the POOL album, collaborations with An Alien Called Harmony alongside Momoko Gill, he'd approached songwriting as a poet. But on OFFSHORE he decided to study songwriting structure deliberately, to understand how songs could hold profound things in limited time. "I really, really enjoy when a limitation can really push you beyond something," he told me. "Most verses are going to be what, 30 to 40 seconds. So how much can I say in that time span?" That discipline shapes every track. The album doesn't feel constrained. It feels expansive and precise at once, which is much harder to pull off.

When it came to building this tour, he approached it the same way. He moved out of London to Bedford in 2021 and that changed how he thinks about Britain entirely. "I've become more aware of the complexity, diversity and just brilliance taking place all across Great Britain and the UK," he explained. "When you grow up in London, you're probably sometimes feel that you're closer to people in major cities outside of the UK than you are to people within your own country." It's a specific kind of provincialism that shapes everything about where attention flows and where networks get built and where money goes.

For Glasgow on 23rd October he's got Chizu Nnamdi and Simone Seales. He saw Chizu perform something "very long and meandering and referring to various different things but not necessarily overtly" and was struck by the subtlety and musicianship. With Simone, there's something sonically and thematically that called to him. For Edinburgh on the 24th, Ria Andrews was another of our recommendations. He checked their work, the DJing and radio and all the different connective tissues of their practice, and it made sense. Jurnalist reached out directly and when he checked them out he knew they were the right fit. What matters is that all three of these artists have played AMPLIFI, the live music series at Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh co-curated by Arusa Quershi and myself that showcases artists doing interesting work across Scottish music. So these are not database picks, they're people we've been working with, people whose practice already connects with what Nadeem's trying to do.

He noticed something else when he was looking at the lineup. "America and Scotland have like quite a long history of migration," he said. "I forget that of course." Simone and Jurnalist are both born in America and came to Scotland, which meant the tour would have different cultural contexts moving through the same spaces which feels textural.

"I feel there's so many Black British artists that exist outside of popular music genres and exist outside of popular music and I don't know all of them. I've had to really ask people and that's been really good and humbling as well because there's so much talent and not just talent, but execution." That willingness to acknowledge what he doesn't know, to ask around rather than arrive with an answer already made, that's the opposite of extractive.

When I asked what connecting with Scottish audiences means to him now, he talked first about his own connection through his name, through the fact that colonialism isn't something that happened somewhere else to someone else. It's entangled with his family: "For me it's a chance to bring the conversation, or not even bring, because I'm not bringing a conversation, maybe start or continue a conversation that people of the global majority, Black Scots, people who are from different backgrounds within Scotland have been having," he said.

He kept coming back to the word complexity throughout our conversation. "I can live in this complexity. This complexity is okay," he said about OFFSHORE. "Connecting with audiences in Scotland is also me saying like, we can live in our complexity. We can survive and thrive in our complexity. It's part of the fabric that makes us us. And it's a beautiful thing. And it's also a horrific thing. And it's all of it." That's not about easy reconciliation or simple narratives. It's about holding multiple truths at once about what colonialism did and what communities created anyway, about claiming belonging in a country whose history is tangled with yours in ways that are both violent and generative.

On the subject of live performance, he's clear about what matters. "I like the idea of there being something different and the idea of inherent risk. I like the idea of there being you putting yourself, putting myself, other artists putting themselves in a position where oh, this could go wrong. But I think that is what makes live such a great space because the audience is risking something and the artist is also risking something." That's what happens at Glad Cafe and Sketchy Beats, spaces where creative communities often meet each other because they're in the same room, not because a booking agent matched them on a spreadsheet.

Before we finished, he mentioned an EP coming out 28th October, The Commoners Coronation, an addendum to OFFSHORE. So this tour is happening in the middle of an active creative moment, songs that are fresh and performances that will shift depending on who's listening and who's playing alongside him.

Nadeem Din-Gabisi: On Connection, Complexity and Why Small Venues Still Matter

There's a difference between how music moves through this country and how it could move. Small venues and real networks, intention about who you work with and why. These things feel increasingly difficult to find, which is exactly why they matter.

Catch Nadeem Din-Gabisi live in Scotland:
23rd October: Glad Cafe supported by Chizu Nnamdi + Simone Seales - TICKETS
24th October: Sketchy Beats, Edinburgh support by Jurnalist + Ria Andrews - TICKETS

[Halina Rifai]