Jasmine Wembankoy, who grew up around Caledonian Road, is studying at the Abbey Road Institute

A SINGER from Islington whose cover of a Kate Bush hit went viral last year has crowdfunded £15,000 to pay for her tuition fees at a prestigious music school on Upper Street.

Jasmine Wembankoy, 24, spent more time playing video games than instruments when she was growing up around Caledonian Road, but her love of the Assassin’s Creed soundtrack led her to start composing her own tunes when she was a student at Elizabeth Garrett Anderson school.

“It started out as a hobby, then I got into it very quickly,” she said. “As a child of someone struggling with their mental health, the norm around me was dysfunction, poverty and pain at home. There was a lot of just not feeling like I could be myself, but I could be myself within my music.”

Back home after her degree in music production at Leeds, Ms Wembankoy was struggling to break into the industry and decided to do further study.

A friend told her to check out the Abbey Road Institute.

She was surprised to find that the school was on Upper Street, around the corner from where she grew up.

“It was kind of a weird, divine premonition: I’m going to be in Islington the rest of my life,” she joked.

The listed building used to be the home of Angel Studios – where the likes of Adele, The Cure and The Clash recorded songs – before it was bought by the educational arm of the renowned Abbey Road Studios in 2021.

Ms Wembankoy got into the programme but narrowly missed out on the scholarship she had pinned her hopes on.

“I thought, how am I going to do this? I can’t afford it, my family definitely can’t afford it. I had a moment of delulu is the solulu – what if I set up a GoFundMe?”

She had already had some success on social media – where nearly two million TikTok users had viewed her viral cover of Kate Bush’s Army Dreamers – so she used the apps to promote the link to her fundraising page.

Almost 1,000 people have donated since, in sums from £5 to £600, bringing her to just £1,000 short of the target – enough for her to start the course last term.

“It goes to show that people want to help each other, and I’m so grateful and humbled that I was able to receive that help,” she said.

“Sometimes I want to cry because I was able to do this by the virtue of others. I need to work my hardest to show that them investing in me was worth it.”

Now on term two of the year-long diploma, Ms Wembankoy is making new music under her artist name, Safii Koii, while learning the drums and brushing up on her piano skills.

She added: “They don’t joke about how intense it is! There are so many incredible people at the school, I need to really grind.

“As soon as they let us book production suites [music recording rooms] I was booking them every day. I made over 130 bookings in the first term alone.”

Her dream is to work as an engineer in a music studio, while encouraging other young black women to get into sound engineering – women only make 2.8 per cent of music producers; women of colour even less.