Growing up in Boston on the US East Coast with adoptive Irish-Italian parents, Sabrina Kennedy has always looked beyond the obvious to embrace the role of outsider. Childhood trips to nearby Salem, the location of the famous witch trials, exposed her to all manner of alternative belief systems, as well as being “a place with a very peculiar energy” that she picked up on from an early age. Kennedy’s identification with the character of the witch has little to do with casting spells and issuing curses, but is more to do with confronting the controversy that being a strong woman continues to engender. In conservative Boston, it wasn’t hard to kick against conformity. “Most people there want to be a doctor or a lawyer,” she says, “so even wanting to be a singer was seen as quite a weird thing.  I did try to go against it, but as soon as I embraced it and accepted ‘this is what I am’, good things started to happen.”  It was a move to London that paid dividends, with Kennedy being much more at home in the city’s more multi-genre tastes. With two inaugural shows at Balham’s Bedford pub - a venue frequented by Ed Sheeran among others during his formative years - she started working on conquering all four corners of the capital’s live circuit, from Paper Dress in Hackney to Laylow in Westbourne Grove, Notting Hill Arts Club and and Off The Cuff, south of Brixton.