With a world tour underway and collaborations with and under his belt, blend of jazz and house music has sent his star into the stratosphere. talks to him about fame, Kenny G and embracing his Indian heritage…

has had, to hear him tell it, a busy few weeks.

“We’re just buzzing all around the world at the moment. I’m feeling like a little bit of a nomad,” he says. “In the last week and a half we’ve done Stockholm, Oslo, Poznan, Berlin, Copenhagen, Cologne.”

Case in point: he’s chatting to me from a hotel lobby in Cologne ahead of his two-night London headline show. After that, he’s heading straight to Amsterdam, before a series of global stopovers like places like China, Australia and Egypt. He laughs, then pauses. “It’s been non-stop to be honest, but I’m so grateful that it’s non-stop doing this.”

A bit of exhaustion isn’t surprising, given the speed of Jeer’s trajectory. In August 2024 he released his first single, ‘Her Eyes’. It quickly went viral, clocking up over 100m streams to date, and took over TikTok with its blend of saxophone (Jeer’s signature), vocals and melodic house beats.

In the last two years, the 23 year old has followed that up with a second EP, collaborations with artists like and , and his first festival slots – most recently at in Poland. It’s a far cry from his previous life as a doorman at a Canterbury nightclub, but for Jeer, that’s all part of the fun – as well the fulfilment of a lifelong dream.

“A career in music… felt like this distant unattainable fantasy world,” he says. “Like, I grew up in the countryside in Kent. My last bus home was at 5:40pm.” For Jeer, “the idea of the music industry, the glamour, all of these things, London, felt like a million miles away. Let alone going on tour around the whole of Europe.”

Born and raised near Canterbury, the young Jeer spent his childhood listening to the great saxophonists with his mum in the car. 

“She used to play Kenny G and I just remember loving it,” he says. He started learning the saxophone at the age of 11, doing “all the grades”, before pivoting to lessons with “a guy who was like, [a] cigarette out of the mouth, Ronnie Scott’s type sax player. 

“He was like, ‘Charlie, forget about the notes on the page. Let’s play with vibe.’” Jeer laughs. “I pretty much stopped reading [sheet] music from then on, and started vibing.”

From there, a career in music might have beckoned sooner, but Jeer “did something that felt safer.” He got an economics degree, built a massive following on social media, threw himself into boxing and worked as a doorman at venues around Canterbury – something that he says he’s grateful for now, not least for the perspective it’s given him.

“You can get so out of touch being an artist,” he says. “You’re constantly asked about how you feel and you’re constantly expressing yourself and you’re constantly around people who believe in you and want you to win. Flip that to being someone who gets treated like shit, no-one cares about.”

Soon, though, inspiration came calling. “I had this revelation after my degree. I was like, ‘I need to go do some crazy shit,’” he says. “Like, exciting experiences. Unforgettable days, on a day-to-day basis. A thrill, I guess.”

That involved a stint on Netflix dating series , where Jeer met his ex-girlfriend – who, in turn, ended up inspiring ‘Her Eyes’. 

“I basically fell in love with my ex-girlfriend through eye contact, and I was just like, ‘I need to write this song,’” he says. “I wrote on my Notes [app], ‘She said she loves me just with her eyes.’”

That ended up becoming the first line of the song. In the end, going viral was a case of combining that inspiration with the power of the internet: Jeer uploaded the track to social media, and the rest was history. 

“All at once, I went from essentially being a no one to this industry, [to] having all of these offers from all of these labels. Everyone wants to work with you,” he says.

“What [social media] has been good for really is, especially earlier on, there was no need for me to chase a hit, because I’d released the song. It went viral. What I needed to do was create a world for the people who were coming to my music through that song.”

He’s been busy doing that ever since: in September, he released his second EP, ‘Take Away My Problems’. But Jeer’s world is still in flux: as he admits himself, he’s still evolving and experimenting with his sound. 

“If something feels effortless, elevated and timeless, it’s something that I like,” he says. “That’s always what I’m trying to aim towards, rather than trying to limit [myself] to a genre. Because I could say jazz house, but then, we’ve done some disco stuff and alternative pop bits. I don’t want to limit myself to genre. I’d rather limit myself to taste.”

Another area he’s keen to explore more is his Indian heritage. Jeer’s paternal grandparents emigrated from India, but for Jeer, that past was something that often felt hard to access. 

“I think that I have a bit of a confused relationship with it, if I’m being honest,” he says. “I was raised in Canterbury in the countryside with an Indian dad and an English mum… I feel British. I am British. I’m born and raised here.”

“When my Punjabi granddad came over to the UK, he was wearing a turban, [he was] a practicing Sikh man,” he adds. “[He] was racially abused so badly that he one day took his turban off, shaved his hair and beard off and stopped essentially practicing.”

Jeer recalls a time he asked his grandfather about the same thing for a Year 2 school project. “I was talking about being half Indian. I sat down with my baba ji, and he cried in front of me telling me that story. And I just remember feeling so sad.”

It was at university that he met people who made him realise it was possible to embrace his Indian side too. 

“I met all of these Indian people… who were so in touch with their culture,” he says. “They made me understand that there was a world of people who were able to do that, who lived in the UK, even though I didn’t really ever feel like I was one of them. My dad didn’t raise me with Indian culture beyond having curries for dinner.

“For me, [it’s] always been a case of like, I don’t want to lose that [heritage] because I feel like if I lost it, it would be taken. Not necessarily from me, but from my family.” He pauses. “It’s something that I’m keen to explore, in the right way, at the right time.” 

For now, Jeer’s focussed on the future: developing his sound, embracing the twists and turns that come with a life on the road, and handling his growing fame.

“I love my life,” he says exuberantly. “I love the impact that I get to have. I think that your purpose as an artist is to feel understood, essentially. When you make music, you make it with the intention of someone else listening to it and feeling the thing that you felt when you made it.

“That feeling of getting to travel all over the world and have people show up for you and pay money to come and see you at a show… there’s nothing that I would swap that for.”

Charlie Jeer plays Village Underground tomorrow (October 27th).