A singer-songwriter has scored global fame and a UK number one album - as well as becoming one of TikTok's most viral stars.
Born and raised in Ireland, Ciaran Ducrot was around music from the start thanks to his mother, a French classical musician who raised him alone.
He busked around the streets of Cork and released a mixtape, Started in College, in 2020 though to limited commercial attention.
This year his song 'All For You' became a top 20 hit in the UK after being featured on Love Island, but it was follow up 'I'll Be Waiting' which went global thanks to TikTok clips which sparked a viral trend.
The premise is the same for all of the videos: Ducrot takes a choir to a public location - a train station, a skate park, the Louvre - starts singing the song, the choir joins in and the camera catches the reaction of bystanders, be they delighted, irritated or bemused.
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His videos have racked up hundreds of millions of views, with other users posting their own versions of the trend.
Ducrot, who will play in Glasgow later this month, tells The Herald: "I knew that I knew the chorus was really catchy, but it didn’t necessarily tell the full story of the song.
“Nor was it that genius, or the most amazing lyrics – it was just catchy and simple. So that’s when I had the idea, we were doing full choir versions of the song so I realised I’d have a full choir at my disposal.
@cianducrot Had this up my sleeve 👀 singing “I’ll be waiting” with monalisa..
♬ I'll Be Waiting - If you ever want to make things right - Cian Ducrot
“So I thought, ‘why don’t we just take the choir and go and sing the chorus in some random places?’. Obviously, the rest is history.
“The reaction was just insane, I’d never seen anything like that on social media before. It just exploded.
"I just noticed immediately that one the videos I'd posted – we’d filmed a bunch of them and we’d be like ‘OK, this one might be good enough’ – in the space of a few minutes, hours, overnight it was in the millions of views. It’s probably on 100 million now. I remember us being like ‘let's try to get like 20 million views before Christmas, imagine that?’
"I think it hit like 50 million before Christmas and my friend who filmed it - who films all my stuff - he was kind of joking, he was like, 'we're gonna get 50 million before Christmas' and that was outrageous – people didn’t get 50 million views promoting a song, that was almost unheard of.
“It just kept going, then we posted another one which went even bigger even faster, then another one after that which went bigger, then people were making their own videos and even had choirs singing their own version of the song.
@cianducrot Singing “I’ll be waiting” on the train 😲😲
♬ I'll Be Waiting - If you ever want to make things right - Cian Ducrot
“It just took over, and because my face was at the front of all these insanely viral videos, my following just grew massively, I think I garnered three or four million followers – it’s just insane.
“Because I was in the front of it people knew the song but also knew me and my face as well, which is very rare that early on in your career.
“Everything changed very quickly, it was just mad. It was such an exciting time, like ‘OK this is really happening’.”
The success of the song and previous hit 'All For You' catapulted the singer to mainstream success. He's toured with Ed Sheeran, had a number one album in Victory and is speaking to the Herald from the road in North Carolina.
He says: "I grew up in Passage West in Cork for most of my childhood, North Carolina is a long way from there for sure!
“It’s something I always dreamt of, touring America, so it’s really mad when I think about being out here, having been a kid with those dreams, coming from somewhere like Cork which isn’t somewhere where a lot of people have those dreams or pursue them – so it’s pretty crazy.
"I’ve scratched the surface of what I want to achieve and some of the things are crazy and amazing: meeting Ed, touring with Ed, befriending Ed. If I could have talked to myself when I was 13 and busking his songs on the street and said, ‘yeah you’re going to be buddies with Ed’… that’s just insane, it’s just not something that anyone could fathom would ever happen.
“There have been so many incredible things that I’m so grateful for, it’s a really amazing thing.
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“Things do change but also I still feel the same, I still feel like I’m trying to prove myself and reach more people, still trying to make more music that I love.
“I still feel like my songs are getting better and I’m still chasing that and trying to tell my stories.
“Many things have changed but also they haven’t, it’s kind of a strange feeling.”
Cian Ducrot will play Glasgow's 02 Academy on Monday November 13.
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