Soundcheck Award ceremony: Emma-Jean Thackray honored in Berlin

This is how Thackray, who became known as a jazz trumpeter, recorded her album “Weirdo,” from which the song comes. She played every instrument on it herself, and she also produced and mixed the record herself. It took about a year until everything was finished, she says in an interview with moderators Torsten Groß and Andreas Müller. Both just gave her the Soundcheck Award for best album of 2025. It is awarded by Radio Eins and the Tagesspiegel.

Emma-Jean Thackray came especially from London to accept it and play two songs. “I was in a difficult phase of my life when I recorded the album,” she says. That’s why she withdrew completely and concentrated entirely on herself. She recorded “Weirdo,” which combines her jazz roots with funk, soul and hip-hop, in her cluttered guest room.

Lyrically, it is characterized by the grief for her partner, who died suddenly a few years ago, as well as by her experience as an outsider as a person with autism and ADHD. Because she was often called a weirdo, she quickly appropriated the word and made it the title of her record. “Why, why you always got to, got to make it weird?/ Why, why you always got to be so different?/ You don’t belong,” she sings in the title track.

Her solo performance in the studio on the song “Save Me” perfectly expresses how great the album sounds and how goovy it is. Feet tapping and heads nodding in the audience.

The musician is very happy about the prize, a poster made especially for her by the New York artist Otto Steininger. It varies the pastel tones and motifs of the “Weirdo” album cover, which shows the musician lying in a bathtub. There is a toaster on the edge. Moderator Andreas Müller asks whether it was plugged in. “That remains my secret,” answers Emma-Jean Thackray.

But she likes to talk about her love for Miles Davis, whose music the musician, who was born in Leeds in 1989, discovered by chance at the age of 13 and was immediately enthusiastic about. “He showed me the way into a new creative world,” she remembers. After listening, she began to replay his songs on the trumpet – and found her own sound following in the footsteps of the jazz great master.

Davis would certainly have been okay with the Soundcheck Award for “Weirdo.” Thackray doesn’t know where she’ll hang it yet, perhaps in the guest room.

The Soundcheck Award has been presented since 2009. All albums that receive the highest rating of four hits in the “Soundcheck” program broadcast on Fridays on Radio One qualify. In 2025 there were 28 works from which a 50-member jury of music journalists initially selected a shortlist of four titles.

In addition to Thackray’s “Weirdo” were “Never Enough” by Turnstile (“Never Enough”), “Essex Honey” by Blood Orange and “Schwarze Magie” by the Hamburg band Die Heiterheit. A jury from Radio Eins and Tagesspiegel then selected the winning album.

Last year, the Berlin rapper Apsilon was awarded the prize for his album “Haut wie Pelz”. Other award winners include The Black Keys, Neil Young, Tocotronic, Bilderbuch, James Blake and Tristan Brusch.