Ten years ago, the singer-songwriter Victoria Canal wrote in her diary that she dreamt of meeting Chris Martin, the Coldplay frontman, one day.
Three weeks ago, her telephone rang while she was with some friends. It was Martin on FaceTime.
“He said, ‘Hey, Victoria. Do you want to play piano and sing with me on stage at Glastonbury?’” she recalls. “I said, ‘OK …? That sounds great.’ And so from that moment on, I have been rehearsing and figuring out what I’m going to wear on the biggest stage … ever.”
Canal, 25, felt “very nervous” before Saturday’s gig — the fifth time that Coldplay have headlined the Somerset festival — and called her friend, the musician Sam Fender, for advice. “Put your big girl pants on,” he advised.
Canal, who has two Ivor Novello awards and a debut album on its way, was one of Coldplay’s special guests for their headlining slot on the Pyramid stage, playing their hit song Paradise to a crowd of more than 100,000 and millions watching worldwide on TV. It was a triumph.
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Born without her right forearm due to amniotic band syndrome, Canal was bullied at school — “the least attractive, the least popular” — but piano became her salvation. Her grandmother, who played the instrument in church, taught her at first, before she was given classical training. She switched to pop at the age of 11.
“Piano gave me power,” she said. “I went from being the one-armed kid, to the kid who was going to be a famous singer. That felt good. But middle-school was brutal, so I spent a lot of lunches in the practice room, totally avoiding people my own age. I wasn’t having a great time.”
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Now she is performing with the biggest band in the world — is there a part of her that thinks this is some vindication? “Well, in therapy they talk about your inner child showing up,” she said. “And maybe the most wounded, awkward 14-year-old girl with braces, who never had any attention from boys and was shunned by the girls? Maybe there is a little voice from her going: ‘Ha! Look at me now.’ But, honestly, I don’t think it’d be fulfilling to do this for a living if it was a revenge play.”
She said she did not want to be “the one-armed piano player to 100,000 new people” but “Victoria Canal, singer-songwriter, playing to 100,000 new people”, adding: “I don’t want to be reduced to one thing about me that doesn’t really have anything to do with my craft.”
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Born in Berlin to an American mother and Spanish father, Canal had lived in Shanghai, Amsterdam, Tokyo and Madrid before settling in London. She said that she played the piano in a unique way. Her right arm has “one equivalent to a finger” and can be used only for what she calls “cluster chords”, as in keys close to each other.
Canal’s friendship with Martin began in 2021 when he was sent one of her demos and then introduced her to his record label. The pair rehearsed Paradise together for the first time on Friday.
