A former Made in Chelsea star hopes his music will make people see him as more than a reality TV personality.
Fredrik Ferrier, who is from Winchester, Hampshire, appeared on the E4 show from its first series in 2011, but is also a classically trained musician.
“You have to remember that everyone doing reality TV is trying to do it to promote something, and for me I was trying to promote music,” he said.
Ferrier has just released his new single Alive.
Made in Chelsea, which charts the adventures and love lives of a cast of affluent, good-looking people in the London borough, has helped launch the careers of the likes of Sam Thompson, Jamie Laing, and Georgia Toffolo.
Ferrier, who is half Icelandic, featured in the first four series, making return appearances from series 12 and in the spin-offs. During his time on the show he took the opportunity to display his musical prowess when he could.
“When I joined I was in my last year studying classical music at Bristol,” he told BBC Music Introducing: Solent’s Fern Buckley.
“So I’ve been doing music long, long before I started on reality TV, but when you do that you just kind of get known for something.
“But my dream has always been to have that eventual song where people are like ‘oh yeah, it’s that guy’.
“Because ultimately the music has to speak for itself and lots of people who do Reality TV then decide to break off into something, whereas I feel like [with] my songs… people are like ‘fine, he’s not just a reality star’.”
Ferrier’s influences include Hozier, George Michael, Stevie Wonder, Frank Sinatra, Rag’n’Bone Man, and Imagine Dragons. The singer-songwriter plays both piano and violin.
His cover of Coldplay’s A Sky Full of Stars has had more than 1.5m views on TikTok.
He said other reality TV stars, such as Love Island’s Wes Nelson, and Geordie Shore’s Joel Corry, had gone on to make big waves in the music charts and were “crushing it”.
“When I first started doing reality [TV] it was still a dirty word… and now the vast majority of TV is reality,” he said.
But while he had a “great time” doing Made in Chelsea, he said his focus was now his music.
“I think as a musician you have no other choice,” he said.
“At no stage will you ever think, this is enough now. You have to keep putting songs out. You never know which one is going to hit.”
He also described playing live as a “net positive for everyone in the room”.
He added: “As a singer it makes you really happy to perform in front of people, and then as a listener you really like to hear songs, and it lifts up everyone, so…. I’m very happy to be doing it.”
