Thomas Peter Odell was born in Chichester, West Sussex, England, to an airline pilot father and a primary school teacher mother. He has an older sister. He spent part of his childhood in New Zealand because of his father’s job. He was educated at Seaford College. He studied piano classically to Grade 7, and began writing his own songs at the age of 13, but told no one because he felt it was “uncool”.

At 18, Odell abandoned plans to attend the University of York and attempted to gain a place at a music college in Liverpool. He appeared at open-mic events nightly: “It was full of humiliation: dragging a keyboard round, turning up to find out I’d been taken off the bill, gangs of lads grabbing the mic off me and laughing… I learnt to perform and learnt what songs work.” A year later, he moved back to Chichester after being made redundant from his job as a barman. Using his grandmother’s car, he travelled regularly to London to play shows and to put advertisements in music schools. He studied at the British and Irish Modern Music Institute (BIMM) in Brighton playing as part of the band Tom and the Tides before moving to London in 2010. Tom and The Tides recorded the song “Spider” for BIMM’s student album What’s Inside Your Head Vol. 3.

Full biography on Wikipedia.org

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