Kaz Hawkins: How Belfast Made a Blues Survivor

In a Belfast bar in the 1980s, a young Kaz Hawkins watched the stage from the darkness between tables, absorbing cigarette smoke and raw emotion while the world outside her window burned with the violence of the Troubles. She was learning a language—one that didn’t require her to speak her own story yet. That girl would spend the next 20 years translating other people’s pain into cover songs, until the moment her body finally refused to keep silent.

Kaz is now one of Europe’s most compelling contemporary blues artists—a multi-award-winning singer-songwriter who has transformed decades of trauma, addiction, and near-death survival into some of the most honest music of her generation. But her ascent wasn’t the rise of a prodigy. It was the resurrection of a woman who had to die a thousand times before she could finally begin to live.

The Belfast Years: Blues as Escape and Inheritance

Karen McIntyre grew up in the Village area of south Belfast during one of the city’s darkest periods. Consequently, the Troubles filled the streets with violence and fear every day. Her father, however, moved by an instinct toward salvation, did something unconventional: he brought his young daughter into the blues bars—spaces where the music expressed what nobody could say out loud.

While other children studied arithmetic, Kaz learned that blues was a language of survival. The singers in those bars weren’t merely performing—they were excavating. Furthermore, by her teenage years, she was standing on stages herself, a girl with an old soul and a voice that made audiences stop breathing.

The music offered what her neighborhood couldn’t, a way to feel without dying. However, as her twenties unfolded, the escape became a prison. She began self-medicating with cocaine and alcohol—drugs that would consequently dominate two decades of her life. By day, she was somebody’s daughter. By night, meanwhile, she was invisible—singing other people’s songs, drowning in cover versions of pain that wasn’t hers while her own remained locked beneath shame and fear.

For 20 years, Kaz sang Gladys Knight and Van Morrison. Audiences loved her voice, her presence, and her emotional authority. Nevertheless, she wasn’t claiming her story. That part of her remained buried—locked behind the door of childhood sexual abuse, domestic violence, and the accumulated weight of a life spent running.

The Breaking Point: 2016

In 2016, Kaz hit complete mental collapse—her body and mind finally refused to carry the load any longer. She describes it as a reckoning: continue as she was and die, or seek help. There was, ultimately, no third option.

She attended a shamanic weekend retreat—a raw, unconventional choice that reflected her desperation. In that space, something shifted. For the first time, she articulated what she’d been running from, and the suppressed music consequently demanded to be written.

The breaking point became the catalyst for Get Ready (2014), released as she began her recovery journey. The album was spare and vulnerable, relatively unknown beyond the UK blues circuit. Nevertheless, it marked a clear boundary, Kaz Hawkins the songwriter had arrived, and she had finally claimed ownership of her own voice.

Recognition and the Road Forward: 2015-2017

By 2015, Kaz Hawkins had won the Barry Middleton Memorial Award for Best Emerging Artist at the British Blues Awards. Notably, she was the first Northern Irish artist to claim that honor. The recognition confirmed what she’d suspected: her story deserved to be heard.

More recognition followed quickly. She took the Pure M Magazine Awards for Best Female and Best Video (2016) for “This Is Me.” Subsequently, she won the UK Blues Challenge in 2017. Then, in April 2017, she entered the European Blues Challenge in Horsens, Denmark—a competition representing 21 countries. Kaz Hawkins won, becoming the first UK artist ever to claim that title. Consequently, a girl from Belfast was now recognized as the voice of the entire British blues community.

That same year, she launched Kaz Hawkins Got The Blues on BBC Radio Ulster. The show became her platform for deep blues knowledge and advocacy. Furthermore, by 2024 she had recorded nine series, with series 10 premiering in June 2026. The radio work positioned her not just as an artist, but as a curator and educator—someone who understood blues history because she’d lived blues truth.

Albums as Chapters: The Art of Excavation

Her discography reads like a biography of reclamation. Each album documents a woman in the process of reauthoring her own narrative.

Feelin’ Good (2017) brought Kaz Hawkins to the front of a full band. The energy is high, gritty, blues-rock fury—a woman who’d found her voice now demanding to be heard.

Don’t You Know (2017)—released the same year—deepened the personal excavation. The title track begins as spoken testimony: raw documentation of childhood theft. “Surviving” confronts trauma with unflinching precision. These aren’t songs that ask for sympathy. They insist on witness.

Memories Of (2020) served as a holding space while Kaz relocated from Northern Ireland to rural France. The move was strategic. She needed distance from the triggers embedded in Belfast’s streets, a country that valued artists differently, and a culture that understood vulnerability as strength rather than weakness.

Finding a European Home: 2022 Onwards

My Life and I (2022), released on Dixiefrog Records (Paris), remastered her back catalog into a coherent anthology. It became Kaz Hawkins’ official introduction to the European blues and soul community. Moreover, it became the centerpiece of what she calls her “mental health mission”: using music to create safe spaces for audiences struggling with their own trauma.

Until We Meet Again (2023) showed Kaz Hawkins increasingly confident collaboration with orchestral arrangers, particularly composer Mathis Richter-Reichhelm. The album refuses genre categories. String arrangements allow her voice to soar across soundscapes that honor her Celtic roots while rejecting nostalgia.

Coming Home (2025)—her most ambitious work—marks a full-circle moment. Recorded in Berlin with Richter-Reichhelm and co-composer Michael Handschuh, it draws on songs she’d written and buried nearly 30 years ago, now revived with fresh eyes and symphonic production. She described it this way: “It’s about coming home to myself, no genres, no expectations, and only for me. I have felt imprisoned most of my life, and this album is the creation I have dreamt of for so long.”

The Documentary: Raw Life as Art

In 2025, France Télévisions released My Life and You, directed by French production company Oxymore. The documentary is an unflinching portrait of Kaz Hawkins’ earliest traumatic years—the sexual abuse, the addiction, the domestic violence, the collapsing and rebuilding of a human being.

Creating the film required her to revisit parts of her life she’d buried. When filming wrapped on “Surviving,” she collapsed to the floor, drained of every ounce of strength. Yet she made it, and she wanted it seen. Her hope was clear: if she made it through, maybe you can too.

Musical Identity: Genre as Truth-Telling

Kaz Hawkins refuses confinement to a single genre. Her music spans blues, soul, jazz, folk, and increasingly, Celtic contemporary—a blend that works because it emerges from genuine exploration rather than market positioning.

Her voice is her primary instrument: a mezzo-soprano capable of devastating tenderness and full-throated growl, placed with surgical precision. She doesn’t oversing. Instead, she trusts silence and breath to do as much work as sound.

She plays multiple instruments: vocals, acoustic and electric guitar, piano, and bodhrán drum. The bodhrán has become increasingly central as she reconnects with her Irish heritage—not through traditional music (which she never absorbed growing up), but through an integration of Celtic rhythmic sensibility into contemporary songwriting.

Her songwriting emphasizes narrative clarity. Like the best blues songwriters, she trusts her stories to carry emotional weight. A song like “Surviving” doesn’t need embellishment; the bare statement of what happened is devastating.

Performance Formats: The Artist in Multiples

Rather than forcing her diverse interests into a single show, Kaz Hawkins has strategically created distinct performance vehicles, each exploring a different facet of her artistry.

The Quintet (six years together) delivers high-energy blues-rock. Kaz calls herself “Mama Kaz” in these settings, opening with a growl that signals power and presence. The show emphasizes groove and dance, with electrifying guitar work and audience participation that transforms the venue into a cathartic space.

The Duo My Life and I (with pianist Franck Le Masle) is deliberately intimate and confessional. Each song comes with its story—the memory, the trauma, the moment that birthed the lyric. This format has become her primary mental health advocacy vehicle, creating what she calls a “safe space” where audiences feel permission to release whatever emotions they carry.

The Hope Experiment, launching in 2026, brings together a collective of up to ten musicians with an explicit healing mission. Rather than a pure blues presentation, it features reworked arrangements of her catalog against new rhythmic and instrumental interpretations. The project will premiere in France (August 2026) and Switzerland (October 2026), with discussions underway for a Netherlands premiere.

International Reach and Collaborations

Kaz Hawkins’ work has attracted diverse collaborators, steadily expanding her reach beyond the blues circuit. In 2020, she recorded “On The Little Island” with German composer Mathis Richter-Reichhelm. Additionally, she appeared on Italian duo Superdownhome’s gospel single “Life Is A Road” (2023) and collaborated with French soul artist Thomas Kahn on “A Place Like Home” (2024). Most recently, she featured on DJ Craig Charles’s funk track “Shake” from Trunk Of Funk Volume 3 (2024).

In 2019, the Florence Academy of Art invited Kaz Hawkins to participate in “Something In The Water”—a project supporting arts access for children in rural Alabama. Specifically, she recorded with members of the legendary Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section. That session connected her directly to the American blues lineage she’d long been drawing from.

In April 2022, the Cahors Blues Festival—France’s oldest—granted her the title “Marraine du festival” (Godmother of the festival) at its 40th anniversary. She headlined alongside Grammy Award-winning Christone “Kingfish” Ingram, Popa Chubby, and Kirk Fletcher. As a result, her status as a major voice in contemporary European blues was firmly cemented.

Mental Health Advocacy: Lived Expertise

Since 2010, Kaz Hawkins has positioned mental health at the center of her artistic mission. She’s not a therapist; she’s clear about that. Instead, she calls herself a “light-holder”—carrying the flame until others can carry their own.

Through her shows, documentaries, speaking engagements, and vivid social media presence, she advocates for survivors of sexual abuse, domestic violence, addiction, and depression. She’s partnered with French charities—La Maison des Femmes (supporting women in crisis), Women for Women France, Aina Enfance & Avenir (supporting vulnerable children), and United Riders (humanitarian efforts).

Her message to survivors is unambiguous: “These things are none of your doing; they are not your fault. You are brave every day, right now, navigating what is happening to you and still fighting. You deserve the chance to love yourself unconditionally, and you are not defined by these deeds EVER.”

The Move to France: Healing Through Relocation

Kaz Hawkins’ 2019 move from Belfast to rural France was strategic and courageous. She needed geographic distance from the triggers embedded in every street corner of her hometown. France offered what Ireland couldn’t: a fresh canvas, a culture that values artists, and communities that understand vulnerability as strength rather than weakness.

Living in France has also softened her relationship to her Irish identity. Rather than returning to traditional Irish music, she’s exploring what it means to honor her Scotch-Irish and Norwegian heritage through contemporary music. As she ages, this reconnection feels less like nostalgia and more like integration.

She returns to Ireland periodically for shows, but France is now home—a choice that required financial risk and emotional courage.

The Tattoos: Armor and Reclamation

Kaz Hawkins’ body is covered in tattoos. She describes them as “armor” and a visual language of reclamation. Her first, done in her twenties, was romantic and naive. Over the years, as she began covering scars from self-harm with art, the tattoos took on new meaning. An Aquarius water sign design reminds her to stay calm in the storm.

She’s explicit: the scars remain under the ink. She’s not erasing them, just recontextualizing them. Choosing to look at her body with creative eyes instead of shame has been its own healing journey. The tattoos tell anyone who sees them: you can transform a negative into a positive. You can reclaim your body. There is hope on the other side.

Awards and Recognition

– 2022: Innocent Award for Best Album (My Life and I)—Berlin, Germany
– 2018: UK Blues Award, Northern Ireland Blues Act of the Year
– 2017: European Blues Challenge winner, Denmark (first UK artist to win)
– 2017: Semi-finalist, Blues Foundation International Blues Challenge, Memphis
– 2016: UK Blues Challenge winner
– 2016: Pure M Magazine Awards, Best Female and Best Video (“This Is Me”)
– 2015: Barry Middleton Memorial Award, British Blues Awards (first Northern Irish winner)
– Multiple NI Music Prize nominations (2014, 2015, 2016, 2022)

But the awards Kaz Hawkins treasures most are the moments when a stranger approaches after a show in tears, saying, “I thought I was alone. Your song saved my life.” A woman who drove 15 hours to see her after hearing “One More Fight”—a song about breaking free from addiction and abuse—later performed the song with her on stage in Alabama, both of them crying through the verses. These moments are why Kaz creates.

Legacy and Impact

At 52, Kaz Hawkins stands as one of the most honest artists working in blues and soul today. She hasn’t achieved mainstream superstardom—the music industry still struggles with women who refuse to fit neatly into categories. However, across Europe and increasingly in the US, she’s become something more valuable: a beacon for survivors.

Her legacy isn’t measured in chart positions or streaming numbers. Instead, it’s measured in the woman who found sobriety, the abuse survivor who left her situation, and the person with depression who finally felt less alone. The music is a vehicle for connection, not ego. Furthermore, she pours everything into a performance because she knows that vulnerability on stage gives the audience permission to feel the same.

Ultimately, Kaz Hawkins’ artistry proves that blues music, at its deepest level, isn’t entertainment. It’s bearing witness—to pain, to survival, to the human capacity to transform suffering into meaning. She brings that truth to every stage, every recording, and every conversation with a fan who approaches with tears and their own story.

Notably, there’s no neat redemption arc in her work—no point where the music ends and everything is resolved. Instead, there’s an endless journey toward self-love and a relentless commitment to reminding others: you are worth the fight. If she made it through, maybe you can too.

That’s the power of her voice. And that’s why she sings.