Allie Sherlock

Every weekend on Grafton Street

Allie Sherlock was born on 7 April 2005 in Douglas, on the south side of Cork city. Her mother died when she was nine, and in 2016 she left primary school after being bullied and was taught at home from then on. Singing in public was the thing she wanted to do, and busking was the only route open to a child. She started on the streets of Cork, and from the age of 11 she was travelling to Dublin almost every week to play on Grafton Street, the pedestrianised shopping street that has long been the city's busking pitch of record.

Her YouTube channel had existed since 2014, but it was a cover of Ed Sheeran's Supermarket Flowers, filmed on the street and posted in June 2017, that turned her into a phenomenon. Within months she was singing at the Miss Universe Ireland pageant, and in early 2018, aged 12, she was flown to Los Angeles to perform Adele's Million Years Ago on The Ellen DeGeneres Show. She later said the experience was nerve-wracking, and that she had been an avid viewer of the programme before she was ever a guest on it. Back home, she told The City in December 2024, the day after the Ellen broadcast aired was the best she ever had on Grafton Street: record crowds, CD sales, tips and selfies.

What is unusual is that the pavement never went away. In December 2024, by then 19 and with television bookings and tours behind her, she was still driving from Cork to Dublin every weekend to busk. She was frank about it not being forever. If the music worked out, she said, she would be touring and charting more and the busking would eventually stop, but for now she would keep going, and she would only quit when she could no longer do it or no longer wanted to.

Tedder, the Palladium and a slow turn towards her own songs

The viral year brought a record deal. In 2018 she signed a five-year contract with Patriot Records, the label owned by OneRepublic's Ryan Tedder, and the association gave her early stage experience well above busker level. She played Cork Opera House in December 2016 and Cyprus Avenue in Cork in December 2018, headlined Dublin's Olympia Theatre in April 2019, sang at the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg in early 2020, and in March 2020 opened for OneRepublic in Paris, Cologne, Utrecht and at the London Palladium, just before the pandemic shut touring down.

Lockdown pushed her towards writing. Songs such as Hero, Locked Inside, Without You in July 2021 and Leave Me With a Decent Goodbye in September 2021 appeared alongside the covers, and The Night Before addressed her mother's death directly. She contributed to the Irish Women in Harmony charity recording of Dreams in 2020, played the finale of RTÉ's Home School Hub with the RTÉ Concert Orchestra that June, and by 2022 was writing with Kodaline's Steve Garrigan. On 4 June 2022 she sang at the AO Arena in Manchester as part of the Platinum Jubilee celebrations.

Her first full-length record, the self-titled album Allie, arrived in April 2023 with 11 tracks. Speaking to The Honey Pop in March 2025 she described it as the first body of work where every song genuinely resonated with her. Even so, the mass audience was still coming for the covers: by 2025 her YouTube channel had passed 6.28 million subscribers and 1.46 billion views, and she told The City in late 2024 that her combined following across platforms was close to 15 million.

How Love Works and the songwriter arriving

The turning point on record was How Love Works, released in October 2024 and co-written with Ella Henderson and Ollie Green, a writer who has worked with Gavin James and Nina Nesbitt. RTÉ, which profiled her in a Behind the Music feature on 7 November 2024, called it her debut self-composed track, and she explained that it came out of an evening spent feeling like an outsider at a party and wondering how love actually works. She had recently signed with a label after turning down several offers, and the song reached number one on Spotify's Viral 50 chart for Ireland with close to 300,000 streams in its first weeks.

On 22 November 2024 she performed it live on RTÉ's The Late Late Show, talking to host Patrick Kielty about her UK dates and about busking on Grafton Street. She had already played the song on the street before the broadcast and described the television performance as a full-circle moment. That month she also ran a small headline tour of Ireland and the UK, including Whelan's in Dublin on 12 November.

The singles that followed staked out her sound as soulful pop written from the heart, in her own phrase. Ex Friend, released in spring 2025 with a video shot in the mountains of Tenerife, dealt with the end of a friendship, which she argued can cut deeper than a romantic break-up because a part of you feels missing afterwards. The Greatest, I Don't Need Saving and Damage Control came during 2025 and 2026, the last of them about masking loneliness by being the life and soul of the party. Her influences have not changed since the Grafton Street days: Adele above all, whose 19 and 21 albums she calls nostalgic and whose Chasing Pavements still gives her goosebumps, along with Stevie Nicks.

Where she stands in September 2026

In an interview published on 3 August 2026, Sherlock set out the plan she had been following: alternate an original with a cover, keep the audience that came for the covers, and try new songs out live before deciding whether to release or bin them. She confirmed that an album is due in 2026, after which she intends to concentrate on original material. She was also candid about the friction in that strategy. Some people, she said, automatically react badly to a busker playing their own songs, which is one reason she still values the street as a confidence-building rehearsal room. She has recently opened for Macklemore and The Script, and told the interviewer she takes any opportunity she can to sing, including an unplanned duet with a busker who recognised her in Lanzarote.

The most concrete step is the EP For Once I'll Say It Out Loud, released in late summer 2026 and available on CD through her own site. It has five tracks: Trying to Unlove You, Say a Little Something, Empty, Beautiful Mistake and a version of Tom Odell's Black Friday. Say a Little Something is the current single, and she has described it as being about the silence after a break-up, the strange emptiness when someone who was part of your everyday life has nothing left to say. Venue copy for the tour presents her as an artist who has moved from viral sensation to established live performer, with vocally driven pop on an acoustic foundation and influences in Ed Sheeran, Adele, Lewis Capaldi and Sam Smith.

The show: For Once I'll Say It Out Loud Tour

The EP gives its name to her largest headline run to date. It opened in Ireland in the first week of September 2026, with Belfast's Empire Music Hall on 7 September, then moved to Edinburgh's Liquid Room on 9 September and The Grove in Newcastle on 10 September. The English leg runs from The Wardrobe in Leeds on 12 September through Manchester Academy 2, O2 Academy3 Birmingham, MK11 in Milton Keynes, Islington Assembly Hall in London on 16 September and Concorde 2 in Brighton on 17 September. The continental dates start at La Madeleine in Brussels on 20 September and take in Amsterdam, Cologne, Frankfurt, Berlin, Warsaw, Prague, Vienna, Stuttgart and Winterthur before closing at Café de la Danse in Paris on 10 October. The Milan date at Legend Club on 8 October has been cancelled.

These are club and small-theatre rooms, and the format is straightforward. At Tolhuistuin in Amsterdam on 21 September the doors open at 19:00, the support goes on at 19:30 and Sherlock at 20:30, with tickets at 28.70 euros and the show sold out. Local singer-songwriters open: in Amsterdam it is Mischa van den Brand. A limited VIP package adds early entry, a meet and greet, a signed tour poster and a lanyard, which fits an artist whose relationship with her audience was built on selfies after a street set.

The clearest published description of her current live set comes from a support slot rather than a headline show. Reviewing Tom Grennan's arena date at Bournemouth International Centre on 3 September 2025, Bring the Noise UK saw her play with guitarist Filipe Colares, opening on a cover of Alex Warren's Ordinary, moving through Ex Friend and How Love Works, and closing with Adele's Set Fire to the Rain, which drew the singalong of her set. The reviewer rated her voice highly and called Ex Friend an earworm that lingered after she left the stage, but found the set a little flat, without the build in energy that a big room demands, and put some of that down to staging and venue size. She told the August 2026 interview that she performs the same way whether the setting is a pavement, a club or a festival, and adjusts only her between-song talk to the room. On this tour, in venues a fraction of Bournemouth's size and in front of people who bought tickets for her, that consistency is the thing being tested.