TikTok sensation PinkPantheress is the ‘posh’ daughter of a statistics professor and civil servant

She’s the social media phenomenon who has become one of the UK’s most promising pop singers after last week winning the BBC’s prestigious Sound of 2022 poll.

Yet despite her success and more than one million TikTok fans, little is known about the 20-year-old protegee apart from her stage name: PinkPantheress.

But The Mail on Sunday can reveal that the star’s real name is Vicky Beverly Walker and that she is the daughter of a statistics professor and a Kenyan-born civil servant.

She was born in Bath in 2001, where her father Stephen worked in the maths department at the city’s university. One well-connected diplomat described the singer as ‘posh’.

Along with her mother Elza and older brother Christopher, the family moved to Kent in 2010, where home was a £500,000 townhouse in Canterbury.

She attended the selective and high-achieving Barton Court Grammar School, during which time she says she stacked shelves at the Co-op supermarket.

Ms Walker’s showbusiness career began at the age of 12, when she danced in a school production of Bugsy Malone, but music was her passion and she began to write songs in her bedroom and plan her unorthodox approach to her career.

Over the past year, she has been releasing music while living in London and studying film at university, but there is time for other pursuits including futsal, a football-based game played on a hard court.

Her stage name was coined after watching the ITV quiz show The Chase, where host Bradley Walsh asked a contestant what a female panther was called.

Ms Walker says the answer – pantheress – was to be her name, but after realising there was already a person using that online, she put ‘pink’ before it.

Speaking of her wish to be mysterious, she said: ‘I find it easier to not lay every single card on the table. I like my privacy and I felt like, if I have my music out and my face everywhere, it would start getting too much for people.’

She was born in Bath in 2001, where her father Stephen (pictured) worked in the maths department at the city’s university

That did not, however, stop her from getting to work on increasing the number of her followers on TikTok. Her strategy of following 1,000 people every hour paid off and soon her popularity was noticed by record label Parlophone, home to artists such as Coldplay and Sir Paul McCartney, which signed her.

In October, Ms Walker released her debut album To Hell With It and a week later she was unveiled by US fashion designer Marc Jacobs as his new muse alongside young models Iris Law and Bella Hadid. 

Despite her shyness over her real identity, Ms Walker is well-connected, networking with Kenya’s High Commissioner to the UK, Manoah Esipisu, who described her as ‘posh’ and revealed she is a regular visitor to Mombasa, the port city in her mother’s native country.

Last Thursday, Ms Walker was unveiled as the BBC’s tip for the future after 130 music industry experts voted for her, including singers Sir Elton John, Jade Thirlwall of Little Mix, Ed Sheeran and Billie Eilish.