Winners Announced: Kendrew Songwriting Competition 2025

Now in its fourth year, the Kendrew Songwriting Competition is open to all current students at the University of Oxford. Submitted songs must be original but may be in any genre, style, tradition, or language. As ever, the songs reviewed by our panel represented a broad variety of styles and genres and the quality of the submissions was truly impressive.

Submissions were reviewed by Nick Fowler (guitarist for Gaz Coombes, member of Goldrush, The Dreaming Spires, and St Etienne, and Graduate Studies Administrator for the Faculty of Music), Sarah Hill (Associate Professor of Popular Music at the Faculty of Music and Fellow and Tutor at St Peter's College), and Jason Stanyek (Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology at the Faculty of Music and Fellow and Tutor at St John’s College).

This year's winning songs are 'Worst Best Thing' by Tegan Addison, a second-year Music student at St John's College, and 'Golder’s Hill" by Oliver Spooner, a first-year music student at Lincoln College. Many congratulations, Tegan and Oliver!

Below you'll find recordings of the winning songs, along with a short description of the works by their respective songwriters.

The members of the panel extend their heartfelt thanks to everyone who participated in the 2025 competition and look forward to reviewing next year's entries.

First Prize: 'Worst Best Thing' by Tegan Addison

I’m Tegan, and I’m a second-year music student at St John’s College, Oxford. I started out as a classical pianist (DipABRSM) and singer, but over time I found myself drawn to pop and rock songwriting, taking inspiration from artists and bands like Fleetwood Mac, ABBA, Led Zeppelin, The Cure, Wolf Alice, Kate Bush, Blondie, Paramore, and Alanis Morissette. I feel incredibly honoured to have received a prize in the Kendrew Songwriting Contest two years in a row. Since 2022, some of my songs have been played on BBC Tees Introducing, which has been a huge encouragement for me. This year, I’ve particularly enjoyed performing classical piano recitals and spending more time in the studio, developing my production skills. I love experimenting with vocal composition and have recently begun arranging my songs for orchestra, which feels like an exciting new direction for me. I record and produce most of my music solo from my home studio. After my degree, I hope to pursue songwriting professionally but in the meantime, I’m really looking forward to writing even more songs and playing more live music in my third year!

'Worst Best Thing' is a commentary on those ambiguous almost-relationships where boundaries are blurry and commitment feels uncertain. I recorded and produced the song myself in Logic, using four synths, electric guitar, bass, piano, four vocal tracks, and programmed drums. I had a lot of fun writing intricate piano runs over a simple, repetitive synth pattern, which weaves in and out of the bass, guitar, and drums. I like to preserve a sense of conversational flow and liveness in my tracks, so I kept some pitch imperfections and some of the breaths in my vocal line, recording all instruments and vocals in as few takes as possible. I also played with timing a lot in the vocal delivery, especially in the chorus, where some lines land just ahead of the beat, as if anxiously anticipating what’s coming next. I used the backing vocals in the first verse to accentuate some of the lines, sometimes in a call-and-response manner to sort of create the sense of gossiping with your friends about what’s going on and asking lots of questions you don’t really want the answers to. I tried to build up the presence of the harmonies gradually throughout the song, moving from a sense of uncertainty in the first verse which is only occasionally supported by fragmented backing vocals or a single harmony in the first chorus to something a bit more supported by the second verse and chorus as the narrator expresses more and more anger with the situation they have found themself in with 3-4 stacked close harmonies. I wanted the song to end quite abruptly, as these sorts of situations often do, so on the final line everything just stops, leaving everything up in the air. The song’s basically all about unpredictability, a push and pull that must eventually come to an end.

Second Prize: 'Golder's Hill' by Oliver Spooner

I'm a first-year music student at Lincoln College, Oxford, who has been releasing music under the artist name ‘inigo’ for a few years now. I love writing music, playing music and listening to music. I try and make music that sounds a bit like a dream and hope that the songs I write resonate with, and connect with, as many people as possible! You can find me on Spotify here.

'Golder’s Hill' is about long distance in relationships and about feeling isolated in a digital world. The superficial connection of a phone call, the voiceless words that appear on a text. As the song progresses it becomes more surreal, with more complex harmony and more and more layers. The tempo change tries to create a sense of disorientation whilst maintaining a coherence with the rest of the song.