"Rising pop star Myles Smith can still remember the first time he felt famous.
"This might sound trivial," says the singer, "but I was playing a concert where I asked the audience, 'Does anyone have cookies?'
"And within about 10 minutes, the whole dressing room was full of cookies.
"It was the best thing ever."
Since that gig, the 26-year-old's career has only grown bigger.
Smith confesses he learned about the accolade while in the grip of a ferocious hangover.
"The night before, I'd tried to go drink-for-drink with some people who were a lot more experienced than me, and we actually had to call a doctor to my Airbnb," he cringes.
"Finding out I'd got a Brit Award brought me back to life more than any vitamin C ever could."
It was, he says "the most LA I've ever felt".
It's certainly a long way from his upbringing in Luton.
Born to a working class British-Jamaican family, he was a bright and happy kid, who grew up singing along to his mum's Motown records.
His first true musical discovery was Coldplay's Yellow ("it resonated with me, even though I didn't understand a word of it") but Luton's social and cultural diversity meant he was exposed to hundreds of different genres.
"I went through a lot of stages," he says. "I was a huge Green Day fan at one point. I even went through a bit of a Screamo phase."
Before long, he was writing his own songs – initially by dreaming up melodies and lyrics to instrumentals he'd found on YouTube, then creating originals on a guitar he'd been given for his ninth birthday.
"I remember writing this song called Dream Girl, when I was 11," he says.
"It was about a girl at school, and it was bloody awful - but I sang it at school assembly anyway.
"Terrible decision. She realised it was about her and avoided me every day after that."
Undeterred, he started playing at open mic nights around the city – covering artists like Ed Sheeran and Marcus Mumford while fine-tuning his distinctive folk-pop style.
For a long time, however, music was a side hustle. After completing a sociology degree in 2019, Smith set up his own business, specialising in management and strategic development, and was turning a healthy profit by the time he was 23.
"I was quite comfortable," he says. "But I understood quite early on that just because I'm good at something, it doesn't necessarily mean I'm passionate about it."
"Money has never been the way I measure my success, but it was definitely scary," he says.
"It started off very much like plunging into an ice bath and feeling the shock. Like, 'OK, this is real. I don't have a consistent salary coming in, and I don't have the security of knowing how long this is going to take.'
"But it was a matter of switching mentality - so I wasn't looking at what securities I had lost, but what opportunities I'd gained."
Any apprehension was short-lived.
With a growing online fanbase, he started interspersing TikTok cover versions with snippets of originals.
The one that made everyone pay attention was Solo – whose devious wordplay was so obviously memorable ("Why'd you get me so high/ To leave me solo") you couldn't quite believe no-one had thought of it before.
Released independently in 2023, it earned Smith his first UK chart hit and, subsequently, a deal with RCA Records.
But he continued to build his audience organically, gigging constantly while posting on TikTok and YouTube.