Sheku Kanneh-Mason: First steps in fame

It is 9am on a Friday morning and I am sitting on a plastic chair in a school gym hall, bathed in artificial yellow light, with more than a hundred children seated quietly on the floor before me. We’re at a primary school in Barbican, London, for a cello workshop being run by the educational charity London Music Masters (LMM). In front of us and many of the children’s parents is cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason, one of the charity’s junior ambassadors, playing the Gigue from Bach’s First Cello Suite. The setting is surreal: one child wears two hair buns outlined with pink cupcake cases; others have green or red hair, or yellow mouse ears; another sports a mauve, sparkling unicorn horn. Nearby, a girl’s ponytail feeds up through a soda bottle pinned to the top of her head, then tumbles out through the lip into a cup clipped to the side. It is Crazy Hair Day here today, for BBC Children in Need, someone explains.