Jessie Ware: 'Slightly classy with a bit of innuendo'
- Published
Jessie Ware is taken aback. She does a double take. Her flabber is well and truly gasted.
We're
at the Southbank Centre in London, at an exhibition celebrating the
50th anniversary of David Bowie's Aladdin Sane; and we have just learned
two things.
First,
the lightning flash painted onto his face on the album's iconic cover
was copied from a National Panasonic rice cooker that was lying nearby.
Second, that the photo shoot lasted less than an hour.
"That's wild! Just two rolls of film!" laughs Ware, confessing she needed three shoots for her new album, That! Feels Good!
"That's
because I'm fussy and I didn't like the first two," she says. "We did
the third attempt in a makeshift studio next door to where we were
shooting the Pearls video.
"It couldn't be less of an exhibition if you tried."
Bowie
wasn't a big figure in the singer's upbringing. She'd be more likely to
listen to soul singers like Donny Hathaway, Chaka Khan and Whitney
Houston, before entering a huge drum and bass phase in her teens. Every
December, the family would play Band Aid's Do They Know It's Christmas
while they decorated the tree.
But
she recently discovered that her mum, Lennie, is a huge Bowie fan who
attended the star's notorious Ziggy Stardust concerts in the 1970s.
"She was kind of in love with him, fully in love with him... He's a phenomenon, an enigma."
The
exhibition passes in a flash ("I'm really impatient," Ware admits. "My
husband hates taking me to galleries.") and we decamp to a nearby café.
Ware
is famished - her day started with 6am weight training - but after a
quick glance at the burger-centric menu, she opts for a cappuccino and
settles down to chat about music.
At
this point, a better journalist might be able to connect the dots
between Ware and Bowie. Both were raised in south London and both...
er, make music. But as she says herself, "we don't have that much in
common".
The
closest link is Bowie's 1975 album Young Americans, a love letter to US
R&B whose exuberant team of backing vocalists was led by a
then-unknown Luther Vandross.
Ware's
new record takes a similar approach, revelling in luxurious layers of
harmonies as it harks back to the golden era of disco and 70s soul.
In
a depressingly modern twist, however, those posse vocals weren't
recorded by dozens of people stood shoulder-to-shoulder around a
microphone. The album began in November 2020, while Ware was pregnant
with her third child and the UK entered a second lockdown. Every line
was recorded in isolation.
Ware
swipes to a group chat on her WhatsApp that's labelled "Disco on Zoom",
and scrolls through pages of voice memos that she and her collaborators
Shungudzo Kuyimba and James Ford sent back and forth. Every one begins
with a count of "5, 6, 7, 8", before launching into a melody or a counter-melody or a few "la, la, las".
"We'd
send them and put them onto the computer and see what we liked," she
says. "It was really annoying. I never want to make an album like that
again".
Nonetheless,
remote recording technology helped her recruit an incredible cast list
for the album. In the first 30 seconds alone, you hear Kylie Minogue,
Gemma Arterton, Jamie Demetriou, Hayley Squires, Clara Amfo, Benny
Blanco and Lennie Ware, her mother, all uttering the record's title
phrase.
"I just called everyone like, 'Hi babe, do you think you could just send me a few recordings of you saying, that feels good?'" she recalls.
"It
was so funny getting them back. People were really good sports,
considering they didn't even know what they were agreeing to. Roísín
Murphy did hers in an airport toilet!"
The
opening sets the tone for an album that's fun, fresh and
forward-thinking. The title track is an tightly-coiled explosion of
disco funk, all scratchy guitars and breathy horn stabs, that calls to
mind Stevie Wonder and Prince.
"Just remember: Pleasure is a right,"
purrs Ware. It's a celebration and a declaration of intent: If her last
record asked "What's Your Pleasure?", the new one celebrates the
answer, no matter how frisky it gets.
The single Free Yourself is a giddy anthem to sexual autonomy: "Why don't you please yourself? If it feels so good then don't you stop!" sings Ware in full diva mode.
Shake
The Bottle is a flirtatious invitation to "make my bottle pop". On
These Lips she whispers coyly, "These two lips could do so much more."
The title of Freak Me Now is self-explanatory.
"Weirdly,
considering I'm quite prudish, I've found it really fun tapping into
this world," says Ware. "It gives me freedom musically. Hopefully it's
slightly classy, with a bit of innuendo."
At this point, we clumsily steer the conversation away from discussing the star's sex life.
"Okay, good, because it's quite non-existent," she laughs.
"I
mean, three children would imply otherwise, but yeah, it's funny
because it's not somewhere that I would have ever expected my career and
my music to go."
The
transformation began in 2017, after the promotional campaign for Ware's
third album, Glasshouse, left her disillusioned with the music
industry.
A deeply introspective record, it was written as she tried to balance parenthood and a pop career for the first time.
"I
was maybe masking how hard I was finding it," she says. "And I was
writing this autobiographical record without being ready. I didn't know
how to fully kind of jump [into that world]."
Part of the problem, she recently said,
was constantly being made "to feel like I needed to be the next Adele"
when Ware's background was in dance music, collaborating with artists
like SBTRKT, Disclosure and Two Inch Punch.
When
the Glasshouse tour finished, Ware ditched her management and thought
seriously about quitting music to concentrate on her
cooking-for-celebrities podcast Table Manners.
Instead, she switched record label, and traded the "sad mum" songs for an album full of euphoric escapism.
What's
Your Pleasure was one of the holy trinity of lockdown pop albums,
alongside Dua Lipa's Future Nostalgia and Kylie's Disco. Entering the UK
charts at number three, it earned Ware a Brit nomination for album of
the year, a support slot with Harry Styles ("he's such a gentleman") and
revitalised her career.
"When
I made it, I was like, 'I know, I'll go out with a bang'. And I didn't
go out with a bang, so now I'm off to the races!" she says.
That!
Feels Good! is very much a victory lap, but it never commits the sin of
repeating the past. It's brighter and more rhythmically complex than
its predecessor, full of bossa nova and Brazilian disco and a feeling of
exuberant liberation. It also contains, on Begin Again, the highest
note Ware has ever sung.
"I'm
obsessed with harmonies and backing vocals and creating these big
moments that just build up, so I was riffing over the song and I just
went for it.
"James
[Ford, producer] looked at me and raised his eyebrows. I was like, 'I
know? Too much?' And he just said, 'No, it's hysterical and brilliant!'"
She's
a bit nervous about replicating it live, though, especially with an
appearance on Jools Holland's Later... looming on the horizon.
"I don't know if I'll hit that note, we'll see. I've tried to practise it with my kids and now we just walk around going, 'Aieeeeeeeee'. It's become a way to scare each other in the house."
It's
a uniquely Jessie Ware observation, effortlessly juxtaposing the
glamour of her pop career with the realities of everyday life.
Bowie
would never have allowed the curtain to be drawn back so far - but Ware
cheerfully admits to things like being obsessed with her infants' poo
("does that make me sound really weird?") and goes all giddy when she
describes using the same microphone as Madonna ("Those songs have some
of the magic of Madonna as a result").
Her
warmth, approachability and versatility have already put her on the
track to national treasure status. Table Manners is now in its 10th
series, with spin-off tours and books of its own; and Ware has a low-key
second podcast, Is It Normal? that acts as a companion for expectant
mothers.
"If I see a pregnant woman smiling at me, I don't think she's smiling at me for the music, somehow. It's lovely."
But she's determined it's the music that will endure.
"I'm
very lucky that I've got to play with so many different things; but I
want to be remembered for my voice and the songs that I create," she
says.
"Does that make it sound like I'm gonna die? I'm not dying."
That! Feels Good! is out now. Jessie Ware tours the UK in November and plays on Later... With Jools Holland on 27 May.
FIRST PUBLISHED ON BBC ENTERTAINMENT
