‘I feel I have to work twice as hard as everyone else’
Singer James Arthur talks to Alex Green about creativity and mental health struggles
WHEN James Arthur won The X Factor in 2012, he set out on a path of fame, public controversy and ultimately redemption. Nearly a decade on, three of the 33-yearold’s albums have charted at either number one or two.
His career almost entirely derailed in 2014 when he parted ways with Cowell’s Syco label following accusations that he used a homophobic lyric in a song.
But finally Arthur is in a place where he feels he has the maturity and creative control to make something a little different.
“I do sometimes feel I have to work twice as hard as everyone else just because of where I came from,” he explains over the phone.
“It has been a long time coming to get to a place where I have full creative control.”
He recorded an album in three months during the first national lockdown in England and took up hiking and running.
The single Medicine, which dropped last Friday, is the first taste of that project.
His languid voice, almost tailor made for the radio, combines with brash production and upfront lyrics — “When I’m suicidal / you don’t let me spiral”.
“I learnt a lot about myself and the things that I want to do and the things I don’t want to do,” he says of the past year. “The song is about love over adversity, about the things that help you through the dark times.”
In the past Arthur’s mouth may have got him in trouble, but now his honesty feels more refreshing than antagonistic.
He entered 2020 struggling with his demons, stemming from his time in foster care and his parents’ split, and on stage in Madrid suffered a debilitating anxiety attack.
Shortly after, he was rushed to hospital with flu-like symptoms where doctors found he had a gallbladder infection.
“I had hit a roadblock,” he recalls. “I had this arena tour in March that I had to do, but before that it was a question of, ‘Do I go off to rehab in Texas to address these childhood traumas that I hadn’t processed?’.
“That was why I was hitting these walls every so often.”
He decided to check himself into the Nightingale, a private mental health hospital, where he began cognitive behavioural therapy, embarked on a course of medication and got fit.
Soon March was upon him and he went out on tour again where, by his own admission, he “smashed it”. Of course, the tour was curtailed by coronavirus and Arthur was grounded once again. The first few months were tough.
“Health anxiety was a huge one,” he admits. “For the first couple of months I didn’t want to step outside. I thought I was going to be one of the statistics, having a little bit of asthma and things like that.”
Arthur’s usual music making process involves songwriting camps in Los Angeles and a cabal of producers and songwriters to hand. This time it was just him, alone, in his house.
You don’t need to point out the stigma that comes with starting your career on The X Factor, Arthur is perfectly willing to bring it up himself.
“Ballads are a thing I have stayed away from on this album,” he says half laughing.
“I don’t want to be defined that way, as the guy who does ballads all the time.”
It is some surprise to hear Arthur talk disparagingly about his last album, 2019’s YOU.
“Listening back to my most recent album, it’s hard, I don’t want to be critical of it or do it down, or slam it, but it just felt really disjointed sonically,” he admits. “I have written it off in my head as not being the best.”
This album is different, he tells me. “You can hear that it is a guy who is really reflecting and processing things and being very honest about where he is at this very moment in time.”
‘I don’t want to be defined as the guy who writes ballads’
THERE is one day every year when Jennifer Garner lets her children do whatever they want. If that sounds like a recipe for lawlessness, think again. She says the requests of her three kids — Violet (15), Seraphina (12), and Samuel, who is nine — that she shares with ex-husband Ben Affleck, are usually pretty tame.
The idea is called a ‘yes day’, and comes from a children’s book of the same name by Amy Krouse Rosenthal and illustrator Tom Lichtenheld in which parents say yes to every request (as long as it’s not dangerous or illegal) for 24 hours.
Now the book has inspired a film, also called Yes Day, and stars 48-year-old Garner and The Undoing’s Edgar Ramirez as the parents who reluctantly agree to give in to their three children’s wishes for a day.
“I read the book to my kids,” Garner remembers, “and my middle daughter just loved this calendar in it that says all the nos, and at the very end it says yes on the last day.
“It’s very easy to think of yes day as only being over the top and, granted, we are a wish fulfilment movie, but I really have learned over nine years of doing yes days with my kids that it’s little things.
“You don’t even realise how many nos are implied in a kid’s life, because they’ve heard it so many times they’ve stopped asking.
“For my kid’s it’s buying lottery tickets, things I would never do, or stopping at a gas station and letting them get junk food and lottery tickets, things like that.
“And it’s the energy of giving your entire attention to your kids for an entire day with a whole lot of yes, yes, yes — that is what it’s really about. Although the big stuff is fun too.”
Garner has been doing these days for so long that she evangelises about what they have brought to her family life.
“My kid’s yes days have always ended in a late night out in the back yard,” she says with a smile over Zoom.
“We have ours in August, almost always, at the end of summer when I’ve run out of anything fun to do and they just need to go back to school, and we are trying to fight our way there.
“Having a s’more in the backyard all together and playing flashlight tag and then going to sleep in a tent in the backyard, it’s just that you’ve earned the feeling of cosiness by the end of the day that is special.”
Garner has even been trying to incorporate some more yeses into her family life during the pandemic, as kids battle home school and long periods away from their friends.
“After dinner every night the kids and I have just sat on the couch together, I make popcorn, and we watch two episodes of The Office (the US version).
“We watched it all the way through and then we went back and watched it again.
“And it’s a little too mature for my son and I never allow screen time during the week, but that has been my yes.”
Venezuelan star Ramirez (43) who does not have children of his own but is a heavily-involved uncle, has also experimented with bringing ‘yes’ into his family life as a result of the movie.
“Over Christmas 2019 I celebrated my first yes day with my family and realised the cornerstone of the whole movement is time,” he says. “The most beautiful and most important gift you can give to the people you love the most is time and I think the pandemic has re-enforced that, how valuable and how important it is to spend time.
“When I planned a yes day with my family and my nephews, they were simple things, no real extravaganza — it was having a picnic and eating pizza and going to a theme park.
“I live in the US and my family is in Venezuela and we haven’t been able to see each other so I think that reality, which is the reality of many, many people with fewer possibilities and resources.
“It’s been so tough for so many people around the world, and I think it’s made this experience way more relevant than before.
“I had just been exiled from my country before I did this movie. I’m from Venezuela, I’m very vocal against the dictatorship there, and I became exiled and I don’t have the opportunity to just go and be with my family because I’m not allowed in the country.
“I have as much privilege as possible in comparison with so many people around the world who have been exiled from their country for many different reasons, so I think this was a beautiful experience for me to come to terms with my new personal reality.
“The movie is very emotional to me and because it taught me so much, to be in the moment and not think too much and be very present.”