My days as a party animal are well and truly over!
How Arabella Latham calmed down… and became a Queen
A‘I was so hungover doing that show… I lost my marbles in Cork the night before’
rabella Latham’s earliest songs betrayed the musings of a selfconfessed Taylor Swift copyist. But that was while she was still a teenager in Durban, South Africa. She persuaded her parents to let her go to London when she was 18 to pursue her ambitions. Although she had relatives there as ‘a safety net’, a chaotic heavy partying lifestyle changed her outlook and musical style. Reinventing herself as Baby Queen, she began writing harder-edged lyrics and her 2020 Medicine EP and a mixtape in 2021 called The Yearbook gradually gained traction. Now the 26 year old has just scored a top five in the UK with her first proper album Quarter Life Crisis.
She talks about her mental health issues in songs that make her relatable to a late teens and twenties audience. I first saw her supporting Olivia Rodrigo last year in a large tent in Dublin’s Fairview Park and I thought she equipped herself well opening for the new queen of indie pop. My contention surprises her greatly.
‘Oh my god I was so miserably hungover doing that show to be honest with you,’ she groans.
‘That Dublin show was one of the most difficult ever! I had no voice literally 20 seconds before walking on stage and then suddenly a little peep came out and… Oh, that was a tough one for me. When I first started touring I had this idea of being like Motley Crue and going completely crazy but it is not sustainable at all. I never really went out on that Olivia tour. Then in Cork the night before the Dublin show, I don’t know what happened. I just lost my marbles and suffered the consequences really badly the next day.’
She can count on the emotional memory of the times when she partied hard and battled to keep her mental equilibrium for fuel for her songs.
‘The song Raw Thoughts was the moment of feeling finally I have found what I want Baby Queen to be,’ she says.
‘The music that I began to write dictated the name, the visuals and everything else. I had a long list of names and Baby Queen was the one I kept returning to. I was making music that didn’t feel like it was made by a Bella Latham or Arabella Latham.’ Back when she was Arabella or Bella Latham as a music-obsessed teenager in South Africa, her parents were set against that London move but she persisted.
‘They went, “No, you ain’t” and then I went on and on and on about it,’ she says. ‘My mum’s sister lives in London and that was the only
‘Life is less thrilling now but that period of time is interesting to write about’
reason they said, “Okay, you can go do that”.
‘I couldn’t have stayed in London so long without them as my safety net. For a long time my parents wanted me to come back home because I was really broke, living on couches and floors and it was really rough. I have actually become really close to my aunt and uncle’s family; They’re really great people. Their oldest son, my little cousin, plays bass in my band.’
One thing that sets Baby Queen apart is the quality of those lyrics. You feel you are listening to an artist who doesn’t self-censor on tracks such as Love Killer, Obvious and 23. Although she says she is not a voracious reader which often fuels great writing she says that while at school English was the subject at which she excelled. ‘I got among the top marks in the whole of South Africa for one of my final English tests at school,’ she reveals.
‘Now, because I can write words, I can deal head-on with my emotions. I learned so much from that first period of time that I spent in London. It was so chaotic and unstable but it was incredibly inspiring. It was a visceral story that I was able to tell.’
She says she has found comfort and stability in the last two years. ‘Although I am not experiencing the same thrilling things now that I did initially, those extreme highs and lows from that period of time was inspiring and interesting to write about now, ‘she says.
‘Finishing a song that encapsulates those feelings at those moments can be incredibly cathartic. But I don’t live that lifestyle anymore, well most of the time. Mostly I’ve turned to houmous and celery. I got bitten so many times that eventually I realised it’s just not worth doing that to myself.’