Singer Emeli remembers going ‘a little bit mad’ in Glasgow
THERE comes a time in a pop star’s life – usually after the first wave of success and the second album – when the draw of the city pales and they start binge-watching episodes of Escape to the Country on the iPlayer.
Emeli Sande, 31, has arrived at this point in her career. In this, if nothing else, can we draw comparisons between her and fish farmer Roger Daltrey and Blur’s cheesemonger Alex James.
As yet, Emeli has not, as far as I know, set up her own jam and knitting factory. But she has left London behind, moved to the outskirts, found a place and built a recording studio in it, which means, she tells me, if she wants to make music at three in the morning there’s no one to stop her.
“Nowadays, because I’m a grown-up I try to get to bed before one,” Emeli adds. “But you never know when the spirit hits you and you get one of those songs.”
Already this morning she’s sat in her garden having breakfast serenaded by a chorus of birdsong. “It just feels like a dream to me,” she says.
Emeli in 2018 says she is in a good place, and not just geographically.
She’s working on a new album and living with her sister. Maybe you could say she was nesting, although the only new arrival on the horizon is the next record, her third, which she’s hoping to finish in the next few months. “It’s soulful, it’s quite a positive album,” she tells me, though she’s not sure when we’ll be able to judge for ourselves. That’s up to her record company.
She began writing songs as early as nine or 10 and at 16 she even got to the final of the BBC’s Urban Music competition. But medicine trumped music in her teens and she came to Glasgow to study. It was, she says, the first time she’d been away from home.
Did you go a bit mad in Glasgow, Emeli? “A little bit. But I was so nervous about failing exams. I didn’t go too crazy.”
She loved her time in the city. Meeting new people, discovering new ideas.
“I started finding my favourite spots. I used to go to a place called Tchai-Ovna, a tea place. The guy who owned it played the saxophone.
“He had a Bible of different teas. That was really great.”
She’d go to Nice N Sleazy’s on a Monday night, perform in med school talent shows. She even got up on stage at the Arches once. “I remember it as a free-for-all. As long as you were studying everything was just such fun. I feel so safe in Glasgow.”
And, yet, by the time she left uni she had met Naughty Boy who would become her songwriting partner for her first album and soon she was writing songs with Alicia Keys and for Susan Boyle.
But, really, the idea of Emeli being a backroom song wallah wasn’t going to fly as soon as anyone heard that voice. Even if you found some of her songs a little too tame, the setting a little too polished, the pedigree and punch of her vocals couldn’t be ignored.
And they weren’t. Her first album, Our Version of Events became the best-selling album of 2012, with more than 4.5 million people buying it.
As a performer she dropped her first name as she reckoned Adele had already been claimed. That said Emeli’s album outsold Adele’s that year.
At the end of our conversation we raise our eyes and talk about the world we’re currently living in.
Last year Emeli was one of the artists who recorded a charity record for the victims of the Grenfell Tower disaster, alongside Robbie Williams, Paloma Faith and Mister Daltrey.
And here’s the thing I want to ask you, Emeli, I say. This is the age of Trump and Brexit. We’re speaking in the wake of the Windrush debacle where the government has been deporting British citizens because of the colour of their skin. As a mixed-race woman, how does Britain feel to you at the moment?
Her answer is a surprise. “It feels more honest than ever,” she says.
“I feel like these topics even being discussed is a step in the right direction.
“It’s not as if we’ve suddenly got to this place. And with social media things that may have been swept under the carpet parliament is being forced to discuss them.
“It’s not a taboo subject to talk about race anymore. These things are open to be discussed.” Emeli has an album to finish. Outside, the birds are still singing.
Soon, she will, too. It is her favourite thing. “It’s definitely cathartic,” she says. “How often do you get to be that loud and not look like you’re crazy?”