Celeste: ‘The purpose was to be myself and bare all’

During a run of intimate shows at north London’s 19th century Gothic revival Union Chapel, Celeste Epiphany Waite felt something she hadn’t felt before. The five nights in early July marked her first major headline slots since the pandemic struck.

In this time, Celeste has become a household name with a number one album – Not Your Muse – and multiple magazine covers to match.

Her live return was, understandably, a much-hyped event.

“There was a moment on the Thursday night where I was taking all of it in and thinking, ‘Wow, this is really something to actually feel proud of ’.

“Because quite often I don’t really get to the stage of feeling proud.”

The 27-year-old Californiaborn, East Sussex-raised singer is speaking over Zoom from her bedroom.

“It was nice for it to happen there and it meant that I was obviously letting go and not overthinking what I was doing.

“Because I had the leniency in my mind to think about something else and not just, ‘Am I gonna screw this line?’”

The shows were recorded by streaming company LIVENow (which also worked on Dua Lipa’s Studio 2054 show and Ellie Goulding’s V&A performance) so viewers can relive the performance.

Celeste describes them as warm-ups for her return to the road – a chance to make mistakes and work out kinks.

She tells me her last “proper gig” was supporting Mercury Prize-winner Michael Kiwanuka in Milan in late 2019 – putting aside her performance at the Brits and a handful of pop-up shows.

“I was really apprehensive about how the shows would be received,” she explains tentatively.

“So I was really nervous about that and then I was pleasantly surprised by people’s reactions and some of the reviews.

“I was really surprised at those. “I thought they were going to be rubbish, to be honest.”

Celeste moved to Dagenham in east London at the age of three before settling in Saltdean, near Brighton, where she spent most of her adolescence.

In 2017, she moved to London with £100 but was fired from her job because she would skip work in order to make music.

December 2019 saw her presented with the Rising Star Award at the Brits and a month later she was crowned winner of BBC Music’s Sound Of 2020.

Only a few artists, including Adele, Sam Smith and Jorja Smith, have secured both.

Her commercial breakthrough came during lockdown, where her successes were measured in prerecorded performances during chat shows and virtual awards ceremonies (she sang at the Oscars and Baftas) and streaming figures.

“For me, the purpose of these shows was to be myself and bare all in that sense, whether it was if I’ve made a mistake, admit I’ve made a mistake and not feel like I have to be perfect and machinelike and pristine every moment. “Then kind of embracing that.” Despite the accolades she received in 2020, the pandemic did set back Celeste’s career, albeit temporarily.

She recalls the challenge of regaining her confidence.

“It is kind of funny,” she says. “I had got to a place where I was feeling really confident and feeling the optimum version of myself as a live performer.

“And then losing my momentum because of the year we have had, for the first few months it stayed within me and I still had the same confidence and I still had the same muscle memory of it all.

“But then later on, towards the end of the year, towards September and December time, I completely lost it. Well, I lost the confidence that came with giving something so often, basically.

“So I had to rebuild that and [the recent shows] has helped me to do that somewhat.”

Celeste’s debut album, Not My Muse, was praised for its combination of soul and pop, with critics noting similarities to Amy Winehouse and Adele. But she says her next album will be more true to her artistic vision.

“To be honest, I don’t really feel that – although my album is commercially successful – I don’t necessarily feel like it is that credible.

“So, for me, having a number one doesn’t mean much unless I feel proud of the music that I have made, which I do feel proud about, probably like a portion of it, of the album.”

She says she is proud of songs such as A Kiss, Not Your Muse, Ideal Woman and Strange, but admits she felt “limited” because she was releasing on a major label – Polydor.

“Now I have had a number one I feel like, hopefully, it has given me the leverage to them to trust me now a little bit more, to take it a bit further in the direction that I would have liked to do with that first album. But I am fine with that and I am prepared to know that maybe that was the purpose of that album, to open that door, and then it allows me to maybe establish who I really am on the second album – everything to be fully conceptualised visually and it to be completely understood by the people around me.

“I feel like the only way I could only really communicate what I wanted to do was by beginning to do that on this album, and that being heard.”