Damaged diva... the secret torment of the star who serenaded Obama
By Emma Cowing
FROM a singer who has performed live at the White House for Barack Obama, won three Brit awards and reduced millions to tears with her heart-rending version of Abide With Me during the London Olympic Games opening ceremony, one might have expected something more glitzy for the launch of Emeli Sandé’s first new solo song in three years.
So the rough and ready video appearing on her Instagram page with little fanfare last week comes as a shock. Dressed down in a denim shirt, wearing no makeup and with her trademark Mohican scraped back behind her ears, Miss Sandé sings her heart out in the grainy black-and-white film, throwing her head back on the high notes.
‘Can’t you see what they’re trying to do,’ she sings. ‘They’re trying to divide us.’ As with much in the notoriously private Miss Sandé’s world, the deeper meaning of Don’t Fight the Bullet remains opaque, yet there can be little doubt that the song contains a veiled reference to her complex love life.
While the 28-year-old Aberdonian has soared to international success, including two Ivor Novello awards, collaborations with Rihanna and Alicia Keys and an international tour, she is also emerging from the wreckage of her disastrous yearlong marriage to Adam Gouraguine, her teenage sweetheart and the man of whom she once sang: ‘Don’t ever question if my heart beats only for you, it beats only for you.’
As the ink dries on the divorce papers, this now seems unlikely. While Miss Sandé prepares to launch a much-hyped follow-up album and an international tour without the man who has been a constant presence by her side since she was 17, it should perhaps come as little surprise that she is attempting to fly a little more under the radar this time.
Two nights before her wedding in September 2012, she performed a secret gig in the Montenegrin town of Kotor. It was a relaxed affair. She walked onto the stage in a red sundress and sling-back heels and shyly told the crowd that this was her first concert in the Balkan state.
Then she launched into her hit single Heaven before moving on to Next To Me – a nod to her Montenegrin fiancé Gouraguine, who sat watching her adoringly from the audience.
For the singer, that warm night in Montenegro must have felt like the fairytale ending. Just a week earlier she had performed at the closing ceremony of the 2012 Olympic Games, capping off a magical summer in which she had released what would become the year’s biggest selling debut album, Our Version of Events.
TWO days after that concert, the wedding went ahead at the luxury hotel and marina Porto Montenegro i n the Bay of Kotor, notable for its luxurious facilities and the fact that it has serious backing from British financier Nat Rothschild. The bride arrived by boat on the arm of her father, Zambian-born Joel. Sister Lucy was bridesmaid.
‘It was a fairly traditional service in the evening,’ one guest says. ‘Emeli looked beautiful in a designer dress. Her fiancé wore a lounge suit.’
Yet the cracks in the marriage appeared almost immediately.
‘We were married in the madness, t he whirlwind,’ Miss Sandé explained last November, when news broke of the couple’s split. ‘It was literally Olympics, wedding – fly to Montenegro, get married, fly back – and we had maybe a week’s honeymoon together.’ Yet that was all the time available for a busy artist who has worked hard for her success.
Adele Emily Sandé ( perhaps wisely she adopted a revised spelling of her middle name following the stratospheric success of fellow songstress Adele) grew up in the small Aberdeenshire town of Alford, dreaming from an early age of bright lights and a life on the stage.
Her sister Lucy recalled that as a child, the would-be star would annoy the neighbours with her constant singing: ‘She sang Mariah Carey songs that Dad had in his record collection.
‘I remember the house would be filled with her singing all the big ballads. She would sing in the bathroom and the neighbours would complain or comment that they could hear her singing i n the shower.’ Her parents had moved the
family to Alford from Sunderland when Miss Sandé was four. Her father was a teacher in the local secondary school, and she would recall how the Sandés were the only black family in the town: ‘You were just different, you were like an alien. I didn’t suffer any racism, but I felt very different.
‘We were the only black people there and that was very isolating. I needed something, and that’s where music came in. That became my world and the way I could connect with people. As soon as I could, I moved to London.’
Yet that is not strictly true. In fact she first decamped to Glasgow, where she was a medical student at Glasgow University. It was there that she met Adam Gouraguine, a bright young Montegrin who was studying marine biology. The pair were inseparable from the start – smart, unconventional and supportive of each other’s dreams.
‘Anything I wanted to do – be a doctor, be a musician – he’s supported me,’ she once explained.
Intriguingly, it was through songwriting, rather than singing that Miss Sandé first made her name. While still at university, she wrote a song called Diamond Rings for the pop singer Chipmunk. Much to her surprise, it was a hit.
Later, she would reflect: ‘ I’d reached a point where I had to follow my heart, my passion. Diamond Rings proved I had something, I needed to see it through. I called my dad and asked him what he would do and he told me to go for it. A lot of my tutors weren’t happy but I moved to London and became who I really wanted to be.’
Miss Sandé has written for some of the best in the business, including Alicia Keys, Susan Boyle and Leona Lewis. Despite her own success, she continues to do so, and last year attended a Rihanna ‘writing camp’ in Paris, brainstorming alongside other musicians and lyricists for new hits for the songstress.
She also has a hefty and unusual collection of tattoos, including one with the perplexing words ‘Did our last castle look like this?’ on her neck. Her right arm bears a large image of the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo (her idol, about whom she made a TV programme last year), while Virginia Woolf’s quote about A Room of One’s Own adorns her left. She explained: ‘All my tattoos, like with my songs, as I’m growing up, they start to mean more and more.
EXPLAINING the Virginia Woolf quote, she said: ‘It’s the idea that the more you become a woman and the more you become involved [with people], the more you need your independence to create.’
As Miss Sandé became more successful and started to taste mainstream fame following the launch of Our Version Of Events, Mr Gouraguine stayed by her side. Indeed, many of the songs reflected their love for each other. The pair moved to London, but he was often abroad on research trips. He proposed at the start of 2012 and the couple wasted no time in setting a date for that September.
Miss Sandé continued to write and record, despite the odd disparaging remark from critics. Noel Gallagher dismissed her music as being ‘for grannies’. Yet the OAPs who turn up to her gigs consider that a compliment and Miss Sandé responded by posting a picture on her Twitter page of a pensioner making a rude gesture. Her music does indeed seem to cross generational boundaries – she is hip enough to win an Urban music award, yet mainstream enough to produce a Live At The Albert Hall CD.
The whirlwind of 2012 exhausted her physically and emotionally. She was struggling with her monumental success, and her wedding had been rushed. After the one-week honeymoon, she found herself separated from her husband for months at a time as she criss- crossed the world promoting her album, perf orming at high- profile events including a Carole King tribute concert at the White House, where Barack and Michelle Obama sat only three feet away from her.
By 2013 she had become so ubiquitous that when Margaret Thatcher died, some wags inquired if Miss Sandé would be performing at the funeral. In the summer of that year, burnt out from 18 months of constant touring and performing, Miss Sandé demanded a break – and took a cold, hard look at her marriage.
‘Everyone just thought I’d gone mad: “What do you mean, a divorce? We were all at your wedding a few months ago!” But there was just something inside me that said: “This isn’t the life. You’re pretending to be somebody else.”
‘I just felt I had to wake up. I’d been sleeping, and things were happening – I could get up on stage and sing but, I don’t know, it was just a real... I don’t want to call it a breakdown, but it felt like that.’
SHE only went public with the split in November last year. She admits now that her marriage was as much a life-raft – a way of coping with her phenomenal career success – as anything else: ‘Maybe I was just looking for “OK, this is my guy. Whatever happens, no matter how crazy this gets, I’ve got someone”. But our lives were so separate. I was on tour all the time and I think it was quite unfair of me to want his world to fit into my life so much.’
She now lives alone in Hertfordshire, in a large neo-Georgian home stuffed with pianos, keyboards, and memorabilia from the past three whirlwind years. There are portraits of her iconic be-quiffed profile, those three Brit awards and even a signed note from the band Coldplay thanking her for performing with them at a charity show. Presumably the designer wedding dress is packed away in a cupboard somewhere and if there is anyone new on the scene, he is kept firmly under wraps.
Later this month, Miss Sandé will embark on a European tour, performing in countries from Sweden to Serbia. As yet there is no release date for the second album, but apparently she finished it at the end of last year. Critics will be salivating at the thought of new songs but she is said to be privately nervous about how her new work will be received.
Meanwhile, there is little doubting that her wounded heart is still in the process of healing. In January of this year, on her Instagram page, she posted the phrase ‘You gotta let it hurt to let it go’. Underneath she had written: ‘Year of the happy heart. Grown men only please.’