‘Our view of women is squiffed’

The Latin-spouting, crossword-solving Laura Marling tells Helen Brown how she’s finally made peace with prettiness

Shivering from a bike ride through the London sleet, Laura Marling rubs her palms across her frozen thighs. On the pale skin above her femur, there are two words tattooed in scarlet: “semper femina”. “I got it done when I was 21,” she tells me. By that age, the shy daughter of the fifth Baronet Marling was already the shining star of England’s nufolk scene, with two arrestingly mature albums and a Mercury Prize nomination under her belt.

“I was reading Virgil,” she says, “because I’d been told it would help me with crosswords.” She was drawn in particular to the Roman poet’s verses – “Varium et mutabile semper femina” – which she translates as “fickle and changeable always is woman” and had shortened in the tattoo parlour to the more committed: “Always a woman”.

Six years later, Marling is using the Latin tag as the title of her sixth album, her first since completing the five-album deal she signed with Virgin/ EMI when she was only 16 years old. A direct and philosophical exploration of femininity, Semper Femina was written last year during what she describes as a “particularly masculine time in my life… when I’d gone on this trip of abandoning any sexuality”. She began writing the album “as if a man was writing about a woman, and then I thought, I don’t need to pretend it’s a man to justify the intimacy, or the way I’m looking at and feeling about women”.

Marling’s early love life is a matter of very public record. In 2009, Charlie Fink – the Noah and the Whale frontman who produced Marling’s 2008 debut album, Alas, I Cannot Swim – poured his heartbreak over his split from Marling into his band’s second album. Next, she dated Marcus Mumford of banjowielding stadium-filling Mumford & Sons (who started out as her backing band). When she moved to Los Angeles for a couple of years in 2013 – slotting in a brief existential crisis, hanging out with drifters and stoners, even considering giving up music to work in a coffee shop – she was “following another boy”, although that affair ended soon after her arrival.

But this talk about “looking at women”, alongside the release of her self-directed video to the single Soothing last November, featuring two women writhing across a bed in leotards, led to some intrusive speculation about her sexuality.

Protective of her privacy and admitting to taking a “sick pleasure” in confounding expectations, Marling hesitated before breaking her silence, but recently told a reporter from an online magazine: “I’m straight.”

Warming up over a cafetière of strong coffee, she tells me that on the new album she “hoped to play with ambiguity. I’m thinking about my own boundaries and taboos. I don’t just mean sexual boundaries but extreme intimacy. I’m into…” she pauses, laughs.

“Rather, I’m interested in the revolution in sexual fluidity. In LA it’s particularly prevalent. And that’s an interesting revolt against our homogenised identities. My most useful revelation in the last few years was to permit myself to find women beautiful.”

Born in 1990, Marling is the youngest daughter of posh, hippy parents. Her father ran a recording studio from their old farm in Berkshire, where he recorded the La’s jangly 1988 hit There She Goes. Black Sabbath came to stay when Marling was six months old and one of her earliest memories is of crawling over the “chaos” of cables. The Marlings’ studio failed when they didn’t digitise and the family moved to rural Hampshire, where she winces to admit they “didn’t really integrate”. A sign at the end of their street read, WELCOME TO JANE AUSTEN COUNTRY.

“We had dogs, a pond and a forest right next to our house, that was nice,” she says. “I think about my friends bringing up their kids in London, which is a really stimulating environment with all the access to culture and museums and people. But I think it would have completely overloaded me. If I’d grown up in London I would have sunk into the undergrowth.” She pauses. “I like not being from London. I’m obstinate in that way. I don’t like to be associated with anything. People were shocked when I decided to move to LA and I was like: ‘Ha! Can’t pin me down!’”

I ask if a rural childhood also put less pressure on the three Marling sisters to conform to gender stereotypes and Marling nods. “Exactly, although my eldest sister is extremely feminine and glamorous. She’ll get up two hours

‘I’m thinking about my taboos – not just sexual boundaries but intimacy, too’