I discovered my voice when my father died
Celeste, the singer-songwriter behind this year’s John Lewis Christmas advert, tells Neil Mccormick about her path to fame
Celeste Epiphany Waite was hailed as the breakout artist of 2020. Then everything went quiet. “I was supposed to be travelling the world, helping people put a face to the music,” says the 26-year-old English singersongwriter, on a Zoom call from her flat in Ladbroke Grove, west London. “There was a gig in my diary every day until September. Every single day was mapped out. Everything was non-stop.”
And then the whole world stopped. “It’s in those moments that you realise what you want and who you are,” she cheerfully reports. “I don’t really get scared by challenges. I just try to take it day by day. It’s been quite freeing, really, in a way.”
You can hear Celeste’s warm, husky tones on the new John Lewis Christmas advert, serenading plucky snowmen and flying hedgehogs. “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if everybody gave a little love?” she croons, in an old-fashioned jazzy style that sounds as cosy as Ella Fitzgerald sharing an eggnog with Nat King Cole by a log fire. “The idea was that if everybody gave one act of kindness to another person, that would create a butterfly effect and make the world a better place,” says Celeste. “It’s simple, not grandiose, rooted in everyday stuff, but slightly romanticised and rose-tinted, which is where a lot of my writing starts.”
The annual John Lewis seasonal campaign has featured such big stars as Ellie Goulding, Lily Allen, Elbow and Elton John, usually singing cover versions. This is the first time an artist has composed an original song. “A lot of the time, if you get asked to do something for a commercial, you lose a bit of yourself. But with this, I didn’t feel like that. I spoke truly of something I felt. And I love Christmas. I’m not a Grinch.”
Her speaking voice is at once girlish and yet oak-aged. “I’ve always had a husky voice. Like, honestly, people used to ask me if I smoked even when I was a kid!” She laughs with a sound that verges on the musical. “There are two schools of thought with singing, really. You either want to sing perfectly, like Sarah Vaughan – who I love – or you accept your voice for what it is, like Joe Cocker or Janis Joplin, and it becomes a story in how you carry emotion. I recognised quite early on that what I liked wasn’t making everything really perfectly round with elongated notes and breath in all the right places. For me, it was always about the release of raw emotion.”
She did not discover her singing voice until the death of her father, of lung cancer, in 2010, when she was 16. Celeste was born in California, in 1994, to an English mother and Jamaican
father, but relocated to the UK as an infant, when her parents’ relationship broke up. Her contact with her father was mainly over a transatlantic phone line. “He was present in my life, but I just didn’t see him very often. I had all of these thoughts and new feelings I didn’t know how to process or express in conversation with people. So, I began to write things down, a diary, and poetry. It almost transformed into song by accident. I was doing a music class at (A-level) college, singing with friends, and some of those words began to flow naturally. It was quite a healing process. I didn’t know it was something I would still be doing 10 years later. But I like it.”
She ascribes her old-fashioned style to growing up an only child, constantly around adults, listening to the music of her grandparents, mother and uncle. She describes herself as “a woman of colour” predominantly raised “with the white side of my family”, yet it was primarily black artists she was drawn to, perhaps as a way of affirming her own identity.
“I loved Muddy Waters when I was really young, Etta James, Howlin’ Wolf, Aretha Franklin. They’re the voices that got me interested in music, so the way they phrase things and bring melodies together comes naturally to me. It’s all people from before my time. I love Al Green, Bill Withers, Marvin Gaye.” She mentions the powerful impact of more recent albums by Frank Ocean, Solange and Kendrick Lamar, that drew on deep soul and jazz roots in modern ways. “It helped me to communicate my ideas with more confidence, to show how those references could work now.”
From the age of 18, Celeste has focused on music, though it took time to develop her own style. She relocated from Brighton to London, working in shops and restaurants to support herself whilst collaborating with writers and producers. “There was a good few years when I couldn’t really understand why I wasn’t getting to the sound I wanted, and it was because everyone was on computers making beats. I’d be pointing at guitars and saying ‘can you play that?’ ” When she got involved in the Steam Down improvisational jazz scene in south London, and put her own band together, things started to take flight. By 2019, Celeste was a hotly tipped artist signed to Polydor, whose richly emotional songs and live performances were being acclaimed by critics. She topped the BBC Sound of 2020 poll and won the Rising Star Brit award, which has been a platform to stardom for Adele, Sam Smith, Ellie Goulding, Emeli Sandé and Florence and the Machine. She performed her
song Strange at the Brit ceremony in February, to rapturous effect. This should have been Celeste’s year.
And then lockdown. The pandemic has affected everyone. The music business has faced its own challenges, particularly with the decimation of the live industry. Some established artists have flourished on streaming platforms while others have struggled. It has been particularly hard for new artists to gain momentum. So what does it feel like to be the chosen one, yet consigned to limbo?
“I didn’t let it throw me off too much,” she says. “I had to figure out new ways of making things work. A lot of writing sessions over Zoom,
‘I began to write things down… it almost transformed into song by accident’
‘For me, singing has always been about the release of raw emotion’
making videos from home, finding windows when my band could get into a studio together, making sure we were prepared when that moment might come. If I become too lost in pessimism, it wouldn’t help. I was making music for years without any attention, because it’s the thing that I like the most.”
She has repeatedly delayed the release of her debut album. Instead an extended player featuring eight songs will appear next February, titled I Am Not Your Muse. “And then we’ll see what happens,” she says. “I would like to have a long career in music, so I want to get it right, I don’t want to rush into anything.”
The John Lewis ad has been a boon at the year’s end, and Celeste is looking forward to Christmas. “It feels like a milestone, one of the things that we hope will happen in a way that we want it to. And then, with that, always comes a new year. Whenever the clock strikes midnight, people are all of a sudden filled with a sense of optimism that carries them for at least a couple of months.”
The thing she is most looking forward to is playing a show. “I can’t wait. I really miss it. I’m excited to see more of the world, once everything feels a bit more open. I want to make music ’til I’m really old, so I don’t really mind what’s happened this year. It’s just one year.”