THE VOICE OF AN ANGELE
AS
Music
YOU may not have heard of Angele, yet, but in Europe the 26-year-old Belgian singer is a bona fide pop superstar.
Her music has sound-tracked the French Me Too movement, she has been an ambassador for Chanel, and she has collaborated with Dua Lipa.
Now a Netflix film is bringing her songs and intriguing life story, to British audiences.
“I feel like this documentary made me even more free,” she explains. “Because I’m telling everything in this documentary.”
Angele Van Laeken is the child of two famous parents: her mother is the actress, Laurence Bibot, and her dad is the singer, Marka.
Her brother, Romeo, is also a successful rapper. But while their fame has been mostly confined to Belgium, Angele’s has quickly spread across Europe.
Her Netflix film follows her from childhood to household name, while also sharing an insight into the creation of her recent second album, Nonante-Cinq (meaning 95, the year she was born).
The 12-track affair, full of introspection and dance beats, was written during lockdown and takes inspiration from Brussels and her adopted home of Paris.
“I’m talking a lot about freedom on this album because I felt like turning 25 was a big moment in my life where I found out that, actually, my freedom was something I needed to take and to choose,” she says.
“When I chose how to get my freedom I wrote songs about it. I wrote how there are no dos and don’ts for women.
“You just have to be the way you want to be. And then you just have to make people accept it.”
Angele wrote her warm, poppy debut album, Brol, in her bedroom and its success, boosted by witty videos she posted of her music on Instagram, took her by surprise.
When it went to number one in France and Belgium, she was thrust into the spotlight – something she admits she struggled with initially.
Fame came with both responsibility and scrutiny, as a role model to women and the LGBT community (she is openly bisexual).
Angele reveals that being a role model “is kind of a pressure because I feel like I have so many things to learn”. She adds: “I’m always learning about feminism and about my way of seeing this fight. So I think it’s important.
“I’m very grateful to be seen as a role model sometimes. But also I want to say that I’m [a] feminist in progress.”
Angele has had to battle to control her image. In 2017, she agreed to an interview with Playboy and despite being asked not to, the magazine printed a revealing photo of her. She tackles this affecting episode head on in her documentary.
“It wasn’t a crazy photo but I felt like it wasn’t the image I wanted to show at that moment,” she recalls.
“Also I was very, very young and I didn’t want to get sexualised too soon, and I felt insecure about my body anyway. This photo came out with the article and I was very upset and sad, because I felt like they didn’t respect my choice.
“Nobody ever talked about this, because it’s not known.
“But it was important for me to tell this story because it showed me very quickly that I needed to pay attention and stay very careful to everything around me.
“To the fact that I was a woman and I was blonde and even if I was an insecure person, not everybody cares.”
Angele’s 2019 feminist anthem, Balance Ton Quoi, was chanted during Me Too protests in France and she rose to the occasion, becoming a voice for the movement.
“Women should be free to wear whatever they want to wear or not wear,” she states. “Because being sexy or showing your body is just about your consent, and what you want to show or not show.
“I feel when a woman is choosing the way she’s dressed, it’s a way of empowering herself. And that’s really something I think.
“If you choose to be sexy, it’s OK, you still have the power. But if somebody sexualises you, and you don’t want to be sexualised, it is very violent. And this nuance is very important to get.”
In the UK, Angele is best known for Fever, her 2020 duet with Dua Lipa.
The dancefloor-focussed track was accompanied by a music video built around the idea of women avoiding danger on the streets late at night by sticking together.
There are just four months between the singers in age, and the pair remain friends, meeting up when Dua is in Paris. Angele will also support her when she plays at London’s O2 Arena in May.
“It was a very good experience to work with somebody like her because she is the same age as me and she is so mature – and knows what she wants and what she doesn’t want.
“She is very strong and powerful, and that was something I needed to see in the last year because I wasn’t doing shows and promos. I was doing my album, I was working on my own. I wasn’t seeing anybody because we were in quarantine.
“Then I met her in London, and we were able to do this video, we had a connection and I felt like it was possible to be very famous and to work a lot and to still be normal. And she is very normal.
“I was happy to see somebody like her doing the same job as me and still be so normal.”
WITH THE RELEASE OF OHEFRHSEERCSOENCDONADLBUM, ABELLBGUIMAN, B-BEOLGRINAN-BORN AND PARIS-BASED POP STAR ANGELE IS ON COURSE TO CRACK THE UK, ALEX GREEN DISCOVERS