Emeli Sande interview

AS A MIXED RACE WOMAN RAISED IN RURAL SCOTLAND, SINGER EMELI SANDE IS UPBEAT ABOUT THE IMMIGRATION DEBATE. IT’S GOOD TO TALK, SHE TELLS TEDDY JAMIESON

THERE comes a time in a pop star’s life – usually after the first wave of success and the second album, and sometimes after the first or second marriage – when the draw of the city pales and they start binge-watching episodes of Escape to the Country on iPlayer. Emeli Sande, 31, has arrived at this point in her career. In this, if nothing else, can we draw comparisons between her and fish farmer Roger Daltrey and Blur’s cheesemonger Alex James.

As yet, Sande has not, as far as I know, set up her own jam and knitting factory. But she has left London behind, moved to the outskirts, found a place and built a recording studio in it, which means, she tells me, if she wants to make music at three in the morning there’s no one to stop her.

“Nowadays, because I’m a grown-up I try to get to bed before one,” Sande adds. “But you never know when the spirit hits you and you get one of those songs.”

In a way, of course, this means her life has come full circle. Growing up in Aberdeenshire, Sande was surrounded by nature. Now she is again.

“I had kind of forgotten how healing nature can be,” she says. “Because I grew up in the countryside you want to live in the city, because you want all the fun and the excitement of it. But now I’m reminded of how lovely the peace of nature is.”

Already this morning she’s sat in her garden having breakfast serenaded by a chorus of birdsong. “It just feels like a dream to me,” she says. I am imagining her toes curling up in pleasure as she says it.

Emeli Sande in 2018 says she is in a good place, and not just geographically. She’s working on a new album and living with her sister. Maybe you could say she was nesting, although the only new arrival on the horizon is the next record, her third, which she’s hoping to finish in the next few months.

“It’s soulful, it’s quite a positive album,” she tells me, though she’s not sure when we’ll be able to judge for ourselves. That’s up to her record company.

If so, though, that would mark a stepchange from her last album, Long Live the Angels, which arrived in 2016 in the wake of her short-lived marriage to her long-term boyfriend Adam Gouraguine.

Even though Sande denied it was a break-up album at the time, it was difficult to listen to songs like Hurts and Lonely and think it could be anything else.

It’s not something she wants to talk about today though. What Sande has learned in