I performed for Obama, then my life fell apart... I hit rock bottom. I wanted to quit music for good
Scots singer Emeli Sandé reveals her struggle with fame, identity and the heartbreak of a failed marriage
It is a beautiful thing when you can fully accept yourself and accept that you fit in somewhere
AS THE cheers rang out and the camera flashes rippled around the crowd, she stepped onto the stage to deliver the biggest performance of her life. In front of 80,000 spectators in the Olympic Stadium – and broadcast to an audience of a billion people around the globe – Emeli Sandé kicked off the closing ceremony of the London Games.
With a gigantic screen behind her showing a montage of victorious athletes weeping with joy, she gave a powerful and emotionally charged rendition of her track Read All About It.
For the watching world, her extraordinary performance was a celebration of the breathtaking achievements of the Olympians.
For Sandé herself, it should also have been an amazing moment of triumph.
After all, it was 2012 and over the course of just a few months the singer, from Alford in Aberdeenshire, had topped the charts with her debut album and enjoyed a string of hit singles.
She had collected the first of four Brit Awards and had even managed to find the time to marry her long-term boyfriend.
But Sandé has now confessed that – during the very period when her life seemed to be gliding from success to success – her world was, in reality, falling apart.
Now, seven years on from her astonishing set at the Olympics closing ceremony, she has revealed that the meteoric rise of her career – which included singing in front of Barack and Michelle Obama – threw her into turmoil.
In a candid interview with The Scottish Mail on Sunday she has spoken of the rapid collapse of her marriage – and told how she suffered a crisis of confidence that almost made her quit music altogether.
However, with a new album and new TV project on the go she now feels some of her wounds have healed.
The 32-year-old singer-songwriter said: ‘I’ve survived the world as I knew it falling apart and that was a big deal. Back then I wasn’t sure which way I was headed.
‘I didn’t know if I would still be making music. I didn’t know anything. I really had to start my life from zero again.
‘So being here now and being excited about music again and feeling strong and resilient and powerful feels like quite a miracle, if the person I was six years ago could see me now. That’s a great thing to celebrate and here I am.’
Sandé was born in Sunderland, where her father studied engineering, but her parents moved to Aberdeenshire when he could not find work. After retraining, he became a teacher at Alford Academy.
Growing up, the singer struggled with her identity as a mixed-race woman – her father, Joel, is Zambian while her mother, Diane, is English.
Sandé, who was born Adele Sandé but created a stage name to avoid confusion with the singer Adele Adkins, said: ‘My identity has been a big search for me, understanding being mixed-race and being a woman of colour and growing up in a place where there weren’t many people of colour.
‘So my identity, understanding my own beauty without having to see it through someone else’s eyes, has been a big journey for me.
‘I’ve had to explore my culture. I’ve had to go to Zambia and come back. I’ve also had to understand what it means to be from two different cultures and have the confidence to define my own beauty without anyone deciding for me.’ The singer, whose hits include Hurts and Beneath Your Beautiful, added: ‘My father experienced racism. I don’t feel I have an issue.
‘I feel my skin colour is beautiful, but when you’re a kid and you can’t understand how to do your hair because your hair is being made fun of because it is different, or because your colour is different, you have to develop a thick skin.
‘You have to have a perception of yourself that you’re beautiful despite not being able to see yourself represented on TV or in magazines or any of these things.’
Yet her Alford home proved the perfect training ground for her musical ambitions. She regularly entered – and won – local contests. Her father would encourage her to sing at home, recording early performances to watch later.
Sandé found some of the confidence she was looking for while studying medicine at the University of Glasgow.
There, she also met her husband-to-be, marine biologist Adam Gouraguine. The couple eventually married in 2012, in Montenegro. While she was at university, at weekends she commuted to London to collaborate with urban music acts such as Chipmunk.
When he topped the charts in 2009, with his single Diamond Rings, she was guest vocalist.
Soon afterwards, she chose to give up her studies to sign a record deal with Virgin EMI and moved to London full-time. ‘It is a beautiful thing when you can fully accept yourself and accept that you fit in somewhere,’ she said.
‘Everybody needs community in one sense of the word. I definitely found acceptance moving to London because you have so many different cultures there.
‘My true realisation was that you can’t expect other people to tell you what you are. That comes with age. You are searching everywhere.
‘When I moved to Glasgow I thought I would find it. Then I moved to London and I was continually searching for something which has to come from you.’
As an artist in her own right, she enjoyed two hits in 2011 – Heaven, which reached No2 in the charts,
‘I thought my life was going to be perfect’
and Daddy. Other successes followed, including Clown, a track she previously performed for Take That star Gary Barlow when she had been an unknown and he was looking for people to sign to his ill-fated Future record label.
He turned her down and his label folded soon afterwards.
Sandé went on to accumulate sales of 18 million singles and six million albums, while also finding time to write hits for US superstars Alicia Keys, Katy Perry and Rihanna.
Her debut album, Our Version of Events, went on to become a massive success.
In 2013 she was invited to sing in front of US President Barack Obama and his wife Michelle at an event honouring singer-songwriter Carole King – whose track Natural Woman Sandé performed in the Library of Congress.
It was the same year, however, that her marriage broke up.
Sandé is hesitant to blame her divorce on her thriving career, but admits it played a role.
She said: ‘Every relationship needs attention and energy put into it whether it be a marriage or your family.
‘I don’t know. It just wasn’t meant to be. I went through a divorce. I had set up this whole life that this was the person I was going to marry and be having kids with and how my music career was going to go.
‘It was a lesson to me that you can’t assume anything and you have to take life day by day.’
Now, she says she has a greater self-acceptance than ever, in part due to her new-found interest in meditation and yoga, as she prepares to release her third album, Real Life.
It will be released on Friday and is the follow-up to 2016’s Long Live the Angels, which made it to number two in the UK charts. The new album is, according to the singer, her most personal piece of work to date. She said: ‘I feel like all of these songs represent the point where I was building my own self-confidence.
‘Prior to that there was a lot of self-doubt. There were a lot of options. Was it the right path for the music to go down and was I doing the right thing with my life?’
She said: ‘In that period of my life, from when I was around 27, I started to wonder if I had discovered enough about myself.
‘I had self-doubt, but I feel that I have made many steps forward since then. I really want this album to sum up this new confidence and hopefully give people power and energy.’
Songs on the album, such as Free as a Bird, chart that journey of self-discovery, reflect her rapid rise to fame – and also reflect on the pain of divorce from a man she had expected to spend the rest of her life and have children with.
Sandé said: ‘I thought I was going to get married, settle down and my life was going to be perfect, no further questions.
‘When really there was such a poverty of confidence. If you get famous so young, that becomes who you are and what you believe is your worth, and then you kind of forget that these songs are coming from you. It’s such an incredible feeling to share them but that can’t be how you validate yourself.’
One track in particular on Real Life, called Survivor, seems to sum up her struggle as she sings: ‘Baby, I been lost at sea, I been in the dark. Oh, I been on my knees, I been torn apart... Oh I was underground, thought all hope was lost. So I thank God that I’m surviving, again.’
Sandé hopes other women going through tough times will be able to take inspiration from the song’s lyrics.
She said: ‘I’m excited for people to hear Survivor because that’s how I feel.
‘I feel I’m a survivor and I feel anything’s possible. I feel stronger than ever and that sums up my mentality just now.
‘I want to shine a torch for those who haven’t made it through. I want to make sure I’m shining my light as brightly as I can because I’m in a position where I have freedoms. The more you read about the rest of the world, a lot of people don’t have them – especially the women. I want to shine brightly for them.
‘It’s my story and I wanted it to be an empowering album.’
She will also reflect on her career in Emeli Sandé’s Street Symphony, a four-part BBC Scotland series, which airs from Thursday, September 19.
Viewers will also see her visiting Scottish cities to handpick her favourite buskers, six of whom will go on to perform a concert with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra.
The singer said: ‘I thought it was the perfect match for me because I am usually quite reluctant to be in anything to do with talent shows.
‘But this was about true performers. The buskers are getting to perform their own original material. The whole experience has been very inspiring and humbling for me.’
Despite reports she has recently found love again with music manager Daniel Caruana, Sandé insists that she remains happily single.
She said: ‘We’re good friends and we enjoy each other’s company, but at the moment I’m just enjoying the single life.
‘I’m not in a relationship with anyone. Right now I’m enjoying dating and exploring different people – and I’m trying my best to understand the male mind a bit better.’
With a tour coming up in November, she feels better equipped for any future successes that come her way.
Sandé said: ‘I had to catch up with myself. I entered the music business a really quiet person and very shy.
‘The music exploded but that didn’t necessarily mean I was going to become this self-assured person. I was catching up with the success.
‘It was amazing. I’m so happy I had that experience, but at some point even though the success has happened I had to explore and develop my skills.’
Now she feels better equipped and more determined than ever to go back into the spotlight – and this time it will be on her terms. ‘I feel grounded,’ she said. ‘I know exactly what I want to say
and do.’