Paloma Faith: ‘I did a whole tour with postnatal depression. I was devastated’
There were choirs planned for Paloma Faith’s new album, a swell of voices to fill out the optimistic, celebratory songs. Then the pandemic struck. The album changed dramatically, in just a few weeks. Some of the more upbeat songs were dropped, she says, because in the midst of so much crisis and loss, “it felt like the lyrics could be perceived as a bit patronising”. New songs spilled out of Faith and the other writers, all four singles written in lockdown, then recorded in a studio set up in her basement. The songs sound more solitary now; more suited to the times.
We speak over Zoom, Faith lying on a bed at home in London. Infinite Things is her fifth album; her first was released in 2009, and all have been hugely successful. There have also been big singles, such as Only Love Can Hurt Like This and Picking Up the Pieces. Her latest album is also her most personal, perhaps as a result of this year’s forced intimacy.
Faith has a three-year-old daughter with her partner, the artist Leyman Lahcine, and says her family “became infinitely more present and more important” in this period. Ordinarily, there would be tours, gigs and studio work to do; instead, she has been spending much more time with Lahcine.
In a crisis, she says: “You really can tell what the person you decided to be with is like, because you want more than just somebody you fancy and you love a bit. You can really see whether you picked well.” She laughs, a machine-gun cackle. “I feel like in the lock
down, we realised that whatever crisis was happening, we work well together.”
She wanted to write “realistic” love songs, she says. “They’re not just about saying” – she puts on a cutesy, withering voice – “‘You’re the greatest thing that’s ever happened to me.’ It’s like also: ‘You are highly annoying and you hurt me, and I still want to be with you.’ Which is a bit more what it’s like to be in a longterm relationship, particularly one that involves children, because they’re binding. You have those thoughts still: ‘Oh, I don’t know if this is going to work.’ But your attitude towards those thoughts is different because you’ve got children or a child together.” She pauses for a rare second. “And it’s that thing: how you become more selfless. You’ve got to think about what’s best for your child, and what’s best for your child is also what’s best for your partner, because they love their other parent.”
The album’s title track was inspired by Faith’s daughter. It’s based on Jorge Luis Borges’s short story, The Aleph, where it is possible to “see simultaneously all the pain and all the joy of existence. I guess I likened becoming a mother for the first time to that; it’s about looking in your child’s eyes and seeing all of it.” She wanted to write about love without the usual sentimentality, “both as a parent and also in a romantic sense. I think that true love embodies more than just a sentimental feeling. It’s devotion and that sometimes involves negative things, like sacrifice of yourself, or in the case of parenthood, when your kids break your heart all the time.”
Faith is, she says, “a very maternal person” and when she became pregnant after IVF: “I was so over the moon because I was like: ‘Finally! My calling.’” The reality, at least to begin with, was different – her daughter was born prematurely, by emergency caesarean, and Faith lost a lot of blood. They were both in hospital for a week. Back home, the sleeplessness became torturous. “I hallucinated and lost touch with what was real and what wasn’t, just disoriented. It lasted for some time, where I was disappointed that I wasn’t able to be the mother I’d envisioned. I put myself under way too much pressure. I was very angry with how my body responded to pregnancy and I think I really punished myself.”
For all the images of serene motherhood, the reality for many women is that having a baby can be exhausting, frightening and overwhelming. “I also think everyone assumes that women know what they’re doing because it’s ‘nature’. But we don’t. I remember my partner saying to me: ‘I’m sorry I can’t help, I just don’t know how to.’ And I’m like: ‘I don’t fucking know how to either.’” She laughs.
Faith now believes she had postnatal depression, though at the time she wasn’t aware and didn’t seek help. “I just thought that I was never going to be happy again and I made amends with that, and then I just pushed myself and it was punishing. I did a whole tour with it, and I was just devastated. I was miserable, I didn’t enjoy it. I toured arenas and I shouldn’t have, or I should have done it differently.”
She would look after her baby all day, then put her to bed at 7pm. “I would have two hours to get ready, do my vocal warm-up, and then be on stage by 9pm. I’d finish around 11pm, and then I’d dismantle myself from pop star to pyjamas and, at midnight, I’d go to sleep, and then wake up and do the whole thing again.” She made herself ill, she says. “It was self-imposed, but also no one said anything, no one said: ‘This is absolutely ridiculous and here’s a way to change that.’”
Faith employed nannies for a while, but it did not really work, she says. When it all got too much, she had a small breakdown – she remembers dropping a glass she was holding, and shaking – and decided the only solution was to give up work. Lahcine talked her down, pointing out that she was the higher-earner and that he should be the one to put work on pause. “My relationship with my own father was really irregular and I see how lucky my child is to be with her dad a lot,” she says. “I think it’s really good for her to spend time with a very sensitive, kind man, and that will be her benchmark and mould her expectations of men in a way that I didn’t have. I think I had really low expectations.”
Although it is becoming more common for fathers to do the bulk of the childcare, it is still unusual. Indeed, she points out that, when it is all added up, she and Lahcine probably do equal amounts, but that it is more visible when a man does his share. “I think society defines what male strength is in a bizarre way, and I feel like I’ve never met as strong a man as him, because he goes against what society expects of a man and that’s strength in itself.” And their daughter gets to see her mother working and fulfilled? “Yeah. I remember one day she said: ‘Why do you go to work all the time?’ And I said, because it makes me happy. I don’t want her to think you should only work for money.”
For a while, Faith chose not to reveal her daughter’s sex, which was taken as a big statement that she was raising her child to be gender neutral. She is bemused by the reaction, when all she intended was to give her daughter a bit more privacy. Gender, anyway, “is irrelevant to a baby”, she says. “Even though that wasn’t what I was saying, the reaction sort of made me want to say that to make a point. All I was trying to do was protect my child from the unhealthy world of celebrity. It’s so strange to me that people were more cross about my liberal attitude towards gender than they are about imposing celebrity on a child, and I think celebrity is way more unhealthy.”
Faith’s own childhood, she says, was
“extremely politically correct and not in a superficial way”. She was brought up in Hackney, east London, by her mother, a teacher, who would take her on anti-Thatcher marches. (Faith has always been one of the most political commercial artists; her last album, The Architect, featured the Guardian columnist Owen Jones.) As a child, she was extremely shy. “If I was a psychologist, I would think it was partly because my mum was really hardworking. I had a lot of empathy as a kid, and I still do.
“I was always worried that my mum had a lot on her plate because she had me and she was working full-time, and she had a lot of other kids she looked after through work. I always just felt like I didn’t want to be any trouble for her.” And her father, she says, “was a very overpowering personality and rather than feel the wrath of his upset, I’d just not say anything. Also, I was an only child and I had a strong internal world.”
Her mother and her teacher “were both a bit worried about how quiet I was. I was prone to being bullied because of my quietness, and they wanted to give me the ability to assert myself.” The teacher gave Faith the part of the head dinosaur in a school play and she unleashed her inner roar. “I remember thinking it was fun because it wasn’t me, it was another character. I guess I got into being a performer because I could remove myself from myself and be somebody else, and get different results. I still feel maybe I am like that overly empathetic, quiet person that’s just living inside the character.”
Her pop star persona is chirpy, funny and engaging, and her stage costumes are glorious and theatrical. Has she created Paloma Faith the pop star? “I have a bit,” she says. “When people ask my partner about it, he definitely thinks there are two versions.” What is she like in her non-constructed personality? “Maybe less ‘on’.” In a more public setting, such as a chatshow: “It’s like an armour almost, to be vivacious and funny and a bit goofy.”
As a young adult, Faith studied theatre direction and design at Central St Martins, then worked in a lingerie shop and as a magician’s assistant. When she became a pop star, she famously knocked four years off her age (she is now 39). It still feels as if there is a bit of glee about the fact that she was found out, when we should really be asking why extreme youth is so valued in women. What has it been like, being a woman in the public eye?
“I do think I’m treated differently because I’m funny and political, and those things are way more accepted in men,” she says. “People are very dismissive of any opinions that I have, because of being female.” After having a child, she says, “I felt very much that there was a huge shift. My record company’s expectations of what my targets were went down. Whereas before it would always be like: ‘We want to sell a million copies,’ I had a baby and it just went like …” She makes a diving, swooshing noise. “‘We want to sell a couple of hundred thousand.’ I don’t know where that comes from, or who decides that or why, but I don’t think it’s a coincidence that it happened after I’d had a baby.” To be generous, maybe it was a misplaced kindness, that they didn’t want to heap pressure on her? “No. I think it’s to do with the fact that they just think that people wouldn’t find a mother as appealing.”
A few years ago, Faith moved into acting; she currently appears in the Batman spin-off show Pennyworth. She had filmed two episodes of the second series when the pandemic shut down filming, although they are planning to start again soon. It will take longer for the music industry to get back to anything more normal, and it is hard to imagine she will perform again soon, although she seems optimistic.
This album has been, she says: “The best creative experience I’ve had in years, in a decade. I feel like I’ve got ownership of it and it feels exciting. I feel like I’ve returned to my creativity and that, for a long time, maybe I got lost in a world of commercialism.” There is a renewed energy and focus, and she wants more. “More writing, more everything,” she says. “I’m going to see where the wind takes me.”