Laura Mvula doesn’t sleep so well. The night before we meet, the 29-year-old musician wakes at 3am. She tosses, turns and finally drags a laptop on to her duvet to watch Friends. (“It’s comfort. It’s my youth.”) After that she dozes for a while and then wakes again, this time for good, at 5am. We’ve arranged to meet in a London bar in the late afternoon; by the time the clock circles around Mvula is tired and restless and ready for a drink. She orders a martini and a bacon sandwich and once these arrive she sets on them with the lust of the truly exhausted. “This is proper,” she says of the sandwich, munching. “Cheers.”
Mvula has close-cropped hair, a millimetre or two of fuzz that she’s dyed a deep green. Her lips, like her nails, are painted black. In conversation Mvula’s voice is crisp, precise, quite lovely – just as it was when she sang on her Mercury-nominated debut in 2013, Sing to the Moon, the vocal on that rich and strange album the happy result of her Caribbean DNA, a Birmingham upbringing and a lifetime’s informal training in church choirs. Mvula also did four years as a music undergrad at Birmingham’s Conservatoire. It was there that she acquired her distinctive surname, meeting and marrying Themba Mvula, a Zambian-born student from her year. What happened in that marriage is one of the reasons Mvula hasn’t been sleeping well. But only one of the reasons.
“So,” she says eventually. Her second album, The Dreaming Room, is due out shortly, and this is one of the reasons our interview has been arranged. I’ve also been told by an intermediary that Mvula might want to speak about one or two personal matters that haven’t come up before.
So, I say.
“So you’re the person I’m going to tell my deepest and darkest to.” She sips her drink. “Honest, Tom, in the last few years I feel like I’ve been hit by a bus. A very big bus.”
Mvula is intelligent, fiercely so, but hers is a sharpness rippled through with an offbeat sense of humour – a sort of appalled hilarity at the situation she’s found herself in. Mvula’s long, serious monologues, I’ll soon learn, come studded with goofy chuckles. Sad and intimate revelations might finish with a wide grin. Is it odd, Mvula asks, that she’s quite looking forward to speaking about all this at last? We agree we’ll meet again, somewhere quieter, in a few days’ time.
“How long will I have?” she asks.
To talk?
“Yeah.”
As long as you need.
“Really? Because once I get going I can go.”
I suggest we meet at a place where they serve lunch. She raises her glass to that.
Three days later Mvula sits in a riverside pub, keeping on an oversized fuzzy jacket despite the nearness of an open fire. She orders a hamburger and a glass of wine and then talks, without much interruption, for the next two and a half hours.
“I grew up in a very Christian household,” she begins. “The family unit was… tight. Our socialisation, mine and my siblings, was centred on family, church life, school.” It was “a house of love. But if I was to be critical, I would say that there was a lot of growing-up I wasn’t exposed to.” When she went to sixth form college in Solihull, aged 16, “it was the first time I took a bus”. She says that she enrolled at the Conservatoire, aged 18, with the chief intent of finding a musician to marry.
That can’t have been the reason.
“It was. I wanted a saxophonist.” Mvula shrugs: she was a child of the 90s, sax was cool. Her point, anyway, is that “I was sheltered. Massively sheltered.”
At the Conservatoire she met someone right away. “Themba. Just a stunning human being to look at. He had such presence.” She spotted him while they were singing in the same choir. “I literally said to myself, ‘Yes, thanks!’ Even without speaking to him.” They became friends, then a couple. “We had a lot in common. Fathers in the church. Two siblings. I felt a very instant connection. I wanted to spend all of my time with him – I did spend all of my time with him. Not a lot of studying in those years.”
They got married after graduation. Everyone approved the match. “Particularly in church, we were put on a pedestal. I could think to myself: ‘We are people who lots of people admire and now we get to build our own way of life.’” Themba encouraged Mvula’s musical ambitions, forming choir groups and jazz ensembles with her. It was Themba who suggested she write music of her own. The demos that resulted from this – Mvula working on a laptop, equipped with not much more than a mic, a keyboard and a piece of composition software – caught the ear of a producer, Steve Brown, and his manager, Kwame Kwaten. Both would become key figures in Mvula’s career to come.
She remembers taking an early phone call from Kwaten – “The phone call, when he said he wanted to manage me.” The manager hesitated, noticeably, when she first said she was married. “I remember finding it strange that Kwame would find it strange. In the environment I was raised in it was very normal to be married at 23. The important thing in life was that you were married. It meant direction; that you knew where you were going.”
She was raised to believe in certainties like these – and this became a problem, in her mid-20s, when Mvula found out her parents were breaking one of the most rigid conventions of her upbringing. They were separating and seeking a divorce. “I can’t express how much of a turning upside down that was. Divorce, the way we were raised – it was something that happened on EastEnders. It felt like 25 years of being lied to. My way of dealing with it was not dealing with it.”
Shortly after this, Mvula began to exhibit symptoms of acute anxiety. She was seized by panic attacks. “At first it was the shortness of breath… Dizziness… Why do I want to run out of the house naked right now?” As time went on the attacks “began to manifest in different ways. It’s difficult to explain. My body starts spasming, I think I’m going to collapse… Difficulty swallowing sometimes… A feeling of struggling to stay in your skin.”
Episodes would occur most frequently when she was on her own. Mvula describes a common thing: “The freak-out in the shower. And I wish that was the term for something good – it’s not. When it happens I feel like my head’s about to explode. So I start shaking it violently, bang the door open, water spills out, this whole episode. When all I want is to have a fucking shower. After that, you have to deal with getting over the shame of calling for help.”
The sudden, disarming grin: “As you can imagine I was not in the greatest condition for what was about to happen in my life.”
Mvula was working as a receptionist when Kwaten called to say he’d got her a six-album deal with Sony. “Sony were there and not there,” Mvula recalls of this time. “They said: ‘Nice to meet you, thank you, sign. See you when the album’s finished.’” Steve Brown produced Sing to the Moon. Sony were delighted with the result and put it out with minimal fuss. “It was painless, quick,” she remembers. “Which is probably one of the reasons why the change for me, when it came, was so traumatic.”
Mvula was one of the domestic musical triumphs of 2013. She was everywhere, on chat shows, at the Hammerstein Ballroom in New York, on M&S ads, at the Mercury Awards (odds-on with the bookies to take that prize before it went, in the end, to James Blake). She refers to all this as a period of “coming to terms with a new reality. Even to only have a foot in the door, it was a strange, ongoing sensation, one that I couldn’t make sense of quick enough. My anxiety shot up from what it was. It shifted gears.”
If the upset of her parents’ divorce was “the top off a bottle”, the sudden beginnings of life as a public figure brought “everything pouring out, rocket-fast”. Her anxiety – and in particular her difficulty with being left alone – got worse. In London for gigs or other engagements she had to be accompanied at all times by her younger sister, Dionne, who was then a student in the capital. Themba would be everywhere with her in Birmingham. People outside the immediate family were deliberately kept in the dark about her anxiety. “There’s a natural fear that nobody will understand,” Mvula says. “Or they’ll think you’re making it up, or you’ve become a diva. I was ashamed. Embarrassed. Also, at that point, I was so ignorant of what the industry was, I thought: ‘If they find out about that they’ll drop me.’”
As her music career got busier, Dionne and Themba stopped being able to cope. “Everything was moving so fast.” Mvula finally told her manager. He was “heartbroken”, she says, that she’d waited so long. An assistant, Mariama Abudulai, was employed, so that at least Mvula could lean on someone who was paid to be there, with a smaller measure of guilt. Her manager knew Mvula was more or less “debilitated” by anxiety, “but it didn’t go beyond management. And we all know the machine is huge – you have the record label, you have publishing, publicity, agents. You have the video team, stylists, all the people who are making your career move forward. None of those guys knew.” They still don’t.
Two years ago, things got extremely difficult. “Naturally, all this was a huge strain on mine and Themba’s marriage. Then, a year ago, we split. I don’t want to say too much more. This anxiety thing is something that has dictated my life. I know it was a factor in my marriage breaking down. I wish that life could be compartmentalised: ‘That was because of that, and that was because of that.’ Really, I’m not sure. It was a combination of lots of things. I would say… quite honestly, that I failed him. I failed him as a wife.”
There is no animosity between her and Themba. They’re still interested in each other’s lives, supportive. When I ask if it ever came down to a choice between her marriage and her career, Mvula says that would be an oversimplification. But after some thought, she says: “I think it’s true that if I had remained specifically in one place… I could be wrong, but I think that had my life remained in one place, and with certain patterns…”
She pauses, restarts. “In my mind I see the car. I see Themba picking me up from work. I see us teaching choirs. I see us going home and getting up to do the same thing the next day. I see us like every couple having our good times and our not so good times – manageable, just about, but only within the structure of an ordinary life.”
These days Mvula lives in London with her assistant, Mariama (“like family now”). Mvula’s mother “sends daily messages, to reinforce the message: ‘You are loved, regardless of all this.’” Dionne and her younger brother, James, are often around. She’s cut down on drinking. About 18 months ago, Mvula says, this threatened to become a problem; particularly when she was trying to make her second album, sitting for hours at a computer, “trying to find a way to write music when my marriage was breaking down, when I felt like shit, thinking the red wine was helping, which it wasn’t.” She has been formally diagnosed with clinical depression and is in treatment.
Mvula has brought her laptop to the pub. The music that makes up the new album is harsher and sadder than on the first, as you might expect. One of the tracks is a meandering heart-wringer called “Show Me Love” that speaks of missing a lover’s touch; a spikier track called “Phenomenal Woman” is about learning to get along without it. The music is lively, ferocious, difficult at times. It sounds just what it is – bloody hard-won.
Mvula believes that she’s written “a beast of an album in The Dreaming Room. I never thought I’d be able to. I couldn’t be left in a room on my own. So how could I write?” She only got around this obstacle, she says, because for weeks on end Dionne and Mariama “found ways to be in the room with me, but not in the room”. They’ll have to do something similar again, soon, when Mvula takes to the road for a run of gigs. She feels guilty about this (“These are people who have lives of their own”), but at the same time she doesn’t feel ready to give up her career. Music has been “a way to grieve about my marriage, and make sense of what it means that my life has changed”.
With her computer open on the table, it suddenly occurs to Mvula that she can show me some of the curious processes that went into composing The Dreaming Room. While writing, she explains, she often recorded herself using her laptop’s camera – in case she should hit on a “moment in time thing” and later want to recapture it. Many of the videos Mvula shot are hours and hours long. We scroll through them. They tend to show her hunched over a keyboard in casual clothes or pyjamas. One video has her sitting in a desk chair, singing phrases into a microphone, when suddenly she whips off her headphones and disappears from view.
Panic attack, Mvula explains. She would have gone looking for Dionne or Mariama.
We go back and watch the moments leading up to this. You wouldn’t know anything was happening to Mvula if you weren’t looking for it. Her fingers brush her face. Her jaw tightens. She looks frightened, then determined – finally overcome. “I haven’t watched this back before,” says Mvula.
It is hard to see yourself like this?
“Um. No, not any more. This is my life. I used to think, ‘I can’t be honest about this because that person’s going to think I’m ungrateful. That person’s going to think I’m a maniac. That person’s going to think I fucked up my life.’”
And now?
“Now I think it is what it is.”
Laura Mvula’s single, “Overcome”, is out now. Her second album, The Dreaming Room, is released on 17 June
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