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Laura Mvula interview: the supply teacher turned reluctant star

Prince plays her album before his shows and the critics love her. So why is the singer-songwriter Laura Mvula so tortured by her newfound fame? The classically trained singer-songwriter Laura Mvula Photo: LINDA BROWNLEE

By Stephanie Rafanelli

8:00AM BST 03 Aug 2014

“I loves you, Porgy/Don’t let him take me/Don’t let him handle me/And drive me mad…” Nina Simone’s doleful contralto floats from a stereo in a London studio. The mood is strangely solemn for a photo-shoot, and so is its subject. Laura Mvula is blinkered by an abundant, corkscrew-curl Afro – extensions fixed to the crown of her head, still partly shaved beneath. The singer, classically trained pianist and composer, who just two years ago was working as a music supply teacher in Birmingham, is not the typical bouncy, eager new star. For a 28-year-old, she has a rather stately presence, enhanced by a dignified profile, arched brows and Cleopatra-worthy eyeliner.

“I think we all have too much to say in our society,” she tells me later, on the studio roof terrace. “We are constantly encouraged to be vocal, have an opinion through Facebook or Twitter. It’s out of control. We all need to shut up and be quiet for a bit.” Mvula talks slowly and deliberately, her intonation tinged with the flat notes of Midlands suburbia. She considers each of my questions at length, her eyes shut, only speaking when she has formulated an answer in its entirety. There are long silences: she’s not the kind of girl to fill in gaps in conversation. “I spend a lot of time listening to interviews with Miles Davis and Nina Simone. Her answers sound like poems, sermons.”

On a laptop she plays me a version of Green Garden from her latest album – a rearrangement of her 2013 debut “Sing To The Moon”, performed with the Metropole, the celebrated Dutch jazz orchestra. Then she surprises me with an anecdote about her recent American tour: “When I told them I was going to play at the Proms with the Metropole this summer, they all thought it was my school ball. ‘You’re having a prom?’” She lets out a throaty laugh.

If it’s hard to get the measure of Mvula, it’s perhaps because we have become accustomed to a musical landscape awash with neatly definable, cookie-cutter acts who pout, pose and post it all on Twitter. It wasn’t until Mvula released “Sing To The Moon” in March last year – originally written on her laptop when teaching, after graduating from the Birmingham Conservatoire with a degree in composition – that we were reminded what we’d been missing: someone who sings their own tune.

WATCH: Behind the scenes at the Abbey Road recording of "Laura Mvula with the Metropole Orkest"


Her complex orchestral arrangements of layered vocals, sparse piano, strings and brass flourishes in freeform jazz structures, awoke even the most jaded critics from musical ennui. “Sing To The Moon” showed influences from Björk, gospel, The Beach Boys and Broadway to The Carpenters and Gershwin. The Telegraph called it “one of the most striking and original debuts from any British artist in many a year”. She has been nominated for three Brits, the Mercury Prize, an Ivor Novello and won two Mobos including Best Female Act (beating Jessie J and Rita Ora).

Mvula’s outlook on all this lies somewhere between measured and tortured. Her poise belies a sensitive nature plagued by self-doubt – in early interviews, she was critical of her singing voice. With a church-choir background, she was first and foremost a communal singer, and has struggled with being thrust into the spotlight in an X Factor culture increasingly focused on strutting-peacock solo artists. Her first gig was at the 2012 iTunes Festival in front of 3,000 people. Laura Mvula performing at the Love Supreme Jazz Festival in July (GETTY)

Initially, she suffered stage fright and an acute fear of being alone, which she describes now as monophobia, a sensation captured in her song Is There Anybody Out There? She sought help through the controversial Lightning Process, a treatment programme intended for sufferers of conditions such as chronic fatigue. Developed by the osteopath Phil Parker, it claims to inhibit the adrenalin cycle that causes a stress response. “Every time I stepped on stage, it was this ultimate moment,” says Mvula. She pauses. “Life is complicated. I’m complicated. One day I will be free of this anxiety, but things take time to work through. I’m less hard on myself now. I’ve experienced deep changes, even in the last six months, simply through the momentum of everything.”

She is helped by the presence on stage of her brother James, 27, who plays cello, and her sister, Dionne, 24, on violin, who form part of her five-strong band. “Without them, I wouldn’t be making music,” she says. Then there is the devotion of Prince, whom she supported last year: “On Twitter he said he wakes up to Green Garden every morning. He plays my album before and after shows. It’s the highest praise. It sends me a very clear message. It’s very grounding, like feeling loved.” Both artists are Christian. I bring this up, but after a minute-long hesitation, false eyelashes quivering, she refuses to expand.

It was Mvula’s love of communal music that led her to work with the Metropole, known for historic collaborations with Ella Fitzgerald and Dizzy Gillespie. Together, they will perform “Sing To The Moon”, rearranged by the orchestra’s English chief-conductor Jules Buckley, at the Royal Albert Hall on 19 August, a prospect that fills her with joy and pain. “I was so moved by his arrangements. But it’s tough emotionally for me to sing such personal songs again.” The cover of her latest album, a rearrangement of her debut, 'Sing

“Sing To The Moon” was originally written in the aftermath of her parents’ separation in 2007, and her fragility and confusion are plain. She plays me the new orchestral version of her song Father, Father, about her estrangement from her father, with its distressing repetitions of “Father, Father, why you let me go?” “The song became more of itself. It was pretty devastating. It’s already so heartbreaking. It was a real outpouring for me. Now the emotional level is even higher. Diamonds was about my friend who died of a brain tumour. Tears come when I listen to these new songs, but it’s a different kind of weeping. I’m happier to give myself room to feel that overwhelming pain, yearning and chaos. It’s been a big two-year journey.”

Mvula, born Laura Douglas, grew up in Kings Heath, Birmingham, the daughter of St Kitts-born Paula, a teacher, and Elford, a council worker whose family hails from Jamaica. The household was immersed in music. “My mum liked Diana Ross, so we’d clean the house to her. My dad was into Etta James, Miles Davis, The Carpenters. Saturday mornings were orchestra rehearsal. Sundays were gospel and church music.” Elford played piano and, aged eight, Laura began too, along with violin lessons. The three children accompanied their father at the local Pentecostal church when he was Worship Leader. Stage fright was there from the start: after her first church solo aged 10, Mvula was so frightened by the applause that she erupted into tears.

Mvula was always more at ease when performing as a group. As teens, Laura, James and Dionne founded the Douglas String Trio, managed by Elford, playing weddings and conferences. “My band now is basically the Douglas String Trio, only the venues are better,” she says. “And I’ve been demoted to vocals and piano, because I’m crap at violin.” In 2005, Mvula joined her aunt’s a cappella group Black Voices: emboldened by this, she formed the neo-soul outfit Judyshouse. By this time Mvula was at the Birmingham Conservatoire, where she was intimidated by the establishment and other students, embarrassed by her own compositions. After graduation, she felt lost, unable to find her footing in the music world. She directed a number of choirs, worked on reception at the Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and taught in schools for a few years. Laura Mvula with her sister Dionne, and her brother James (GETTY)

It was her husband, the Zambian-born baritone Themba Mvula, whom she met at the Conservatoire and married in 2009, who encouraged her to channel her sense of loss into music as a form of therapy. “It was a very intense period. I left college, my parents separated, I’d just got married. I think the anxiety had a lot to do with all those things. Music is a vessel through which I express pain. But it’s a thread running throughout my life.” She emailed the demos to two producers for feedback in 2012, one of whom went on to produce the album.

In the intervening years, the meanings of Mvula’s songs have shifted for her. Green Garden, about Birmingham’s parks, is tinged with nostalgia for the normality of her old life. That’s Alright – “I will never be what you want/Because my skin ain’t light/And my body ain’t tight” – has become a defiant anthem in the face of the celebrity circus. “Celebrity is so rampant in our culture. I loathe it. We are driven by this weird world that’s so complex, yet has no substance. I stumbled across something on the internet recently that said I’d chosen the wrong dress and my figure was all wrong. It would upset anyone. But what’s most upsetting is that it exists. Seeing that changed me. I just pray I won’t be damaged by it.

“I think I’m a feminist,” she continues. “I think a lot about body image and the ideal we’re subconsciously nurtured to aspire to. With That’s Alright I wanted to express that I’m tired of being made to feel I lack because of what society projects on to me.” For not being white, or light-skinned? “For whatever. I don’t even think society knows anymore. It’s just that you’re not ‘right’. I want to exist in a headspace where I’m free of those chains. I want to encourage everyone to be free.”

Mvula with the singers Lianne La Havas, Shingai Shoniwa and Paloma Faith

She was proud to appear with Alek Wek, Helen Mirren, Tracey Emin and Rita Ora in Marks & Spencer’s recent campaign. “There is something empowering about celebrating the diversity of one another, that fights against the big, ugly beast. If I can make music that promotes that, I will for the rest of my life.”

Mvula is also campaigning to “beat down narrowness” in music. She is one of the ambassadors of the BBC’s Ten Pieces initiative, in which primary-school children across the country will be asked to respond creatively to 10 classical compositions. “When I was teaching, if I asked the kids about their ambitions 70 or 80 per cent would say Britain’s Got Talent or X Factor,” she says with a grimace. “I have nothing against the shows, but when kids think they have only one option it upsets me. Children have all sorts of creative abilities that are nothing to do with singing into a microphone. There’s so much scope in music. But it’s all about pushing people on to platforms at lightning speed.” She laughs raucously when I suggest she could be a judge on The Voice: “Maybe… I’m ruling nothing out.”

The hurtling momentum of her own career is something she is now pushing against. “I’m not in a rush. I won’t write another album until I’m ready. I want to savour each day. I may not even be here in five months,” she says, sighing at her own “doom and gloom”. She and Themba are flat hunting in London and he has promised to take her to Zambia at some stage. (“I can imagine myself living in Africa in years to come.”) She likes the idea of writing in the Caribbean. “It’s my culture, my identity. It’s in my music somewhere. The warm and the sea and the green and the mountains and the music and the spirit…”

"Laura Mvula with the Metropole Orkest" is out on 11 August.

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