Click here to watch the video
for 1980
On her new single, Estelle rubs shoulders on the songwriting credits with the
US soul singer John Legend and will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas, while Kanye
West shares vocal duties. That’s some supporting cast. The song, American
Boy, precedes the singer’s second album, Shine, which is released on
Legend’s label, HomeSchool, as part of a big-money deal with Atlantic
Records in America. The west Londoner, who blazed briefly in the British
charts in 2004 with the singles 1980 and Free, and her debut album, The 18th
Day, is getting a second chance.
Legend, who guested on two tracks on her debut, kept faith with the
28-year-old singer and rapper after her third single, Go Gone, failed to
repeat the success of its predecessors. In Britain, Estelle was written off
- like so many black British artists before and since - and languished,
increasingly uncertain of herself, in a record deal with V2 that neither
party seemed exactly committed to.
She sat through the 2006 heatwave on the balcony of her London home, too
depressed to move a finger, let alone write a song. It’s not, she points
out, as if she hadn’t been given the support: radio stations had playlisted
her, reviews were ecstatic. So, when she flopped, she began to question what
had, up to that point, seemed her very reason for being.
“I had to go and figure out who I was,” she says, sitting in a London hotel
room near her West Kensington birthplace during a brief visit from Brooklyn,
where she now lives. “I was thinking, ‘What the hell am I doing? Am I going
crazy?’ My former label boss screamed at me. He said, ‘You are a product,
nobody is going to work harder for you, but nobody cares about your thing.’
And that planted the seed of, ‘I am. I’m just a product.’ But I’m not. I’m
not just a piece of paper, just a plastic CD. I’m me.”
She was also succumbing, she says, to the sort of thinking she believes
bedevils black music in Britain. “I came up with a lot of hip-hop heads. A
lot of them got bitter, a lot decided to just pack it in, and everyone was
moaning. Nobody was doing anything. After the record sales didn’t go where
they were expected to, people started going, ‘Has she been dropped? Did she
leave her label? Nah, she got dropped – that’s what happens to every British
rap artist.’ It’s boring. If you’re proud of your music, you’re cocky. If
you’re not sure about it, you’re not a star. Especially here, where you’re
not supposed to dress up and act proud, you’re supposed to stay on the road
level. But who wants to stay at the level they’re at? Why is everybody so
hellbent on ‘keeping it real’?”
It will come as no surprise to anyone who has met her to hear that Estelle is
not a good sleeper. She’s too “on it” for that. “There are always 20 million
things in my head – all the time. Four or five hours and I’m good. I can’t
sleep beyond nine o’clock, which is an issue, because I often go to bed at
six.” She has, though, learnt to channel her anger, as they say, and
accentuate the positive.
“I get eczema,” she says, “and that comes from stress, held inside. Well, I
like smooth skin. There’s so much going on in my head anyway, I can’t have
too much stress or I go really mad.” Not every crease has been ironed out.
Estelle may have made a comeback album with the help of Legend, Kanye, Mark
Ronson, Wyclef Jean and Gnarls Barkley’s Cee-Lo Green, but Shine’s most
distinctive feature is that the West Ken ducker-and-diver has survived the
move to America intact. Slick and promiscuously multi-genre the grooves may
be, but that gobby, insouciant, you-got-a-problem-with-that? delivery will
not be suppressed.
“You need to grow a couple, boy,” she scats contemptuously on No Substitute
Love. Wait a Minute (Just a Touch) finds her showing an impatient would-be
lover the door with the magnificent: “If and when the time comes when you
and me are sexy-so / Wrap it up, ’cos I ain’t carrying your embryo.” Shine’s
musical variety, which encompasses soul, R&B, pop and reggae, and
lyrical content, which veers from defiant to vulnerable, from joyous to
melancholic, have led to inevitable comparisons with Lauryn Hill. Estelle
isn’t bothered.
“If that draws attention to the album, cool. People keep saying it’s Lauryn
Hill-real. That’s okay. But I never slept with Wyclef. I ain’t slept with
any of my mentors, nothing like that.” She says this while exploding with
the gurgling, glass-shattering laugh that accompanies many of her more
risqué utterances. Could you give Estelle media training? Well, you could
try. Would it do any good? Oh, come now.
Her enduringly unbuttoned lip is another welcome sign that her essence has not
been diluted. By the sounds of it, she walked into her first meeting at
Atlantic and simply blasted away their doubts. “See, I came in with John’s
endorsement,” she says, explaining the most obvious reason for her refusal
to be browbeaten. But it was deeper than that. Those balcony sessions had
made her ask herself some fundamental questions, but the answers, when they
came, strengthened her resolve.
“I try to shoot myself down all day, all the time,” she admits. “To find holes
in everything I do – to the point where it’s bullet-proof. Then
I present it.
“But I don’t feel like I’m competing with anybody but myself. There have been
too many coincidences, too many things in my life, for me to have carried on
sitting there thinking, ‘I’m not supposed to be doing this.’ Nobody gets a
chance like this.”
In she walked, then, as tall as her diminutive frame could stretch to, and
served it to them straight. “I was like, ‘How you doing? I’m going to give
you this record, give you the image for it, the whole vibe; and this is how
you’re going to sell it.’ I think it was almost refreshing to them. There’s
so much that’s the same over there that anything that’s two pennies to the
left, they’re on it. So I walked in there and went, ‘You know what? I really
do believe this is going to work. John believes it too, and you’ve got
Kanye, who’s got a close eye on it as well.’ Like, what? Come on now.”
It wasn’t all plain sailing, though. The problems British music fans and
executives seemed to have back in 2004/05 – what is she, a singer, a rapper?
What’s her sound? - were ones Estelle faced again in America, despite
Legend’s imprimatur.
“People were patting me on the back with one hand,” she recalls, “and saying
to him behind the other, ‘Don’t do this. I don’t get it. She’s too varied.’
Then will.i.am came up with American Boy, and that freaked everyone
out. They said, ‘How are you going to do a house-music track, then do
reggae?’ And he went, ‘She can do everything.’ I thought, ‘At last. Yes.’
” Not surprisingly, given her collaborators, Estelle is being bigged up in
America, where she is, to her amusement, being presented as a new act. If
Shine takes off, fine, but she’s taking nothing for granted. “It’s going to
be what it is,” she reflects. “Everyone keeps saying, ‘You’ve made it,
you’ve done it, you’ve gone to America.’ And I’m like, ‘No, no, no.’ Success
isn’t going to another country and selling out a show.”
Fans are already starting to approach her there, which both delights and
scares her. “This girl came up to me in a shop and said, ‘You’re Estelle,
right?’ That freaked me out. If people feel like they really know me, that’s
strange. I mean, I know me, but only to an extent. I’m still trying to find
out.”
She’s a little wary, too, of the sheer scope of fame over there. “They hail
you to nail you, that’s what Lauryn said. But it’s cool. I think of the
first album: that’s West Ken. And I’m on TV across America. I’m like, ‘Huh?’
” We flirted with her last time, then backed off. More fool us. Now it’s
America’s chance. Estelle has her groove back, three years after Go Gone
saw her mislay it. “Go” she has: to America, which is about to hear an awful
lot from her, and may not know quite what has hit it. But “gone”? She’s only
just begun.
American Boy is released digitally tomorrow on Atlantic; Shine follows on
March 31
It rests its head on your shoulders and whispers in your ear
Estelle is awesome! Interview really honest and insightful - can't wait for Shine to come out on Monday! It's going to be incredible! You go girl!
Em, Surrey,
Its her time to SHINE
bo, london,
Great interview. Estelle is very talented. Hope she does well
Jude Johnson, Londin, UK