CELESTE

Growing up, there were feelings I couldn’t quite comprehend. I would sing freely over a piece of music, letting out whatever words came naturally to me. It was only when I listened back that I would realise, ‘Oh, that’s me talking about this thing that’s been on my mind’. It’s like having a dream that’s a map for your true feelings; if you’re good at interpreting the symbols, then you can guide yourself in your waking life. 

Songwriting has been that for me—it has revealed what my subconscious needed to understand and served as a map to navigate my inner world. Throughout my childhood, people recognised that I had a voice and encouraged me to sing. But I was quite shy about it and only really started singing seriously when I didn’t have much choice. In college, while still living in Brighton, where I mostly grew up, I took courses in fashion, fine art, textiles, media studies, and English literature. I struggled with these subjects due to a family grievance that caused me significant anxiety. A teacher then suggested I take an easier subject. While music isn’t necessarily easy, it came naturally to me.

I think music requires an identity, and a visual identity is crucial. I saw musicians channelling various parts of their creativity and taking full advantage of that system. I realised that perhaps what was more exciting than just making music was the ability to integrate all these three-dimensional elements. As a musician, you could be involved in the video—though maybe not for me so much, as I’m not very good at music videos—but I saw people developing acting skills within their music videos. I found it fascinating, the way people used every part of themselves.

On a performance level, singers like Edith Piaf and Maria Callas have had a profound impact on me. I remember watching a video of Edith Piaf and being captivated by the raw emotion she conveyed through her facial expressions and hand movements. What struck me most about her was how her gestures seemed so spontaneous, as if she wasn’t consciously thinking about them at all. 

A dancer and choreographer who has significantly influenced my approach is Holly Blakey. I’ve worked with her on several important projects, including my performance at the BRITs in 2020 and a recent video for my current project. Holly helped me tap into the most primal version of myself, focussing on pure expression without being too self-conscious about appearance.

I’ve also been intrigued by performers who use masks in their work, as with the German dancer and choreographer Mary Wigman. Putting together this next piece of music and how I’ve envisaged performing it, I’ve really been asking myself: ‘Where do you maintain just being natural and that being enough? Where do you magnify elements to become more like the stage version of yourself? And where do you lose out on authenticity? And where are you protecting yourself?’ Sometimes costume is a really important part of performance, but then sometimes costume can actually prohibit. Costume can be this kind of armour to protect you and give you this sense of who you could be; but then sometimes you’re kind of engulfed by the mask. So  I think those are all important to consider in your physical gestures, in your performance.

For this album, I wanted to maintain a classic appeal in my sound and writing because it’s what works best with my voice. I’ve been inspired by great jazz standards and their structured writing, the emotion that remains in the narrative of the lyrics. That’s been key to how I’ve wanted to develop lyrically in my songwriting over the last two years.  

I think the work of Nina Simone has stayed quite ingrained. I went to the Monterey Jazz Festival a couple of years ago and explored their concert archives. One standout was a Nina Simone performance, where she played an improvised piece called ‘Stars Feelings’, which was full of emotion. This, along with songs like ‘Good Bait’, ‘Isn’t It a Pity?’, or ‘Just Like a Woman’. I love the style of piano that is heavy, classical, but also tinged with early jazz.  

And, naturally, I just came to be quite inspired by orchestral arrangements. I had opportunities to perform with orchestras and collaborated with the composer and conductor of the London Contemporary Orchestra, which helped me realise that achieving this sound was possible. I learnt to appreciate the grand scale and beauty of orchestral arrangements and how strings can contribute to my music. I wanted to balance this with disoriented and dystopian elements that come in to influence the sonic landscape of the album. But sometimes it’s quite difficult to incorporate this more brutalist, metallic sound while maintaining the warmth and richness of the voice and live instrumentation. In those last stages of producing my album, this balancing act has been a key focus. 

That’s a really interesting question. I suppose I’ve never really thought about how to be contemporary, nor do I try to be or particularly want to be. Often in my career, I’ve been asked what makes me relevant today, especially in meetings with record labels when I was starting out. But I’ve always chosen authenticity over trying to catapult myself into whatever representation of a musical future. I think that by staying true to myself, I’ve found a place in the musical landscape. While I’ve written new music that represents who I am, it’s not out in the world yet. Once it is, it might become clearer where I fit among my contemporaries and influences, both past and future.

Most of the time when I do music, it’s in a studio, but in the living room I often use my record player and plug in my computer to play my own instrumental pieces and sing along if I get an idea. It has nothing of a studio environment, which allows things to be spontaneous and relieves the pressure of being in a space where you’re supposed to do this task.  

This piano I have here is from a care home for the elderly. As you get older, your body starts to change. Not everything works as it’s meant to, and it’s similar for this piano, which goes out of tune about three days after tuning. But when I first put my fingers on it, I felt a unique connection. This piano has been in a place with people towards the end of their lives and has probably absorbed a lot of their experiences. It has seen a lot of life and death, and it seems to know a lot about the world.  

The first song I wrote is called ‘On with the Show’, which I feel could only be written in this living room on a very glum and grey winter day. It’s a song that reflects my journey of stepping away from other worlds to reconnect with my relationship to the stage. This sometimes means leaving behind relationships, including some friendships and romantic connections. Performing and holding the emotional weight of music requires immense energy, and if these relationships deplete that, they may need to be let go. This song marks my decision to focus on my own path, acknowledging that periods of intense musical focus are often solitary. While this solitude can be challenging, it’s an integral part of the process.

When I first walked into this house, I think I just had this feeling straight away. What I liked is that it had managed to maintain a lot of the older features like the radiators and those—I think it’s called cornering, but those details. My neighbour who’s an architect said that’s probably about a hundred years’ worth of paint, and that beneath, there’s a lot of detail—probably fruit—up there. One of my neighbours has apples, one has roses, but this looks like peaches to me. This house itself is kind of a mirror or a window into my imagination. It helps me to remember my thoughts, and it helps me to re-engage with ideas that I might just leave to the back of my mind. 

I go on little missions when I travel to do shows because I’m really interested in objects and design. This is a collection pot from a church in Lisbon. I found it at the Mercado de Santa Clara. I have a sort of superstition where I never put anything inside of it. I think it encourages greed. I just have this sense that if I leave it there open, then it’s a good omen. 

I also have a banknote from Jamaica, where I’m from, with an illustration of Nanny of the Maroons. I’ve only been twice, but this is important to me because the Maroon Indians are in my bloodline and my heritage in Jamaica. They were basically slaves that were native to Jamaica, and they led two revolts against slavery, one in the 1600s and one in the 1800s. Each uprising against slavery was very bloody and quite violent, and not that I relish the violence, but remembering that that’s in my heritage has really helped me to regain a sense of my own resilience when difficult things have happened in my life. Everything in here is from different places, but this bed I designed. I got a piece of wood and drew the headboard, and then a really nice lady called Lisa Burke helped me to arrange an upholsterer and a furniture designer to bring in the elements of the shape that I wanted. It’s my first attempt at really doing anything like that, but it showed me that if you really work on your shapes, you can make some really interesting things. I’d like to try it again and experiment more.

The chair upstairs. I had this drawing that just came to me one day. I’d never thought at all about making furniture, but I knew that it was a chair. I was in Cuba, and I stumbled across this wood workshop. I saw some carvings they’d done of the full female form, and I just knew straight away that they would be able to do it. We couldn’t speak any of the same language, but luckily, I had my drawing. I showed him, and he just understood it exactly as it was in my mind.  

I got to see it in progress about three days in. I was like, ‘Oh, it’s looking really good’. But he made the boobs massive, and I asked, ‘Can you just make them a bit smaller?’ In the end, it took them only a week and a half to make the chair. 

Well, for me, the title is the most important part. Sometimes they just pop into my head; other times, it’s from a conversation. With the title of my upcoming album, Woman of Faces, the inspiration actually came from a woman who had this title in the back of her head, and she just had a feeling that she needed to give it to me. As soon as I heard it, I knew it was exactly what I had been waiting for. The songs came quite effortlessly after that.

Her artist name is Kiddo. She’s an amazing person with an incredible spirit and presence. We met in America through someone I’ve worked with for a very long time. When we met, even though we didn’t speak about it explicitly, I felt we were overcoming similar hurdles in our lives. There was an unspoken understanding between us.

I guess she knew my voice and my music. Sometimes you can read a lot about a person from their music or even from a photo, from what you can see in their eyes. At that time, I had already been working on the album for about a year and a half. I had written a few songs that gave me the overarching sense that this was the phrase I needed. This title gave me a deep understanding of a woman’s experience in the world, including my own and what I see in others. It provided the explanation I needed for whatever I was facing in my own complexity. Essentially, it was, ‘OK, I don’t have all the answers right now, but at least I can acknowledge that it exists within me and learn to navigate what those shifting faces or parts of myself are’. It helped me to have a sort of diagnosis. And maybe this was someone who could see that I was dealing with trying to understand or uncover different parts of myself. 

There have definitely been points, especially in the last five years, where I’ve worked tirelessly and questioned what it was all for. I’ve faced obstacles, like everyone does, and I’ve questioned whether music was something I actually wanted to do anymore. It’s not an easy world, and I committed to it at 16—a very young age to choose a path that would shape the next 14 years of my life. I’ve come a long way and managed to achieve many of the things I wanted at that age. I went through phases where I had thoughts of depression and didn’t really understand what they were or why I had them. I suppose it was because I was only working, and my sole sense of fulfilment and connection was in my music. In the quiet moments, I would often find myself alone and feeling bad, without understanding why. I’ve learnt what that was, and now I try to maintain balance.

I think part of it was being in love with someone who had to maintain a sense of connection to the world. I learnt a lot from observing the effort they put into staying on a good path, and I sort of started to see the mechanisms that we can bring into our own life to give us that sense of level-headedness.  

But there are times when I need a high level of focus, which can detract from maintaining that balance. This is the phase I’m in right now, and sometimes it’s unclear how long it will last. The difference between now and when I was younger is that I now have an awareness of the need for balance in my life.

I think it’s always an ongoing battle. Some songs you write with people that you haven’t necessarily written with before and there can be some pressure to release tracks that don’t fully align with your vision. This pressure continues up to the deadline for handing over the album. Even now, I’m navigating crucial decisions and facing ultimatums like, ‘If you don’t use this song, you might not be able to release the album’. It’s challenging, but I’ve persevered and trusted that when I present my work, the relevance of each piece will be understood. In the end, it’s my identity on the line, and the judgement falls on me—not the people behind the scenes.  

As a woman in a male-dominated industry, making my voice heard can be particularly challenging. There’s often an echo chamber of male opinions. I remember a quote—‘Do not listen to the voices of men who only listen to themselves’—which stuck with me early in my career. It reminded me to keep my voice clear for myself and to have vigilance in maintaining the connection with who I am.  

I think it’s important to ensure that the work reaching the audience is truthful and not diluted by the industry’s filtering process. Maintaining its potency and purity so that people receive it in its truest form.