Jessie Ware, the singer, podcaster, mother and wife, opens the door to her rather gorgeous end-of-terrace house in south London and, immediately, lets me into her blur of a world.
She rushes us into the kitchen and offers me toast, tea and a cookie she insists will still taste nice, despite being burnt. It is mid-afternoon. Earlier Ware taped her popular podcast, Table Manners, which she hosts with her mother, Lennie. Special guest? The Friends star Lisa Kudrow. Soon her children will be home from school. She is expecting an Uber, to pick up an outfit for a wedding she is singing at the next day.
“Two minutes away!” she says, sending a voice note to someone that ends “Sorry babes!” — as we settle in the lounge, next to a sleepy cat.
“I think I’m quite exhausting to be with quite a lot of the time,” she admits, talking quickly and punchily, her long hair and big earrings seemingly in constant motion. “But then also, I’m exhausted…”
Ware with her mother, Lennie, on ITV’s This MorningKen McKay/ITV/Shutterstock
No wonder she is relatable. Ware’s knack for mixing a public personality with something more homespun, and lots of sharing, is why Table Manners has more than 60 million downloads, with guests ranging from Paul McCartney to Margot Robbie. It has a simple format in a complex world — Ware, 41, and Lennie, 74, cook for guests and they talk.
“It is Mum, more than me,” Ware says about the podcast’s success. They amped it up over Covid, “to keep Mum sane”.
Lennie divorced Ware’s father, the journalist John Ware, when the singer was ten, and raised her, her elder sister, Hannah, and younger brother, Alex, alone. John Ware had been unfaithful and was estranged from his daughter for years. “Mum is quite fabulous,” she says. “And the podcast is nurturing, nourishing, even if we did argue today.” She grins. “Yet it’s still loving.”
Indeed, given that there are almost 400 episodes of Table Manners, listeners can be forgiven for forgetting that talking to famous people is not really Ware’s job. That she is actually a platinum-selling singer who emerged 15 years ago, having gone to the same south London private school, Alleyn’s, that spawned Florence Welch and gave her a foothold that led to work with Kylie Minogue and Ed Sheeran.
Her sixth record, Superbloom, is out this week and it is a euphoric blast of disco, funk and fun — with the recent video Ride showing Ware really getting to know James Norton. “I don’t want to sound like a dick, but people at the school gates said ‘thank you’ for that video,” she says. “It has brought up conversations.”
With James Norton for the Ride video
Her voice has never been stronger, and from the Botticelli-like album cover down, the whole project continues Ware’s pivot to dance music that started with her fourth album, What’s Your Pleasure? in 2020 and broke her away from the more soft and soulful electronica of her debut, Devotion, from 2012.
“Oh God, have you had to listen to all of my records?” she asks, gasping. Of course. And I noticed that, unlike many pop stars who tend to write slower songs the older they get, Ware appears to have gone from the dinner party of her breakthrough to the party of her later work…
“You thought it used to be background dinner party music?” she asks, scoffing. Hang on. Portishead have been called dinner party music. It’s no insult. “No, I hear you,” she says, laughing. “I started out at the same time as the xx and we would do these soft voices…” She whispers: “‘Don’t mind us…’” But now she thinks of clubs these songs might fill? “Yes, I’m ready to step into that space.
“But I’ve had a funny trajectory,” she continues. “Writing my first record was beautiful — I didn’t feel pressure. But then there was definitely the sense of, ‘Right, what are we going to do now?’ And I thought they wanted me to be an Adele, and that’s where it got muddied. So my recent records, really, have been the return to my main love, club music. This is a celebration. And — without sounding smug — I wanted to celebrate myself.”
I say she sounds contented on Superbloom. “I agree,” she says. “But it’s not the sexiest thing to say you’re loving domesticity — even if we should celebrate it and romance, connection, and not apologise for being female pop stars in our forties.”
Which brings us to sex — of which the new album has quite a lot. “Hold my hips/ Watch me move,” go the lyrics for Ride. “On the rug/ Baby keep it up,” goes Mr Valentine. Ware has been married to the personal trainer and her teenage boyfriend, Sam Burrows, since 2014 and this is new territory in pop, an industry whose female stars are largely expected to sing sad songs about men before disappearing for babies.
Ware laughs. “I remember when I got married,” she says. “I was 29 and kept being asked, ‘Oh, you are married? How are you going to write a song now?’ It is ridiculous. But I also cannot pretend I’m going through heartbreak by a bloke every day, because I’m not. I have a brilliant, secure, fantastic man who supports me, but we’re at this weird age, aren’t we?”
At a House Against Hate gig, earlier this yearAndy Barton/Alamy
In what way? “Well, it’s when your kids are slightly older,” she explains. “All of them at school. You’re no longer up in the night. You’re not doing nappies. They are more independent and so maybe your relationship with your partner transitions from saying, ‘Are you doing that feed?’ It is that reclaiming of your sexual identity, needs, wants. Also, you start to understand how you view your body again, which has been a vessel and a tool. It’s a really interesting time, your forties, because you are near midlife. You are nearing a time when you think about dying, but this is a sweet spot, where you want to cram in as much fun as possible. It’s a frenzied time.”
Something has changed. In the past six months Robyn has sung about IVF, Lily Allen dived into her break-up, Florence Welch opened up about her pregnancy difficulties and Sophie Ellis-Bextor has tackled the menopause. “We are all laying it bare,” Ware says of such similar-aged singers.
“Madonna made it easier for people like me to talk about desire and sex,” she says. “But you have to talk about Tracey Emin too, who’s been herself unapologetically. The openness with how she talked about abortion, rape or illness? As a woman, to be so bold? She’s remarkable and is one of the women who opened the conversation up — to be vulnerable.”
I wonder what her children — two sons, one daughter, all at primary school — make of her job. “Well, they are not privy to the fame thing,” she says. “Because I don’t have anyone camping outside my house, or tabloids writing about me. I live a normal life and do school drop-off. My kids know I sing and will come to a show, get bored, but like the sweets backstage. My daughter says, ‘Mummy, Taylor Swift is my favourite and I like you, but Gracie Abrams beats you as well.’ And it’s fine. It’d be f***ing weird if I was her favourite artist.”
Still, it is hard. Ware’s job takes her round the world. The new song 16 Summers tackles this head-on. “I was having a chat with a podcast guest about how you only get 16 summers with your kids,” she explains. “And I thought, ‘My God, that’s bleak.’” Which sage-like guest? “Jason Manford!” She laughs.
“But it is my biggest fear. I’ve had success during the time I need to be the best version of a mother. In music, you can be pulled left, right and centre and it is gloriously exciting, but will also take you from your real life. I never allowed myself to have a proper maternity leave, which I regret — I’m forever haunted by a feeling of guilt. It’s a juggle and a struggle, constant negotiation. For instance, I do shorter tours. I’m not willing to be away from my kids for longer than three weeks.”
“Also,” she adds, quietly, “16 Summers felt like a different song to me when a friend of ours passed away. She passed away six weeks after her diagnosis, so that song was therefore not necessarily about me. It was more about loving and cherishing every second with somebody. You never know when you’re going to go.”
As such, she was once asked to fly to the US on Mother’s Day to be on a US chat show — she turned it down. And while on holiday in Sri Lanka, she was asked to play a New Year’s Eve party in the Maldives. “I thought, ‘Maybe I could…’ But then I went, ‘What am I doing? I’m on holiday with my family!’” How does she decide the right amount of career? “Sam’s a very good soundboard,” she says. “He knows when I’ve bitten off more than I can chew, or am taking the piss.”
Ware could chat for days. People who do podcasts need to be talkative, but her knack for a seamless conversation is one reason Table Manners works — a conversation always running in her brain. We talk about how Liam Gallagher used a tribute gig to the victims of the Ariana Grande concert attack in 2017 to air his new hit, Wall of Glass. “When everyone wanted Live Forever!” Ware blurts out. “Actually, you couldn’t have done Live Forever.” She pauses. “Well, you could actually.”
Then it was this year’s Baftas, at which she sang Barbra Streisand’s The Way We Were for the In Memoriam section. “I was so nervous,” she says. “I’ve definitely sung it better.”
Performing at the Baftas in FebruaryStuart Wilson/BAFTA/Getty Images
Can she imagine recording an album entirely made up of standards like that Streisand song? “That’s 10 or 20 years down the line,” she says, smiling. Next, we slide towards her brief stint as a journalist after school on The Jewish Chronicle — “Really good mini-bagels” — before going deeper to discuss whether in times of heightened antisemitism people may feel they have to hide their Jewishness. “But everyone knows I’m Jewish,” she says, bluntly. “My podcast was born out of Friday night dinners. I’ve never shied from my cultural heritage and never want to.”
And this is how it is with Ware. In conversation she is exactly as she was when I turned up to her house — she exists in a state of controlled mania, balancing many ideas and tasks. I tell her that when I met Barry Manilow — “Oh my God! We want him on the podcast!” — he told me that his tombstone will read: “Musician”. So, what will it say for Ware, a woman with many hats?
“Probably ‘Singer’,” she says. “I don’t think ‘Podcaster’ is going to look good on a tombstone. Actually, I don’t think I’ll have any of those — I’ll have ‘Beloved…’ ‘Beloved wife and adored, cherished partner’. Then ‘Mother’. ‘Greatest mother of all’.’’ She bursts out laughing. I hear a child in the corridor. Ware is making burgers for dinner. “I don’t f***ing know!” she continues of her tombstone. “In brackets it could say ‘She sung sometimes’.”
Superbloom is out on Apr 17
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