Ware

A few weeks before I met Tina Turner in 1982, I saw her playing in London. I was a big fan. Even though I was known for making electronic music, I loved all kinds and River Deep, Mountain High was my favourite song. But back then, she didn’t have a recording contract. The only way she could earn money independently was by doing what they used to call the chicken-in-a-basket circuit in America, touring her old hits. It was staggering really. She could earn good money doing that, but didn’t want to for the rest of her…

Jessie Ware deliberately wanted the opening track of That! Feels Good! to sound like a group of people at an orgy. Featuring the likes of Kylie Minogue, actor Jamie Demetriou, Radio 1 host Clara Amfo, producer Benny Blanco and Ware’s mother (and co-host of the hit podcast Table Manners) Lennie all whispering the album’s title, it has the same brain-scratching satisfaction as an ASMR video, albeit one tempting you into the velveted opulence of Ware’s exceptional fifth album. It’s a record that delights in its author’s…

The song originally appeared on the singer's recent LP, That! Feels Good! Jessie Ware has surprised fans with a new version of her song, “Freak Me Now.” The single, produced by Stuart Price, originally appeared on Ware’s album That! Feels Good! and is a collaboration with electronic pop singer Róisín Murphy. The pair will release a music video for the track, directed by Sophia Muller and Theo James, on Friday. “It is a huge honor to have the queen of disco, Róisín Murphy on ‘Freak…

In the wave of glitterball-dazzled pop-dance albums that sparkled a little light into 2020’s gloom, Dua Lipa’s Future Nostalgia was the world-beating monster smash – No 1 in 15 countries, 10bn streams and counting on Spotify. Kylie Minogue’s Disco, meanwhile, was the career-boosting critical and commercial hit, restoring its author to her natural habitat after forays into country and Christmas albums. But Jessie Ware’s What’s Your Pleasure? was the classiest. In contrast to the neon-hued Future Nostalgia and Disco, it…

Decades before Thatcher declared there was “no alternative” to the dominance of free markets and privatisation, Britain was home to several progressive, utopian experiments in how to build a society that centred human flourishing and collective need. But the story of these experiments, and of the ideals that underpinned them, doesn’t have a particularly happy ending. There were momentary triumphs, of course, but the overall arc is clear. Time after time, high-minded principles of public luxury were diluted and ultimately…