‘Love is love’: Jess Glynne on burnout, Beyoncé – and finding happiness with Alex Scott
Jess Glynne is one of the most successful British singers of all time. She has had seven UK No 1 singles: more than her heroes, Amy Winehouse and Adele; more than Kate Bush, Sade or Annie Lennox; more, indeed, than any other solo British female artist ever. Yet, during the past five years – spent almost entirely out of the spotlight – she seriously considered giving it all up for good. “I fell in and out of love with music,” the 34-year-old Londoner tells me, when we meet in the library of a Soho members’ club. “I was deeply unhappy. I felt I was only seen as a product; I wasn’t seen as a human being.”
Chances are that even if you are un-fam-iliar with Glynne’s name, you would recognise her voice. It has a fierce and direct quality, a raw, soul--ful tone with an edge of hoarseness and distinctive vibrato. It was the voice of the dance-music outfit Clean Bandit’s inescapable 2013 track Rather Be, of which she says now, “I thought it was a good song, but it was just a day’s session for me.”
Its success made her an in-demand collaborator on chart--topping hits with Rudimental, Tinie Tempah and the producer Route 94, after which she scored three solo No 1 singles – Hold My Hand, Don’t Be So Hard on Yourself and I’ll Be There – and a pair of UK chart-topping albums – I Cry When I Laugh (in 2015) and Always In Between (2018). But by the end of a world tour in 2019, she was feeling “really burnt out”. During the course of the tour, she had been hosp-it-al-ised for exhaustion and, she recalls, “I rem-em-ber being like, ‘Whoa! Take it away! I don’t wanna see a mic-ro-phone, I don’t want to see a studio, I just want to have a moment to recalibrate my brain.’ ”
So she planned a short break, which, when Covid hit in 2020, became a longer hiatus. “I was actually quite relieved at first that I got a minute and I didn’t have to have an excuse.” She spent time cooking, decorating, going for walks and “waving at friends from a distance”. She taught herself more about music production and started learning to play the drums.
But as the enforced break stretched on, shadows crept in. Her grandmother died of Covid at a time when pandemic rules prevented family visits, an experience Glynne has described as -“horrific”. Then, in 2021, came the sudden and unexpected death of a close friend. “It was very dramatic, and it really scared me,” she says. “It made me think about how short life is.” Having already had doubts about the direction of her career, now, she says, “my insecurity was so high. I was really scared to go back into the studio.”
In March 2021, something happened that shattered what remained of her confidence. During a podcast with a friend, the comedian Mo Gilligan, she mentioned a visit to a “tranny strip club”. A cancel culture backlash saw her social media feeds deluged with abuse and threats from those who accused her of repeating a transphobic slur. “It felt like the world caved in on me,” says Glynne, who responded to the vicious trolling by deleting her accounts. “People can be so aggressive. They hear one thing and all just jump on this bandwagon, and… it feels like the world is over. For a period, I was like, ‘Oh my God, I can’t breathe, how do I get out?’”
Glynne, who is bisexual, had felt she belonged to the LGBTQ+ community, yet had no sense that the term “tranny” could be considered offensive. “The way I said it wasn’t even an attack, it was actually me celebrating a community that I’m a part of, and that I love,” she says. “And instead of that community being supportive and saying, ‘Oh, by the way, Jess, you know what, that word is actually really uncomfortable’, there were death threats and all these awful things.”
Although wary of reigniting the controversy, Glynne insists that, if we don’t permit people to make innocent mistakes with the terminology, “How are we ever going to learn? And how are we ever going to grow if we don’t allow each other the space to ask questions, or to make mistakes? We’re in a moment where there’s being gay, there’s non-binary, straight, bisexual, transgender – there’s so many different things that we’re being introduced to. Why can’t we get it wrong?”
Glynne did eventually issue an apology, but the incident left her wary of expressing herself in public. “For a year or two, I really thought about everything I said,” she says now. “I know that I am not a bad person, and if I make a mistake and I say the wrong thing, that’s who I am. I can’t change that. But it’s taken me a long time to get to that point.”
Since last summer, Glynne has been in a relationship with Alex Scott, the sports broadcaster and former England women’s footballer. They have posted pictures on Instagram from their holidays together, and while attending events such as the BBC Sports Personality of the Year. When I ask about Scott, Glynne smiles.
“Over the years, I’ve never hidden who I am. I’m a very open person. I believe that love is love,” she says. “And I’ve never hidden the fact that I’ve been in relationships with men, and I’ve been in relationships with women. That’s a massive side of my life.”
She demurs from discussing the relationship further, however. “I am cagey,” she admits. “I find it too precious to share all of that. I’m sensitive. I’m a real family girl, I’m a lover, and I like to protect those worlds for myself.”
Glynne was raised in a close-knit Jewish family in Muswell Hill, north London. “As a kid, all I ever wanted to do was sing. If I love a song and I want to match it and be able to do the riffs, I will just sing it and sing it and sing it. My mum and dad would be like, ‘Come on, Jess. Think of the neighbours!’”
Next month, she will release a new single, Enough, which she describes as “a song I wrote about protecting myself after all the s--- I’ve been through”. She wrote it during a period when she was living alone in Los Angeles, feeling “really depressed, lost and lonely”, listening to Joni Mitchell on repeat and crying “because I just didn’t know how to express myself”. An early version of the song caught the ear of Greg Kurstin, Adele’s producer, who collaborated with Glynne on the finished track.
“I’ve wanted to work with Greg from the beginning of my career; I’ve always looked up to Adele, and what he’s done with her is amazing,” says Glynne. “So just the fact that he liked what I was doing, I was so flattered, it made me feel that I am good enough.”
It can be hard to reconcile this note of underlying insecurity with the confident woman in front of me. Glynne’s career has pretty much been a success from the word go. Yet it’s increasingly clear that it came at some personal cost. Behind the scenes, she says, “I’ve been pulled in a lot of different directions: told I’m not allowed to do this; I have to wear this and go there; I have to be that; I can’t say this and I can’t do that. This industry likes to pit women against each other, like you’re in competition for who’s the best dressed, who looks better or sounds better. It’s really sad, actually. It’s the breaking of so many women.”
In recent publicity photos and videos, Glynne seems to have chosen to represent herself in a much more sexually overt way, wearing revealing outfits and posing for the kind of provocative pictures that she’d never have contemplated -earlier in her career. “I really was in a very restricted bubble within my team,” she explains now. “I was genuinely told, ‘You can’t be sexy, you need to be relatable.’ For a long time, I was shamed, or made to feel like I couldn’t be sexy. And so I was insecure about those things.”
In January 2022, Glynne split from Atlantic, her management and record label, and subsequently signed with Roc Nation, the American entertainment company founded by the superstar rapper Jay-Z. “It was,” she admits, “a really scary decision to make.” In the two years since, she has been recording on and off, working closely with Jay Brown, Roc Nation co-founder and vice chairman, whom she describes as “a very clever man and a very humble human being”.
She has also met Jay-Z and his megastar wife, Beyoncé. “I absolutely idolised Beyoncé, growing up. It takes a lot for me in social scenarios, I get quite intimidated and go into myself. But the moment we met, they made me feel important. Jay-Z’s a very funny man, very warm. We were watching Beyoncé’s show, and the last thing he said to me before he walked off was, ‘It’s your turn. You’re up next.’”
Now, she reveals, her long-awaited third album is almost ready to announce. “I’ve just got one song to bloody finish,” she says. “I want the album to tell a story about vulnerability and power, being brave, showing all sides to who I am. I want it to be unapologetic.”
Glynne’s moment of doubt and questioning her musical vocation has passed, leading her to the conclusion that, “I’ll always sing, no matter what. There’s an element of pressure, but I’ve come to look at pressure as a privilege. I’ve worked way too hard and fought way too many battles just to be giving up.”
She leans forward in her chair, an irrepressible smile spreading across her face. “I know who I am,” she says. “I’m a winner. I just am.”
Jess Glynne’s new single, Enough (EMI) will be released on Feb 16. Tickets for her UK summer shows are available from livenation.co.uk
