By January, she was shut in her bedroom with the blinds down, holding her new dog, Imani. She flew home, determined to get herself together in the month before her headlining tour began, and she opened the Brits ceremony. “I don’t think I’m crying because I’m happy,” she recalls. There she learned she was nominated for three Brits, up with Lewis Capaldi, Dave and Stormzy for the most nods.
She went to the Maldives with an aunt and an “overflowing cup of negative thoughts about myself”. “Exhausting.”īy December 2019, Mabel’s career was sparkling – Don’t Call Me Up was the year’s ninth biggest song in the UK – but her self-esteem had tanked. “Too high? Too low? Too pop? Too Afrobeats, it’s not going to play on this radio station.” She sighs. Once a confident collaborator, now she questioned every note. By 2019, “I was so busy I was hardly making music.” From the four days Mabel had in the studio that year, she felt painfully conscious that you’re “only as good as the last record”. What happens when your coping mechanism makes you anxious? The irony is even worse, she jokes. Growing up in Stockholm, Mabel wrote songs to calm her anxiety. Gripped by fear of letting everyone down, “I actually just ended up letting myself down.” “I was getting messages telling me to do awful things to myself.” Maybe they were right, she thought: she didn’t deserve this success. “People telling me I’m what’s wrong with pop music,” she says. Inevitably, people noticed – little of her easy humour and intelligence came through – and she binged on the negative comments. ‘It’s all I’ve ever wanted and now I’ve got it, I feel like I don’t deserve it.’ Mabel opens the 2020 Brits at the O2 in London, before winning an award. She started underperforming on purpose, “almost like if I stay in the safe zone of about 50%, there’s less chance bad things are going to happen and people are gonna hate me”. As the audiences multiplied, so did her lifelong anxiety and a new fear of failure. “I put out Don’t Call Me Up on 18 January 2018 and basically didn’t have a day off from then until the end of the year.” (Despite her brain-scrambling schedule, she has an acute memory for dates.) Mabel and her team were new to this kind of success, learning on the fly: sure it makes sense to fly to Australia for a 36-hour visit, then New York for 48. Pop stardom happened so quickly, “it’s like my soul didn’t catch up with my body”, she says. The house and buzzing family environment (her godparents live next door) also represent Mabel establishing sturdier roots as she attempts all that again – with album two, the very good, very clubby About Last Night – albeit with a strictly healthier approach.
“Feeling like an outsider when I was younger makes me want everybody to feel welcome,” she says now, sounding sinusy from an immune condition. She once said she didn’t want to make music you needed a degree to enjoy. She found her voice as a no-nonsense, sex-positive R&B singer, then became the first lady of the UK’s Afrobeats-influenced pop scene, and a dance belter who brought a raised eyebrow to the club womp of Jax Jones and Joel Corry. In 2020 she won the Brit award for best British female, positioning her as the next Dua Lipa, although Mabel occupied a different lane.
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