The Full Hot Press Cover Story with Dua Lipa

On October 30, 2015 Dua Lipa climbed into the back of a London cab and asked the driver to turn on the radio. Her heart was thumping as the car slipped into the afternoon traffic. The singer had been tipped off that DJ Annie Nightingale was about to play Lipa’s debut single, ‘Be The One’, for the very first time. The singer, who had dreamed of stardom since she was a child living with her family in Kosovo, had never heard herself on the radio. She was excited – but terrified too.

Through the London streets they drove. Song followed song – but no ‘Be The One’, no life-changing moment. Doubt began to creep in. Had she been misinformed? Maybe Nightingale decided at the last minute that she hated the track and binned it? Lipa was rigid with nerves by the time the taxi pulled up outside her flat and she pressed a tenner into the cabbie’s fist.

“The whole way home, I had the radio on and I was waiting, and I was waiting, and I was waiting, and they still hadn’t played the song,” Lipa would recall. “I’d arrived home, I quickly ran through the door, turned the radio on, and the song started playing! I collapsed on the floor and I was in tears, and I just couldn’t believe what was happening. It was so exciting.”

Three years later, it’s unlikely Lipa could anonymously hail a taxi and vanish into the London rush hour. Or that she would be moved to tears by hearing herself on radio. She’s a chart-slaying superstar – the most streamed woman on Spotify in 2017 (ahead of Beyoncé, Taylor Swift, Rihanna, Lorde etc) and, incredibly, the first British female singer since Adele to reach the UK number one spot (with ‘New Rules’). Tellingly, 50% of the sales of her album, Dua Lipa, have been physical – confirming that she is an artist of substance, rather than just an internet phenomenon.

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She’s also been heralded in the music press – Hot Press was among her earliest champions and was the first Irish publication to interview her – as embodying a new, confident and thoughtful generation of female performers; and she has been garlanded in awards – including two recent Brits, for British Female Solo Artist and British Breakthrough Artist. She is, in short, an extraordinary phenomenon.

At an event widely criticised as formulaic and drab, Lipa’s performance of ‘New Rules’ set the 2018 Brits ablaze. Recreating the YouTube-busting video (746 million plays and counting) in which she is consoled by friends as she fights the urge to return to a rubbish boyfriend, Lipa and her phalanx of hoofers, stompers and preeners lit up London’s O2 Arena – not so much seizing the moment as crushing the rest to a pulp.

She was commandeering the zeitgeist in more ways than one. The #MeToo movement appeared to have bypassed the Brits until Lipa made her entrance. Though unstated, the subtext of ‘New Rules’ was clear – and powerfully relevant. Sometimes women need to stand up for one another and put predatory men back in their box.

“I feel girls should be looking after girls all the time,” she said later. “What I really wanted to portray [with the song] was not just girls but anyone, really, being able to lean on their friends for advice. Nothing is better than being nice and looking after one another. Now more than ever, we need that in the world.”

That Lipa is a strong woman prepared to fight her corner will be already perfectly clear to her millions of social media followers. She famously took to task an Australian journalist who claimed she’d fibbed when crying off a Bruno Mars tour to have her wisdom teeth extracted. He noted that she’d since appeared on Jimmy Kimmel – not realising the spot had been pre-recorded months previously.

“If you were a good journalist you would’ve done proper research instead of talking out of your ass,” she said on Twitter. “Jimmy Kimmel was shot in Feb in LA and aired yesterday. I’ve been in Australia on bed rest and wouldn’t have cancelled my Bruno shows if I didn’t have to.”

That sort of spat notwithstanding, on the surface, Lipa’s rise looks effortless. She has an irresistible voice – husky but vulnerable – and knockout charisma. Even before ‘New Rules’ set the charts ablaze, she carried herself like a popstar – confident, a bit mysterious, dripping drop-dead magnetism.

In truth, however, life has not been at all easy for the 22-year-old. Her parents are Albanians from Kosovo. When the conflict between the tiny nation which is ethnically Albanian, and bordering Serbia blew up in 1999, countries around the world accepted Kosovan refugees, many forced from their homes by Milosevic and his thugs.

A few made it to Ireland. Lipa’s parents, for their part, found their way to London, where their young daughter was born, on August 22 1995. She spent her early childhood listening to Christina Aguilera and the Stereophonics.

“I was too young to understand the lyrics,” she would recall. “I didn’t think a career like this was possible. I didn’t think something like this was within my reach.”

When she was 11, the family moved back to Kosovo. Pristina felt universes removed from London, and though proud of her homeland, Lipa could feel her dreams of stardom slipping between her fingers.

“I’ve always been independent from a very young age,” she told me. ”I’ve always seen myself doing this. It really was a playground dream.”

She refused to let that dream die. At 15, she did something most of us would not have dared – telling her parents she wanted to return to London: she would look after herself there.

“Music there was so different,” she said of Pristina in an interview with a UK newspaper. “It just didn’t compare to the pop stars I’d see on TV, like Britney Spears and Destiny’s Child.”

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Was she going to stay on her own?

“There was an older girl from Kosovo moving to London at the same time and my parents knew her parents, so they said I could live with her. Like a kind of guardian.”

Things didn’t quite work out as planned.

“She was super-busy with her boyfriend and stressed with her studies. So I’d have lots of friends over all the time and I’d always be on FaceTime with my parents.

“The cooking and the cleaning… that was tough,” she added. “I mean, the realisation that no one was going to clean up after me was tough! But stuff like that really made me grow up before my time. It helped me mature, I guess, and made me who I am today.”

She’s given back to Kosovo with bells-on since becoming famous. In 2016 she returned for a hometown show, where she met the President and played to a festival-scale audience at Gërmia Park, in the foothills outside the capital. In this age of Brexit, when Britain is convulsed over questions as to what kind of country it wishes to be, Lipa unselfconsciously waves a banner for Pan-European multiculturalism – simply by topping the charts, she’s a repudiation of the dangerous nostalgia of William Rees-Mogg and his fellow neo-Victorians.

“I feel I represent Kosovo,” she said. “Everyone has been so supportive from the very beginning. When I put out my first song, ‘New Love’, all my reviews came from Kosovo and Albania. They really root for you and support you.”

Lipa didn’t quite grow up in public – but her early steps as a musician were taken in plain view, if you knew where to look. As a young teenager, she posted videos of herself singing on YouTube. As she would acknowledge today, she was far from the finished article. Her voice, even then, was fantastic. What she lacked was a distinctive style and so it’s not entirely surprising that the producers and record companies to which she reached out took a pass. She was young, unpolished – just another awkward adolescent dreaming of the stars.

“I think you shouldn’t have a Plan B,” she would say of that period in her life. “That way you are 100% focused on your goal. I was using YouTube to post loads of covers online. I guess I had something to show people. It was Nelly Furtado mixed with J. Cole. People were going, ‘This is crazy’.”

Expanding on her hop influences, she says: “I love street artists – graffiti… anything urban. I have a fascination with the old New York of the ‘70s – the Studio 54 days. It’s so iconic… you hear the stories from that time and they’re absolutely mesmerising. Definitely, the things that shape me go way beyond music.”

Her breakthrough was the song ‘Hotter Than Hell’, the demo of which found its way to songwriters Adam Midgley, Tommy Baxter and Gerard O’Connell, and producer Stephen Kozmeniuk.

A Canadian who’d started out in the indie band, Boy, Kozmeniuk stumbled into production. In Toronto he’d been put in touch with Nelly Furtado, which led to a gig as one of 12 credited producers on Madonna’s MDNA. By the time he came into contact with Lipa he was riding high after the placing of his song ‘The Blacker The Berry’ on Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp A Butterfly.

“When I was an artist, I was always in a bedroom, tinkering with equipment and trying to learn how to record,” he said. “Around 2004, I realised I wasn’t a good enough singer to make it. To be a great artist, you have to have a voice.

“Being on the road is hard, and when you’re in a band it’s a constant thing. I’m someone who needs more stability in my life. Sleeping on floors in dirty hotels, you have to love that performing life. I’d rather just write music.”

He and Lipa were a natural match in the studio and he would go on to produce all of Dua Lipa. She was toiling hard on the record by the time Hot Press caught up with her in early 2016. Though attracting attention within the industry, in the real world Lipa was still unknown and this magazine was among the first to recognise her potential, featuring her prominently as part of our Hot For 2016 countdown.

Absurd though it seems in retrospect, her biggest problem at the time were comparisons to Americana siren Lana Del Rey. They shared a management company, TAP, leading many (not Hot Press, it must be said) to declare her the “British Lana”.

“I get compared to Lana a lot because we have the same manager,” she told me. “That’s inevitable. I’m a new artist. You are always going to be likened to someone else. They put you in a box and you have to accept that. As more of my music comes out, though, I think people are going to form a different opinion.”

“Dua was always an easier proposition than most because she has such a clear idea of what she likes,” Joe Kentish, senior A&R manager at Warner Music, told The Fader around the same time. “Just as importantly she knew what she didn’t like.”

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Lipa has always regarded her songwriting as her chief strength – more than her voice or stage presence. Paradoxically, ‘New Rules’ was a co-write by Caroline Ailin, Emily Warren and Ian Kirkpatrick (who has composed for Christina Aguilera, Justin Bieber and Chris Brown). The tune came out of a “writing camp” for X Factor winners Little Mix.

The genesis of the track, Warren has stated, was advice she received early in her career not to write a love song that men would “not get”. She eventually cast aside this received wisdom and gave herself a “new rule” of being true to herself.

“I come from the pop world where the rule I was taught was to never write a song that made it seem like the guy wasn’t gonna ‘get it’,” she told website The Young Folks. “I followed that for quite some time, but I really only started getting songs cut by artists, and released, when I stopped following rules – no pun intended.

“‘New Rules’ does just that, and it came about in a session with my friends Ian Kirkpatrick and Caroline Ailin, because this was something Caroline was dealing with at the time. All we wanted to do was write the truth, write her story and create something that would help her and, in turn, many others deal with the temptation of going back to someone who clearly doesn’t deserve you.”

Little Mix didn’t pick up the track – and they weren’t alone in rejecting it.

“‘New Rules’, without mentioning any names, was passed up before Dua cut it, because the artist (in question) didn’t really think it had a substantial hook,” Kirkpatrick told The Fader. “Granted, the demo sounds much different because Dua’s voice changed that entire song from average to amazing, in my opinion.”

Lipa, meanwhile, was informing her social media followers that she had postponed her LP’s release to record several more numbers. She flew to Los Angeles in early 2017 where Kirkpatrick played her ‘New Rules’. Straight away, she knew her life would never be the same again.

“I still take a lot of pride in being able to write my own songs,” she said. “My story’s coming from me. But ‘New Rules’ is a song that I felt like I had been in the room and written. I’m so close with Emily and Caroline and Ian, who had worked on it,that I feel like it was a song they had written with me in mind. I’m proud of it, as if I had been in that room. I just feel so close to it.”

“Obviously ‘New Rules would have never happened if Dua hadn’t heard the song and had loved it,” added Kirkpatrick. “She had her input on it and everything. In the end, it’s really up to the artists and their team to choose the right work.”

Finding her feet in a cut-throat business had been tough, she told me. She has since equalled Adele’s chart topping success – but starting out, the popularity of big-lunged ballad singers had been to her disadvantage. “It was tough,” Lipa nodded. “You’d go from meeting to meeting… It was my voice people were into. But I’d get a lot of: ‘We’re not really looking to work with a pop act’.

“Things can get really scary when you’re about to drop a song or put a new video out. As much as I think it’s great, there’s that underlying element of wondering what everyone else’s opinions are. But ultimately, if I believe in it and the lyrics come from a true place, then I’ve just go to go with it.”

Dua Lipa plays Electric Picnic (August 31-September 2)