Dua Lipa: Enigmatic for the People

When she was 15 years-old Dua Lipa moved to Kosovo with her family. Mum and dad are ethnically Albanian and had been hankering to return to the old country, which they’d fled during the upheavals of the early ‘90s.
But Lipa had grown up in London and studied at stage school in Liverpool and was already dreaming of a career in music. She found herself staring from the balcony of the family’s cramped Pristina apartment drinking in the endless grey of Kosovo’s capital, a riot of Cold War era brutalist architecture stretching into the horizon. Something clicked in her head. She didn’t belong here – she needed to get out.
“I flew back to the UK, on my own,” says the singer. “Was it scary? Of course. I was confident as a teenager. But it was a big decision. I started living with friends. That was the point in my life when things started clicking into place.”
Six years later, her family is back in London (turns out they couldn’t reacclimatise either) and Lipa is on the cusp of stardom. She’s signed to the same management company that helped make Lana Del Rey the preeminent chanteuse of the age and was shortlisted for the 2016 Brits Critics Choice Award. But perhaps her most impressive attribute is her music – hazy, hard-punching alterna-pop, sufficiently catchy for mainstream radio but with enough off-centre glamour to appeal to those who prefer their sirens dark and elusive. She’s the complete package – an enigma wrapped in a mystery with a big glittery bow on top.
“I get compared to Lana a lot because we have the same manager,” she offers. “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.”
She appears to have arrived fully formed. Yet behind the scenes her story has had its share of toil and struggle. Upon returning from Kosovo as a teenager, door after door slammed in her face. The vogue at the time was for Adele-style torch singers and, while Lipa is an accomplished belter, her sinuous weirdo-pop didn’t fit in, at least not at first.
“It was frightening,” Lipa nods. “You’d go from meeting to meeting, tell people, ‘hey, I’ve got covers on YouTube’ and hope they would check it out and like my voice. I’d get a lot of ‘we’re not really looking to work with a pop act’.”
Still she persisted, supported herself by working as a model. This was enjoyable so far as it went – or at least it was until someone at her agency pulled her aside and advised that she needed to lose weight if she wanted a high-fashion career. She shot back that the last thing she wanted was to spend the next 10 years show-ponying on a catwalk.
Eventually Lipa wangled an introduction to Del Rey’s manager, Ben Mawson. He saw in her something everything else had missed – a slow-burn star power all the more potent because it was so understated. She wasn’t an obvious chart topper. That was what he loved about her.
Lyrically, she digs deep, with results far murkier than is standard for pop music. Here she draws on her experiences as a night-club hostess (another side-avenue she juggled alongside modelling). “I write about the dramas I saw every night [as a hostess], the dark side of nightlife,” she told a UK paper. “It’s a good time to be making music that is seductive and sweet but doesn’t sugar-coat it. There are so many great new girls, and we’re able to tell the truth now about what being a teenager is really like. Before, everyone was singing about how amazing it all was. We’re bringing a bit more realness.”
“Dua” is Albanian for love. However, Lipa is adamant her Balkan heritage does not really inform her music. True enough, her father spent time in traditional bands and she grew up amid a rich stew of influences. Yet she doesn’t put any of that into her songs – at least not consciously.
“As my dad played music, that was obviously something I had in my background. But it was people like Nelly Furtado and Pink that I loved growing up. Later, I discovered hip-hop. That was a big factor for me too.”
At the risk of waxing pretentious, she adds that some of her biggest influences are non-musical. She name-checks New York avant-garde art of the ’80s, in particular the tragic abstract-impressionist Jean-Michel Basquiat, claimed by heroin aged 28.
“I love street artists – graffiti… anything urban. I have a fascination with the old New York of that period – the Studio 54 days. It’s so iconic… you hear the stories from that time and they are absolutely mesmerising. Definitely, the things that shape me go way beyond music.”
Lipa radiates self-belief. Still, with the biggest year of her professional life ahead, she will confess to the occasional wobble. What truly frightens her is that music she believes in – into which she’s poured heart, soul and everything else – might be ignored. To be disliked is one thing. To simply fail to grab anyone’s attention is far more worrying.
“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.”
Her debut album is in the can and likely to be released over the summer. How would she define success? “Artistically I want to do something that is true to me,” she says. “Of course, commercial success is the high point. You want to do something that you believe in – but it is important that people get to hear it also.”
She leans forward. “The past few months have been some of the most amazing ever for me,” she says. “Don’t get me wrong – there is a LOT of hard work. That side of it goes on forever. At the same time, it does feel amazing. Sometimes it feels as if I’ve been picked up by a whirlwind.”

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Dua Lipa's new single is 'Be The One'