Jessie Ware talks pop stardom, motherhood, and her most accomplished album to date

She talks to ED POWER about teething troubles, in the studio and real life, and how she has grown into pop stardom.

Jessie Ware is struggling to make herself heard over a short-tempered, big-lunged shriek. But she isn’t fending off insistent fans or dealing with a demanding record company executive. Her one year-old daughter has just kicked off – at the very moment mum is about to begin nattering with Hot Press about her new album. Ware flashes one of those “laughing-because-otherwise-I’d-be-crying” grins.

“She has separation anxiety, which is really normal for this age. Which means she’s waking a lot. Of course, it’s happening just as I’m promoting the record.”

Ware gave birth in September 2016, halfway through recording her just-released third LP, Glasshouse. Having a child in the middle of making a record obviously wasn’t the plan.

“It probably messed up things for the label,” she nods. “I adopted the attitude of, ‘I’ll make it work – I will make sure I get an album out.’ I never thought I couldn’t do it. There were moments of wondering, ‘Is this worth it… doing music when you should be focused on just one thing?’ At the end of the day music is my job – and I had a job to do.”

Ware is a singular fixture in British pop. The daughter of a social worker and prominent BBC journalist, growing up a career in music was never presented as a plausible option. People from middle class Clapham, south London didn’t become pop stars.

This same sense of outsider-dom continues to inform her music. As she will remind you, she has never had a huge, stonking chart hit. Instead, Ware has quietly become one of the more intriguing forces in UK music – her sophisticated R&B referencing Sade and Prince even as she follows her own distinctive course.

Glasshouse is her most accomplished collection yet. Just turned 33, Ware has a more rounded sense of what she wants to achieve as an artist. Marriage – to childhood sweetheart Sam Burrows – and motherhood have meanwhile given her a whole new emotional minefield through which to tread with her songs.

“I don’t have enough time to be nervous about the record,” she says. “I’m too busy being a mum. It’s quite a good distraction. I constantly have something else to think about. It’s brilliant, in terms of stopping you from worrying.”

Not that her life was especially glamorous anyway, but with a one-year-old to care for, inhabiting a pop star bubble isn’t possible.

“I did Jools Holland recently and came home buzzing from the fact it had gone okay and I hadn’t cocked it up. There was a bit of adrenaline. However, my daughter wouldn’t sleep so I was up an hour-and-a-half with her. It puts things into perspective; it’s like, ‘Cool – you’re a pop star. But you have a job to do at home.’”

Ware has rubbed shoulders with pop royalty. She became friends with Marcus Mumford when both served on the judging panel for this year’s Mercury Music Prize – “It was passionate but nobody was shouting or stamping their feet” – and goes back years with Adele and Ed Sheeran who wrote a song for her new album. Most improbably of all, she’s old chums with EL James, author of the Fifty Shades Of Grey bonkbusters, whom she met when they both worked in a London television production company. “She was writing fiction for pleasure,” Ware reveals. “It was a hobby – she was consumed by it. We met up in LA – she was heavily involved in the film and I’d finished a massive tour. We went for a drink and it was like, ‘How have you been… Oh yes, you’re this huge author now!’”

It’s taken time for Ware to grow into her status as the thinking person’s diva. On Glasshouse she collaborates with composers such as One Republic’s Ryan Tedder and Florence And The Machine/Harry Styles adjunct Thomas Hull (aka Kid Harpoon).

“It’s about confidence,” she says of standing toe-to-toe with these heavyweights. “Some of those people aren’t going to want to work with you and that’s okay. It took me a while to realise that wasn’t necessarily all my fault. The chemistry doesn’t work occasionally and that’s alright. There is a feeling, when you step into a big session, that you really want things to do well. Often it’s down to the luck of the day. I’m a lot more confident now – I have three albums of material to look to. Right at the beginning it was intimidating.”

Glasshouse is out now.