Laura Marling on crisis, recovery and rebirth

She knew you’d ask about the hair. Last year, at the end of an eight-month odyssey of self-questioning and discovery, Laura Marling dispensed with the flowing tresses that were sort of, vaguely, a trademark. In their place, a tight crop, almost as severe as the intense, plugged-in folk she debuts on her fifth album, Short Movie.

Tellingly, it is her new look, more than her new sound, that has attracted the preponderance of attention. We can make peace with Marling, previously a dulcet, strictly acoustic strummer, upholstering her repertoire with riffs and feedback. She chops her curls and we’re in a tizzy, demanding smelling salts.
“It’s strange,” she says, breaking into what is surely the least girlish giggle in the history of girlish giggles. “I like the fuss over the hair because it gives me the opportunity to tell stories that may not be true, as to why I cut it. People write their own narratives about me – and it’s fun to play with that."
Playful is not quite the word that leaps to mind when it comes to Marling. As a performer, she is stern and unshowy; headlining Dublin’s Olympia Theatre in 2013, she was on stage barely an hour yet you staggered away drained (in a good way), so dark and torrid was the music. In person, she can be hard work – this writer recalls calling her eight years ago for a phone interview, to be confronted by a monosyllabic 17-year-old who really, truly wanted off the line as soon as possible.
“I was incredibly intense back then,” she says, laughing gently. “I’ve definitely mellowed. Although perhaps ‘mellow’ is not the correct word. The world used to be very serious to me. I’ve learned to appreciate the ridiculousness of life. You have to be able to see the funny side, don’t you?”
Marling is at home in London. She lives in a small terraced house near Crouch End. Inside, all is tastefully ramshackle: there are books everywhere, which give the otherwise understated interior a whiff of the eccentric professor.
She returned to the UK early in 2014, after 14 months in Los Angeles, where she went in pursuit of ‘a boy’. Hers being a stormy, dramatic life, naturally the relationship ended weeks after she had relocated to the United States. There she was, adrift in a megalopolis at the edge of the world (or so it felt), faintly bummed (if not exactly heartbroken) and questioning her direction in life.
Thus began Marling’s long dark night of self-questioning. Having joined the indie-folk ensemble Noah and the Whale aged 16 (she dated frontman Charlie Fink, who went on to write an entire LP about their break-up), she’d never known a day-to-day existence beyond music.
Recently turned 25, to her faint amusement – she has always been good at detachment – Marling was now plunged into a quarter life crisis. She packed away her guitar, applied for a job as a barista at an LA coffee shop (she was unsuccessful), then tried to enrol in a poetry course (for which she received a firm ‘thanks but no thanks’).
Twice nominated for the Mercury, a Brit ‘Best Female’ award winner in 2011 and actually, real-world famous by dint of her relationship (long since ended) with Mumford and Son-in-chief Marcus Mumford, all of a sudden she was kicking around LA, searching for a reason to climb out of bed in the morning. Yeah, it was weird.
“I wanted to see what it would feel like to not call myself a musician,” Marling shrugs. “I’d never done anything else, from school on. I came around, at the end of eight months, to understanding how lucky I was to be able to do something I love. It reinvigorated me – ultimately, it was a good thing.”
You could construct a case that Marling was rebelling from her own ambition. Since adolescence, she had been preternaturally driven – anyone who has seen her sing will have been struck by her poise and self-possession. It was as if, never having entertained self-doubt, when her confidence was rocked, she fell apart completely.
She, however, has a more straightforward take on what happened: after four albums in six years and endless touring, she was straight-up knackered.
“I needed to take inventory and assess. It felt like I’d gone straight from touring to writing another album. Had I gone ahead, I would have written a record that was exactly the same as all the others. I needed to reboot – to give myself an uncomfortable experience to live through.”
Was there regret about her life choices? After school, she might have gone to university – arguably expanding her horizons, rather than spending a decade on a tour bus.
“Not at all. Even when I wondered whether there was another path, I’d never felt a pang over what I’d done. I’ve had this incredibly unique and adventurous life. It has suited me quite well.”
In the middle of all the navel-gazing, there was, she reveals, time to record a ‘rubbish’ album, a going-through-the motions LP she trusts will never see daylight.
“I literally rolled straight out of the car from touring and into the studio. I knew something was up because it was the first time I had a bunch of songs where I wanted to play them to other people, to see if they were alright. I’d never had that instinct before. It’s a warning: if I ever feel the need to test out songs on people, they probably aren’t that good to begin with.”
It is difficult to talk about Marling without touching on issues of class and privilege. Really, she is super-posh. Her father is a Baronet, Sir Charles William Somerset Marling; the exclusive Quaker school she attended near Reading is a well known feeder for Oxford (and is mentioned in Alan Bennett’s critique of chattering class Britain, The History Boys).
By her telling, her family come off as hippyish toffs. Her dad, custodian of his own coat of arms, used to run a recording studio in Hertfordshire; her childhood was soundtracked by strains of jazz, folk and rock and roll seeping from a cabin at the end of the garden.
“My parents are amazing weirdos and I love them to pieces,” she once told me. “I was very lucky. When I told them I wanted to join a band they were cautious. The thing is, my parents did all my wild living for me. I’ve never been naughty or gone off the rails. They knew I wasn’t going to go and start injecting heroin into my eyes.”
Perhaps as a result of her comfortable upbringing, she always radiated supreme confidence. There are glimpses of steeliness, for instance, in her refusal to play encores (which she considered hackneyed and ‘a bit Spinal Tap’). In conversation, she is self-possessed, with an unwavering gaze. Given her focus, when she did, briefly, fall apart, you wonder if it was harder for her to make sense of what she was going through.
“It was a new thing for me, actually,” she nods. “In my defense, it wasn’t because I was arrogant. I hit the ground at pace with my career and didn’t have time for doubt. I was given an opportunity and ran with it. And I kept on running, until I realised I couldn’t continue. I discovered that, in fact, having doubts is a necessary part of being a well-rounded human being.”