The singer talks about the divorce that inspired her album, what being a diva really means—and why her children now come first
BY Julia Llewellyn Smith
ENTERTAINMENT
PALOMA FAITH IS sitting on a banquette in a private members’ club in Hackney, close to where she was born and still lives, smiley in a T-shirt, black patent leather trousers and stacks of jewellery including a chunky gold ring spelling MUM. She’s eating a “fish sandwich”, which turns out to be fish and chips (“I don’t like batter, I’m going to take it off!”) and musing about her talk the previous week at the V&A museum about “reclaiming” the word “diva”.
“When women are powerful or high-achievers we’re branded demanding, difficult, overpowering divas because men think strong women must be controlling or manipulative,” she says. “I resent that. People have always misread the idea of me being an alpha character who’s very threatening. But actually there’s a softness, a gentleness, about me that’s often overlooked.”
Certainly, if anyone can reposition the word, it’s Faith, 42. With her juggernaut vocals and flamboyant stage presence, she’s been a queen of the British pop scene for the past 15 years, as evinced by her Brit award and three consecutive double-platinum albums, making her the only British female artist to accomplish the latter other than Adele.
However, like many of the other divas featured in the V&A’s exhibition of that name—Whitney Houston, Marilyn Monroe, Tina Turner—Faith’s star power is intertwined with an underlying, very grounded vulnerability.
This has been especially apparent since she became a mother eight years ago, since when she appears to have existed in a fraught spin cycle of balancing work and family. The situation has been exacerbated since she split two years ago from their father, the French-Algerian artist Leyman Lahcine. Yet, as with many artists, pain equals material. With her sixth album, The Glorification of Sadness, she becomes the latest contributor to the divorce album genre, a category that has recently taken on fresh impetus since its Tammy Wynette heyday with several “older” (a relative pop world term) female singers such as Adele, 35, Miley Cyrus, 31, and Kelly Clarkson, 41, exploring the sadness, self-doubt and guilt accompanying the ending of a long-term relationship—very different emotions to the youthful heartbreaks articulated by, say, Taylor Swift.
