PHOTOGRAPHS by ZOEY GROSSMAN for ELLE US,
STYLING by CHARLES VARENNE
This is not the way this summer was meant to go. Not for any of us. But particularly not for Dua Lipa, the biggest pop star on the planet right now. Her much-anticipated second album Future Nostalgia was planned for release on 3 April – and it followed in the footsteps of her self-titled first, it was going to be become the hear-it-everywhere-you-go sound of 2020. Except, suddenly, nobody was going anywhere.
In early spring, Lipa returned home to London from a trip to Australia to find her flat flooded and in need of total renovation. She moved into an Airbnb with her boyfriend, Anwar Hadid and, shortly afterwards, learnt that her album had leaked. She brought the release forward, to 27 March, and launched it into a world going into isolation. Her team’s meticulously planned rollout, her plans for the next six months – live TV performances, a stadium tour, festival gigs – went out the window.
So, she did what anyone would do: she refocused and started meditating. ‘The pink supermoon gave me lots of clarity,’ Lipa says, when we talk (over Zoom, of course). ‘It was really nice to sit and meditate and set my good intentions.’ Far from giving into the frustration of thwarted plans, she seems to have enjoyed the enforced pause, not least the unexpected time with her boyfriend of less than a year. ‘We’ve made the most of the situation,’ she says. ‘I’d probably have been planning to go on tour, and thinking about when we’d be able see each other. Having all that extra time was really nice. We’re trying to see the bright side,’ she says with a smile, briefly glancing to her left. Suddenly, a hand that I can only assume belongs to Hadid – model and brother to Bella and Gigi – appears in my Zoom window, offering a friendly wave.
Meanwhile, out in the locked-down world, her album wasn’t merely succeeding, it was soaring: hitting number one in the charts and breaking three streaming records on the day of its release, including the most streamed album in a day by a British female artist. Future Nostalgia provided exactly what we were yearning for: a shimmering, disco- inflected portal to a shinier, happier, Covid-free future – or maybe past. Chock full of musical references to pop greats such as Prince, Madonna and Blondie, it’s a glorious melting pot of influences, from the music that Lipa’s parents played at home to the first concerts she attended in her teens: Method Man, Redman, Snoop Dogg. It soon became the soundtrack to solo kitchen discos, stay-at-home memes and TikTok videos, connecting people across the globe.
She’s clearly pleased by the pleasure it brought people during lockdown: ‘If it gave people a little bit of comfort then I’ve done my job,’ she says. (In a webchat, Miley Cyrus put its function rather more pointedly: ‘I needed a f*cking dance party.’)
The 24-year-old is philosophical about having to stay at home somewhere that isn’t even her home. ‘The way I work and the way I travel, I’m constantly away, making a home wherever I am. So it’s OK,’ she says tightening the knot on her dog-print Ashley Williams shirt, which is tied at the waist. ‘The things I miss are hanging out with friends in big groups, travelling and being out on the road.’ She missed, in short, her life as it’s been for the past few years.
By now, anyone who pays even the slightest attention to pop culture will be familiar with Dua Lipa’s dizzying career trajectory, from her days posting covers to YouTube and SoundCloud, to a serendipitous introduction to Lana Del Rey’s manager Ben Mawson and a 2017 debut album featuring catchy breakup anthem New Rules (its YouTube video has more than two billion views). Next came the two Grammys in 2019, and an Instagram following that’s grown to more than 46 million. And – pandemic or not – 2020 looks like it’s sending her to even greater heights.
Lipa grew up in London, the daughter of Kosovar-Albanian parents who’d left Kosovo to move there during the Balkan wars of the early 1990s. ‘My dad was studying to be an orthodontist and my mum was studying law,’ she says of her parents’ pre-war lives. Upon arriving in London, they worked in bars and restaurants while attending university. Lipa’s father ended up pursuing business and marketing and later received his masters in journalism, while her mum switched gears from law to study travel and tourism.
When Lipa was 11, the family returned to Kosovo. ‘When you move from place to place, you’re always the new girl, trying to make friends at different points in your life,’ she says. ‘It can be hard, but I made great friends in both places.’ Lipa’s Kosovar friends introduced her to the likes of Wu-Tang Clan: ‘I saw Method Man and Redman at 13,’ she says. ‘All the girls in my school really wanted to go, so I was like, “OK, let’s go!”’
At 15, Lipa convinced her parents to let her move back to London to live with a family friend. ‘I couldn’t do music the way that I wanted to in Kosovo,’ she says. ‘Maybe things would’ve been different if streaming services were as prominent as they are now but, for me, London was always home, and I found my footing very quickly.’ She became a regular at Koko, the iconic music venue in Camden. ‘I saw so many artists there,’ she says. ‘That’s really when I started going to lots of concerts.’
Lipa’s parents and two younger siblings eventually joined her in London, but the family makes regular trips back to Kosovo. They also run Sunny Hill, a foundation named after the neighbourhood where Lipa’s parents grew up, which supports vulnerable populations in the region. Lipa and her father Dukagjin, who is part of Kosovar band Oda, host an annual music festival, also called Sunny Hill, in Pristina. ‘Both places are part of me,’ Lipa says. ‘So much of what I do is in twos. I like juxtapositions in my music and what I wear. I feel like my dual heritage, being from two places at once, with all of those things trickling into the other, is what makes me, me.’
When it was time to follow up on the stupendous success of her first album, the first rule? Have fun. ‘We spent some time in Jamaica and wrote for two weeks, and it rained the whole time,’ she says. ‘We were inside eating jerk chicken, rice and peas for two weeks straight, and every session ended up in a dance party. Every song gave us a new emotion. I made the album with my friends, and there was no pressure. It was all about letting loose. If we weren’t able to write songs, we’d order doughnuts, and get really high on sugar and then write a song like Levitating.
Sarah Hudson, the LA songwriter who worked with Lipa on Levitating, as well as the album’s second single, Physical – a synth- heavy ode to a relationship’s honeymoon phase (and Olivia Newton-John) – says her favourite thing about Lipa is her ability to balance ‘having fun in the studio while also putting her all into her art. She is just a lovely, authentic, intelligent, stunning human.’ (Hudson adds that when they’re hanging out, they ‘love to go to the comedy club when [Lipa] is in LA or just hang at her place and do tarot readings’.)
Talking about the meaning behind Boys Will Be Boys, the album’s most serious track, Lipa says: ‘I often will speak up about female equality, especially in the workplace, but this song is talking about the personal experiences and growing pains of what it’s like to be a woman. I’ve spoken to my friends, and they’ve all done the same things, whether it’s holding keys between your knuckles or pretending you’re on the phone while walking alone at night. We’ve all tried to avoid confrontation, or worn something we didn’t really want to wear in order to protect ourselves. We’ve all been like, Oh, I can’t bear the idea of wearing this short dress and then hopping on public transport to get to the party.’ Lipa is hopeful that she can contribute to important conversations about what kind of behaviour society is willing to accept and why. She also finds hope in the fact that some men are finally suffering the consequences of their actions. ‘It’s a massive wake-up call to people all around the world that no one is invincible and no one is untouchable,’ she says.
Lipa's life will (hopefully) soon be roaring back up to its full-turbo, globe-spanning usual speed, with her European tour already rescheduled to start in January 2021. But, in the meantime, she’s been noticing what happens when you stop – and she’s hopeful for the lessons we all might learn from this experience. ‘It felt like, while we were taking a break, we were also taking a break from what we’re doing to our Earth. And it was nice to kind of see it almost replenishing a little bit every morning while people weren’t really going out in their cars as much and staying inside. I think everything’s kind of taken a breather. It’s difficult to think of upsides when there has been so much suffering. But we have to try to stay positive, and see the connection that we have with other people; calling our friends and our family and spending a little bit of time outside in the sunshine. Those are the things to be grateful for in the midst of everything that’s happening.
‘I think our world is probably going to change forever. I think we’ll probably tread differently with Mother Nature; we probably won’t be as careless as we have been in the past. I think we’ll be more empathetic. I think we’ll make moments count. We won’t take things for granted. Hopefully we get some good lessons out of it, and out of this time.’
In the last general election, Lipa called on her fanbase to vote Labour, and though she expresses sympathy for Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s own brush with Covid-19 (‘I wouldn’t wish that fate on anyone’) she does express hope that the experience might ‘make him more human’ and ‘show him the importance of the NHS, and how many people really do depend on it for their lives.’ She hopes that at the least some good will come out of this tragedy: ‘Maybe we will see a major positive outcome come from this, though sadly on the basis that so many lives will have been lost.’
On the work front, she’s already starting to think about her next album – although don’t expect it to reflect too much on what’s taken place this year: ‘Hopefully we’ll be trying to resume life as normal,’ she says. ‘Once we’ve decided to move on, I don’t think we will want to be reminded too much of this time. Of course, this is a major moment in history that we will never forget, but I don’t know whether that’s going to influence where my music is going to go next. I think I’m probably just going to carry on and try to take my mind off things.’
Whatever its subject matter, you wouldn’t bet against another smash. After all, Lipa is the woman who made Future Nostalgia into a massive hit despite the fact that she and her audience were in lockdown. As the moon-meditating, tarot-card-reading pop star says: ‘The response was so amazing, and I’m really happy with the outcome. This is just how it was meant to be.’
The August issue of ELLE UK hits newsstands on July 2. You can buy single issues of the magazine online here.
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