"As good as it is, it's still not good enough, you know, there's still way more that could change and far more spaces that could be filled by people of colour and women of colour. It's a long old road.”

We’re interviewing singer-songwriter Lianne La Havas about her self-titled third album but with everything else happening in the world, from the Covid-19 lockdown to the worldwide eruption of Black Lives Matter protests, we inevitably end up discussing a lot more besides.

"I did some of the Black Lives Matter protests in London and I looked around and just started crying,” she adds. “This is deep, everyone gives a shit, people give a shit about us. More of that please, more people saying something.”

La Havas is currently reading ‘Brit(ish)’ by Afua Hirsch, a brilliant exploration of identity and belonging from the perspective of a mixed-race black British woman, which resonates with this talented musician who has Greek ancestry on her father’s side and Jamaican on her mother’s. “I’m really down with Afua, she's super cool,” she enthuses. "In the intro she's talking about how her hair sticks up and that happened to me at school, no one knew how to look after my hair. My mum didn't know because she always had weaves or extensions and never really did her own hair, and my dad just has white people's hair, which is very easy to look after.”

Representation matters, so when the only people she saw playing guitar growing up were skinny, white boys, it put her off picking the instrument up. “This is why I learnt so late to play guitar, I probably would have done it earlier if I had seen any women doing it when I was a kid. The more seven-year-old kids who can see someone like me playing guitar, the better.”

Positivity radiates from La Havas when she talks about the few role models she did have. “They all look quite different but Alicia Keys was probably the closest thing to what I wanted to do. And there was also Lauryn Hill and India Arie - their music was exactly how I felt,” she says. “And then Mel B. A massive icon and when the Spice Girls dolls came out, that was the only one I wanted. She was loud and proud and beautiful. Later on, it was Corrine Bailey Rae, I think she's such a great composer and seeing her do it was really encouraging."

Right now, La Havas should be touring her eponymous album and letting her trademark powerful pretty tones ripple across the festival fields, doing her own part to inspire the next generation of singer songwriters. In fact, it was a show at Glastonbury that kicked off the recording process for her new release – she and her band wanted to perfect a cover of Radiohead’s ‘Weird Fishes’ they’d performed live. As always though, she’s turning a negative into a positive. "I understand I'm putting an album out at a weird time so what I really want is for it to provide some gentle relaxation from the trauma of what’s going on,” she says. “And also, to represent being a black mixed girl who is doing something that I want to do. I followed my dream,” she says.

“I didn't understand that before, I thought, why does anyone care what I do? Now I understand it's something I would have liked growing up, to have more people to look up to,” she continues. “So I just want to keep doing my job, satisfying myself artistically and being grateful for doing that. Make more stuff, speak loudly about important matters and continue to help in any way that I can.”

The singer was born in south west London and raised in her grandparents’ home but both parents get the credit for her love of and talent for music. “My dad is the musical one, his side of the family is very artistic, and my mother is fascinated by sound and music. When I was growing up, she would always have the best hi-fi and huge speakers in her car,” she recalls.

La Havas starting out as a backing singer for Paloma Faith and released her debut EP ‘Lost & Found’ in 2011. This was followed by the iTunes’ Album of 2012, ‘Is Your Love Big Enough?’. It’s been five years since the release of the follow-up ‘Blood’, her Grammy-nominated sophomore album, and in that time La Havas has grown both as an artist and as a person, too. Now 30 years old, she has confidence in the direction that her work should be going in and a refreshing disregard for authority. “Not to say I didn't have that strong vision back then, I just didn't have a loud enough voice. I’ve always known who I am but you know, everyone tells you what they think you should be, and I was listening to that more than my own voice.”

Part of this process means that she’s been able to do all of the production on ‘Lianne La Havas’, recording it with a live band and making the beats herself. “I’m not trying to slag off the label, I think they're really helpful and amazing, but I don't know if they have licence to tell you how to do your art. That's what I would tell my younger self, ‘You're the artist and they are just helping facilitate it. You have to learn how to be yourself and only you can do that,’ which sounds like a cliché, but it's extremely true.”

Hers is a vocal force that recalls a mother’s hug, in that it’s strong yet soothing, and this time its been informed by some diverse inspirations. “I was listening to a lot of Joni Mitchell, the way that she talks about love is the most accurate to what I’ve been going through. And Destiny's Child, especially the song ‘Girl’, on which they're talking to Kelly, saying, ‘We know he's lying, and we know you're covering up for him’. I know friends of mine have been in the roles of Beyoncé and Michelle,” she reveals. “And loads of Brazilian music, which just makes me feel good - it's so melodic and rhythmic and rich, I love it. So, there was a lot of that going on and a lot of women talking about their feelings!”

The last shows she played before lockdown were a collaboration with the BBC Symphony Orchestra at the Barbican and an intimate gig at Hackney’s Moth Club. Given the personal nature of ‘Lianne La Havas’, which travels through the arc of a relationship, it is no surprise that Moth Club the provoked the most nerves. “The intimate setting was definitely harder in that I was shyer. I feel quite vulnerable playing this new stuff but it's also empowering to play it to an audience.” It’s when she’s singing this material, which reveals her innermost feelings, that she achieves a state of flow. “I found that I had a different feeling with the new songs, it felt almost like they had always been there. I just felt really grounded and that it was all happening for the right reasons.”

It’s not just the album production that she’s had complete control over. An upside of lockdown has been that she’s been hands-on in terms of creating the gloriously lo-fi videos for her lead tracks as well, such as the dreamy self-love anthem ‘Paper Thin’, the soul searching ‘Can’t Fight’ and the studio session magic that is ‘Weird Fishes’. Like the album, which demonstrates her range from the delicate and gentle through to the raw and visceral, these at home videos are La Havas laid bare. “I had never even opened any editing software but it was really fun and a lot simpler than I thought it would be. Lockdown has allowed me to have the time to visualise how I would like to be seen and that's an empowering thing.”

And as for the future? “We have to just keep banging on about it, keep saying it, keep being visible - if you are a black person doing something really positive - just keep doing that really loudly.”

‘Lianne La Havas’ by Lianne La Havas is out now on Warner Records

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Published on 19/07/2020