Jessie Ware: Why the 'prudish' star is singing about sex

"I'm a lover, a freak and a mother" - Jessie Ware's latest album is an exploration of sexual liberation.

Jessie Ware is taken aback. She does a double take. Her flabber is well and truly gasted.

We're at the Southbank Centre in London, at an exhibition celebrating the 50th anniversary of David Bowie's Aladdin Sane; and we have just learned two things.

First, the lightning flash painted onto his face on the album's iconic cover was copied from a National Panasonic rice cooker that was lying nearby.

Second, that the photo shoot lasted less than an hour.

"That's wild! Just two rolls of film!" exclaims Ware, confessing she needed three shoots for her new album, That! Feels Good!

"That's because I'm fussy and I didn't like the first two," she says. "We did the third attempt in a makeshift studio next door to where we were shooting the Pearls video.

"It couldn't be less of an exhibition if you tried."

Bowie wasn't a big figure in the singer's upbringing. She'd be more likely to listen to soul singers like Donny Hathaway, Chaka Khan and Whitney Houston, before entering a huge drum and bass phase in her teens. Every December, the family would play Band Aid's Do They Know It's Christmas while they decorated the tree.

But she recently discovered that her mum, Lennie, is a huge Bowie fan who attended the star's notorious Ziggy Stardust concerts in the 1970s.

"She was kind of in love with him, fully in love with him... He's a phenomenon, an enigma."

The album art for Aladdin Sane is one of the most iconic images in rock history

The exhibition passes in a flash ("I'm really impatient," Ware admits. "My husband hates taking me to galleries.") and we decamp to a nearby café.

Ware is famished - her day started with 6am weight training - but after a quick glance at the burger-centric menu, she opts for a cappuccino and settles down to chat about music.

At this point, a better journalist might be able to connect the dots between Ware and Bowie. Both were raised in south London and both... er, make music. But as she says herself, "we don't have that much in common".

The closest link is Bowie's 1975 album Young Americans, a love letter to US R&B whose exuberant team of backing vocalists was led by a then-unknown Luther Vandross.

Ware's new record takes a similar approach, revelling in luxurious layers of harmonies as it harks back to the golden era of disco and 70s soul.

In a depressingly modern twist, however, those posse vocals weren't recorded by dozens of people stood shoulder-to-shoulder around a microphone. The album began in November 2020, while Ware was pregnant with her third child and the UK entered a second lockdown. Every line was recorded in isolation.

Ware swipes to a group chat on her WhatsApp that's labelled "Disco on Zoom", and scrolls through pages of voice memos that she and her collaborators Shungudzo Kuyimba and James Ford sent back and forth. Every one begins with a count of "5, 6, 7, 8", before launching into a melody or a counter-melody or a few "la, la, las".

"We'd send them and put them onto the computer and see what we liked," she says. "It was really annoying. I never want to make an album like that again".

Nonetheless, remote recording technology helped her recruit an incredible cast list for the album. In the first 30 seconds alone, you hear Kylie Minogue, Gemma Arterton, Aisling Bea, Jamie Demetriou, Hayley Squires, Clara Amfo, Benny Blanco and Lennie Ware, her mother, all uttering the record's title phrase.

"I just called everyone like, 'Hi babe, do you think you could just send me a few recordings of you saying, that feels good?'" she recalls.

"It was so funny getting them back. People were really good sports, considering they didn't even know what they were agreeing to. Roísín Murphy did hers in an airport toilet!"

Sexual autonomy

The opening sets the tone for an album that's fun, fresh and forward-thinking. The title track is an tightly-coiled explosion of disco funk, all scratchy guitars and breathy horn stabs, that calls to mind Stevie Wonder and Prince.

"Just remember: Pleasure is a right," purrs Ware. It's a celebration and a declaration of intent: If her last record asked "What's Your Pleasure?", the new one celebrates the answer, no matter how frisky it gets.

The single Free Yourself is a giddy anthem to sexual autonomy: "Why don't you please yourself? If it feels so good then don't you stop!" sings Ware in full diva mode.

Shake The Bottle is a flirtatious invitation to "make my bottle pop". On These Lips she whispers coyly, "These two lips could do so much more." The title of Freak Me Now is self-explanatory.

"Weirdly, considering I'm quite prudish, I've found it really fun tapping into this world," says Ware. "It gives me freedom musically. Hopefully it's slightly classy, with a bit of innuendo."

At this point, I jokingly reassure Ware this won't be the sort of interview that asks for details of her sex life.

"Okay, good, because it's quite non-existent," she laughs.

"I mean, three children would imply otherwise, but yeah, it's funny because it's not somewhere that I would have ever expected my career and my music to go."

Jessie Ware recently covered Cher's Believe in the Radio 2's Piano Room sessions

The transformation began in 2017, after the promotional campaign for Ware's third album, Glasshouse, left her disillusioned with the music industry.

A deeply introspective record, it was written as she tried to balance parenthood and a pop career for the first time.

"I was maybe masking how hard I was finding it," she says. "And I was writing this autobiographical record without being ready. I didn't know how to fully kind of jump [into that world]."

Part of the problem, she recently said, was constantly being made "to feel like I needed to be the next Adele" when Ware's background was in dance music, collaborating with artists like SBTRKT, Disclosure and Two Inch Punch.

When the Glasshouse tour finished, Ware ditched her management and thought seriously about quitting music to concentrate on her cooking-for-celebrities podcast Table Manners.

Instead, she switched record label, and traded the "sad mum" songs for an album full of euphoric escapism.

What's Your Pleasure was one of the holy trinity of lockdown pop albums, alongside Dua Lipa's Future Nostalgia and Kylie's Disco. Entering the UK charts at number three, it earned Ware a Brit nomination for album of the year, a support slot with Harry Styles ("he's such a gentleman") and revitalised her career.

"When I made it, I was like, 'I know, I'll go out with a bang'. And I didn't go out with a bang, so now I'm off to the races!" she says.

That! Feels Good! is very much a victory lap, but it never commits the sin of repeating a formula. It's brighter and more rhythmically complex than its predecessor, full of bossa nova and Brazilian disco and a feeling of exuberant liberation. It also contains, on Begin Again, the highest note Ware has ever sung.

"I'm obsessed with harmonies and backing vocals and creating these big moments that just build up, so I was riffing over the song and I just went for it.

"James [Ford, producer] looked at me and raised his eyebrows. I was like, 'I know? Too much?' And he just said, 'No, it's hysterical and brilliant!'"

She's a bit nervous about replicating it live, though, especially with an appearance on Jools Holland's Later... looming on the horizon.

"I don't know if I'll hit that note, we'll see. I've tried to practise it with my kids and now we just walk around going, 'Aieeeeeeeee'. It's become a way to scare each other in the house."

It's a uniquely Jessie Ware observation, effortlessly juxtaposing the glamour of her pop career with the realities of everyday life.

Bowie would never have allowed the curtain to be drawn back so far - but Ware cheerfully admits to things like being obsessed with her infants' poo ("does that make me sound really weird?") and goes all giddy when she describes using the same microphone as Madonna ("Those songs have some of the magic of Madonna as a result").

The singer is set to tour the US and UK later this year

Her warmth, approachability and versatility have already put her on the track to national treasure status. Table Manners is now in its 10th series, with spin-off tours and books of its own; and Ware has a low-key second podcast, Is It Normal? that acts as a companion for expectant mothers.

"If I see a pregnant woman smiling at me, I don't think she's smiling at me for the music, somehow. It's lovely."

But she's determined it's the music that will endure.

"I'm very lucky that I've got to play with so many different things; but I want to be remembered for my voice and the songs that I create," she says.

"Does that make it sound like I'm gonna die? I'm not dying."

That! Feels Good! is out now. Jessie Ware tours the UK in November and plays on Later... With Jools Holland on 27 May.