THE RISE AND RESILIENCE (AND SECRET PAIN) OF LONDON GRAMMAR

The band are now one of the biggest music acts in the world, but ahead of next month's Lido festival, frontwoman Hannah Reid reveals the private ordeal that nearly made her quit.

- By Craig McLean

It's been quite the week for Hannah Reid: a hospital visit, a trip to Abu Dhabi for a one-off gig with her band London Grammar, and an appearance on Radio 4's Woman's Hour that "terrified" her.

"I just felt so ill-equipped!" she says, laughing about her appointment at the BBC. “I don’t even know what I said. What did I say?”

Well, quite a lot. About how motherhood (she gave birth to son Josh 18 months ago) had helped cure her crippling stage fright. How she “built a career off vulnerability” in the songs she co-writes for a trio beloved for Reid’s transcendent vocals and their atmospheric, electronic soul. About how she and her bandmates have curated a strong female line-up for their day at next month’s new Lido festival in Victoria Park.

Still, the 35-year-old didn’t tell presenter Nuala McGovern everything.

“Just before we went to Abu Dhabi, I found out that, because of my surgery and endometriosis, I was chronically anaemic,” begins Reid over herbal teas in her Victorian terraced house in Fulham. She's smiley and comfortable in grey sweats as Phoebe, the family’s French bulldog, flops on the floor. She had been feeling “really weak and really weird”. Cue a hospital appointment for a blood test, with the result that “I had to have an iron drip, which kicked in just in time for Abu Dhabi.”

Backtracking a little: while touring London Grammar’s 2013 debut album If You Wait — shimmering dance music that became ubiquitous (and won the band an Ivor Novello award for the song Strong) — the Acton-raised musician came down with what was eventually diagnosed as fibromyalgia. Reid lived in private with the chronic pain condition for much of the subsequent decade, through the rippling success of the band she'd formed at Nottingham University with fellow Londoner Dan Rothman and Northampton-born Dot Major.