This! Feels Good!

After diving into the seductive late-night sounds of What's Your Pleasure?, Jessie Ware is embracing her Age of Aquarius era with a refreshed outlook on life and through the soulinfused disco of new album That! Feels Good!

- CLIFF JOANNOU

Ten years ago, some hours after Jessie Ware had played the John Peel tent for her debut at Glastonbury, she found herself at the festival’s infamous late-night South East Corner at what was then Lost Vagueness, now Shangri-La. “I was probably a bit worse for wear, and it was really late. Skream and Disclosure were playing. I was like, ‘Come on, give me the mic, guys.’ And Howard (Lawrence, one half of Disclosure) was like, ‘Babe, you’re not doing it. Absolutely not.’ And thank God, they didn’t let me,” Ware’s eyes widen at the prospect of a narrowly avoided career mishap during those more hedonistic days when she wasn’t balancing family life with three kids and a number 1 podcast alongside her own flourishing music career.

“We would be like family, and we’d have so much fun together. We’d always find each other at the end of the night,” recalls Ware of a time when her and her labelmates were on the cusp of breaking through and winning mainstream success.

A few years earlier, Ware was cutting her teeth as a backing singer for childhood friend Jack Peñate, when the chance to tour the US came along. On the advice of her mum, Ware delayed her plans to start law school: “Go and have fun,” her mum instructed. So, she did. It was all “pretty lowbudget”. “We were staying in motels and sharing rooms,” Ware says of what then felt like the least sensible thing she’d ever done. “I felt like it was something that I could tell my kids, that I’d done this mad thing. And then it kind of kept on going. So, what was just about having an experience with my best mate turned into a career.”