'Healing is a dirty word'

After four traumatic years, FKA twigs is back with a new album -and a thrilling metamorphosis

- JOE BROMLEY

In a chilly, oak-panelled boardroom in Sotheby’s auction house, deep in Mayfair, FKA twigs looks out of place. She is bundled in her uniform of a “worn, Japanese blue” dancer’s body stocking and enveloping, matching-shade kneelength, zip-up hoodie; it’s the colour she has been living in over recent months because it “says nothing” but “always looks good”.

The 36-year-old singer speaks softly, at 5ft 2in is diminutive in stature, and looks entirely otherworldly — her make-up-free skin glows and her head is shaved save for a ponytail of braids at the back, an ancient Egyptian style she adopted after her father (a musician who she did not meet until she was 18) informed her she was “part Egyptian”. She is quick to remind me, “I grew up in Gloucestershire” and “live a simple life in east London with my partner”.

We are speaking because, after four traumatic years, twigs (real name Tahliah Debrett Barnett) has returned to the music industry, releasing the first track and music video of her new album Eusexua, and put on a two-week-long dance performance, The Eleven, which is currently unfolding — in its grunting and unchoreographed glory — in a next door gallery room. “Over the past few years, I’ve been on a huge healing journey. I’ve had to really learn how to use, and how to live in, my body again,” she says.

In 2020 she filed a civil lawsuit in Los Angeles accusing her former boyfriend of nine months, the Transformers actor Shia LaBeouf, of “relentless abuse” including sexual battery, assault and infliction of emotional distress. The trial date is set for next month, on October 14.

In the filing she alleges LaBeouf threw her against a car, woke her up by choking her, endangered her life by threatening to crash a car they were in, and knowingly gave her a sexually transmitted disease.

LaBeouf denies all her allegations and has said he did not cause any harm to the singer.