THE LIBERATION OF TOM ODELL: 'MY LABEL IS A WHATSAPP GROUP!'

Despite early stardom, the singer-songwriter always felt like a music outsider. But going independent has changed everything, with viral hits, a flurry of albums and Billie Eilish's approval.

- By Martin Robinson

Tom Odell is in an unassuming café in Hackney, marvelling at the signed photos of musical icons on the wall: Jarvis, Nick Cave... “Nina Simone!” It appears that many of music’s greatest have hunched around one of these little tables for an omelette. He takes his drink from the owner, then leads the Standard through a door by the kitchen into a labyrinthine recording complex to his own little studio. Settling into a couch in the soundproofed womb-like room, he expands on life as an independent artist which has seen him hit a purple patch of creativity; his new album, A Wonderful Life, is his fourth in five years and probably his best to date.

“We only finished it a few weeks ago, but I don’t like sitting on it for too long,” he says. “Back when I was on the major labels, I'd finish a record and it'd sit in a queue for a year to be released. I'd always wonder what we were waiting for. Nowadays I finish it and put it out. It’s so uncompromising.

“I used to spend all my time trying to convince people to let me do something, and now I spend my time doing it.” He sits back and laughs: “My label now is a WhatsApp group.”

Odell seems like a happy man at 34, even a changed man. Since leaving Columbia Records, who signed him at 21, he's started to discover who he wants to be. And that appears quite simple: a free artist and a husband to his wife Georgie, who he married in 2023. The rest is noise.

It wasn't always this way. Odell rocketed to fame before he was quite fully formed. He won the Brits Critics’ Choice Award in 2013, at a time when sensitive singer-songwriter blokes were starting to dominate the charts, but he says now, “I never wanted to be a pop star. I wrote a bunch of songs, got signed and then suddenly there was loads of pressure.” In the glare of the limelight Odell developed anxiety issues, and was painted in a certain light, as a bedwetting balladeer.