Jessie Ware interview: 'I needed to work out how to enjoy myself'

“You just missed the Queen,” says Jessie Ware as she greets me in the bar of The Soho Hotel. She means her mum, Lennie, who is becoming almost as well known as the singer since they started co-hosting a podcast, Table Manners, which has been so successful that next month it becomes a live tour and cookbook.

Lennie’s exit must have been deliberately timed. I had asked to interview them both but am under orders to talk to Jessie about her music instead. The 35-year-old south Londoner has a disco-tinted song Spotlight out today, the first single from a fourth album What’s Your Pleasure? coming in June. Even so, as the podcast is now such a major element of her career, and as they’re living together again while Jessie and her husband Sam renovate a new house, her mother looms large.

As does food, the main subject of the conversations the pair have been conducting since Sam Smith was the first guest in November 2017, over a home-cooked meal in Lennie’s kitchen. They’re now on episode 75, having fed big names from Ed Sheeran to Sadiq Khan. Ware’s currently in raptures over a chocolate biscuit, which she breaks in half to allow me to share the experience.

However, she doesn’t offer me any of the banana loaf that sits between us in tin foil which her younger brother Alex baked. She just offered it to Friends actor David Schwimmer, who she and her mother have been interviewing upstairs as part of his promotional efforts for his new Sky TV series. He declared it a bit dry.

Table Manners launched just a few weeks after the release of Ware’s third album Glasshouse. Despite earning her third nomination for best female at the Brit Awards, it didn’t sell as well as its predecessors and it sounds as though the accompanying tour was hard going. Her first child, a girl, was a baby and had to be left at home. “I was adamant that I was going to be a working mother, put that record out and do it all. I think I was slightly hanging on by a thread,” she admits. “The touring became so expensive that it felt like a luxury to have my family with me, which seems mad. And I was having so much fun with the podcast so it was weird that my main job, music, was not fun. It was feeling so heavy.”

Ironically, taking on more work with the podcast (and Lennie works full-time too as a social worker and counsellor) has eased the strain, she says. “It’s made me realise I can make money in other ways than music. I’m pretty well-equipped to try anything.” Now there’s a second child, a boy, who needs a great deal of her time but still she says that making her fourth album felt easier. She changed her management team and record label and worked mostly with the people who helped her on her second album, Tough Love, as well as James Ford, who has produced for Arctic Monkeys and Florence + the Machine.

“James is wonderful. We both have young children. It was this lovely set-up where I’d pop over to his attic in Clapton from my house in Dalston and make music. The pressure was off, which is what I needed.” I’ve heard four of the new songs and they’re all full of energy and bright melodies, a definite change in gear from the dinner party-friendly digital soul of her past work. They reminded me of Chic, Kylie and the fun side of Goldfrapp. “I am not thinking about hits in the slightest this time,” she claims, in which case she may yet be pleasantly surprised. “I needed to work out how to enjoy myself.”

She’s fairly confident her loyal fanbase will warm to the new sound. If they can cope with listening to her and comedian Aisling Bea explaining to Lennie the difference between “doggy-style” and “dogging” over dinner, this is definitely less of a sonic diversion. “My fans are incredibly devoted. People want me to do well. I get so many tweets saying: ‘Jessie is really underrated.’ Now the podcast is this different world but there’s a similar feeling towards my mum and me. People feel part of this cult.”

It was New Year’s Eve 2015 when a friend suggested that she’d be good at podcasting. They said: “You’re the nosiest person I know. You’d get great interviews.” I remember from meeting her before that she was a rare example of an interviewee who doesn’t simply dispense wisdom without paying much attention to who’s asking. She seemed genuinely interested in my unstarry life too.

I ask her for some tips on how to be a better interviewer. “Oh f*** off!” she replies. “I just swear too much and ask questions about food. That’s about it.” She was briefly a journalist, working at The Jewish Chronicle and Daily Mirror before she began to sing guest vocals with SBTRKT and Jack Peñate. Her father is the investigative reporter John Ware, so she has the genes for it too. “I like to think people feel safe when we talk to them because I understand what it’s like to be the person at the other end of it.”

Music may be the food of love but it turns out being a musician with a love of food can be pretty good too.

Spotlight is on PMR/Virgin EMI, What’s Your Pleasure? is out on June 5. Table Manners live is at Shoreditch Town Hall, EC1, March 31-April 2