Jessie Ware: ‘I’m a shouty parent – so was my mum. It’s how we communicate’

“As I’ve got older, my friends and I have become much more open about talking about sex,” says Jessie Ware. At 41, the pop star turned podcaster surrounds herself “with women who are honest about their vulnerabilities, whether that’s talking about a lack of confidence or simply comparing which vibrators everyone’s using.” But today – settling cross-legged on the baggy, velvet sofa of her south London home – the down-to-earth mother-of-three is yanking her hair into a messy bun and working out how she can “bring that sense of filth, honesty and humour” to her first proper arena tour. “Because I want to take that kitchen-table intimacy to those bigger spaces, so we’re all dancing together, sweating together, laughing together.” Although Ware has been the critics’ darling since the release of her sleekly soulful, Mercury Prize-nominated debut album Devotion (2012), she was very guarded (“you mean mysterious?!”) at the beginning of her career. Mainstream success has taken time. But fame has grown with the popularity of her hit podcast, Table Manners. Launched in 2017, the cosy series has seen the increasingly relaxed singer and her mum Lennie invite celebrities over for dinner, interviewing everyone from Paul McCartney to Sadiq Khan over home-cooked food and often cocktails. Ed Sheeran (with whom she wrote her biggest hit “Say You Love Me”) famously had four portions of sausages in 2018. Kylie brought her own brand of rosé wine in 2020 before the pair collaborated on single “Kiss of Life” the following year. In the process, Ware has both literally and metaphorically earned herself a seat at the A-list table, her confidence blossoming with every encounter and feeding back into the music she writes. It helps that the podcast appears to pay most of her bills, allowing her to revel in her studio time without the pressure of commercial performance. In their podcast ‘Table Manners’, Ware and her mother Lennie (right) invite celebrities over for dinner And just as they say love comes along when you stop looking, so Ware’s record sales have swelled as she’s become less stressed about them. Earlier this year, her sixth album, Superbloom, became her fastest-selling record to date, peaking at number two in the UK chart. It’s the last in a trio of records (beginning with 2020’s What’s Your Pleasure?) on which she has embraced voluptuous, vintage disco sounds and a playful, pouty persona, both of which allow her to explore her mature and increasingly empowered sexuality. We have a good giggle over recent single “Ride”, on which she come-hithers a guy with the line “Come be my cowboy… giddy up!” over a shamelessly kitsch sample of Ennio Morricone’s iconic theme from The Good, The Bad and The Ugly. She had a hoot filming the video, in which James Norton saddles up (and strips off) on his white steed and she toys with her whip. On recent tours, Ware’s had fun with a whip attached to her microphone, which she flicks out towards the audience and twirls around her head. How does it feel to wield that whip? “At first I couldn’t stop giggling. I was just like, ‘This is ridiculous. Who do I think I am?’” She puts down her coffee and grins. “But then you learn to lasso that shit. Then you feel like a baaaaad bitch.” Bringing dancers onto her stage along with her props and increasingly theatrical costumes has helped Ware appreciate that “there’s a real sense of sexual empowerment in performance. It’s really liberating.” The joy Ware brings to the spotlight now is very different to the moody minimalism of an early career during which she was relentlessly hailed as “the new Sade”, as she graduated from dropping glacial guest vocals onto dubstep and drum and bass singles to making her own silky synth soul. Though she clings to some of her old rules about keeping things classy – “I swear like a trooper in real life but never in my lyrics” – she’s relaxed a lot. Motherhood has helped her take herself less seriously – her kids’ voices add to the let-loose vibe of the new album. Her daughter has asked about joining her on stage, but Ware is wary of encouraging “a nepo baby attitude”. “I’ve told her she can only get up there with me when she can perform as well as Madonna’s daughter Mercy James [who played a knockout piano on her mother’s 2022-23 tour]”. Born in 1984 and raised in Clapham, south London, Ware is the daughter of Panorama reporter John Ware and social worker Helena “Lennie”. The couple divorced when she was 10 and Lennie raised her three children alone. They all developed a performing streak, and they’re all hardcore foodies. Jessie’s older sister is actress Hannah Ware, who loves recommending Los Angelean restaurants online. Her younger brother is medical doctor Alex Ware, who warmed the nation’s cockles (and ovens) with his baking videos during the pandemic. The singer performs at the V&A Summer Party in June (Photo: Dave Benett/V&A/Getty) Ware attended the prestigious, private Alleyn’s school in Dulwich with a cohort of future pop stars including Felix White, Jack Peñate and Florence Welch (with whom she starred in a school production of Guys and Dolls and later toured as a backing singer). Ware’s relationship with her dad has been distant at times, although she tells me today that she learned her impressive work ethic from both her parents. After graduating with a degree in English literature from the University of Sussex, Ware planned to follow her dad into journalism, working at The Jewish Chronicle, the Daily Mirror and behind the scenes at TV company Love Productions with Fifty Shades author E L James before the music took over. Unlike many women with daddy issues, Ware has had a “wonderful, happy” and very long relationship with a man she first met at primary school and reconnected with as a teenager. She married Sam Burrows – a “really chilled” personal trainer – in 2014 and celebrated her love for him on 2017 song “Sam”. “I found a man far from my father,” run the tender lyrics, “from 17 the only love I’ve known.” Written during her first pregnancy, it’s a song that also finds her wondering “what kind of mother I’ll be”. The answer, she jokes now she’s juggling a four-, seven- and nine-year-old (whose names she keeps private, although she tells me the youngest was named by Paul McCartney), is “quite a shouty one!” Her voice is hoarse as she speaks after a hectic week in which she partied late at the London launch of Madonna’s Confessions II album (they share a lighting director) then got up early the next day to play cello in her daughter’s school orchestra (“I haven’t played the cello since I was 11, but she signed me up”) and then recorded vocals for a new single. “So my voice is like this because of a bit of a chest infection… although it could be from shouting at the kids.” The high-decibel mothering is genetic, she reckons. “Because my mum was quite a shouty parent. It’s just how we communicate.” Ware has been the critics’ darling since the release of her sleekly soulful debut album ‘Devotion’ in 2012 (Photo: Andy Sheppard/Redferns/Getty) Now in her mid-seventies, Lennie is on holiday in Greece as we talk. “She’s earned it. We’ve just completed season 18 of Table Manners. It’s mad that we’ve been doing it so long.” The nub of the show’s appeal, says Ware, is Lennie’s social work-honed ability to ask personal questions that “can be very direct yet don’t sound rude. Like the time she asked poor, sweet Liam Payne, ‘Why did you get that tattoo?’” Lennie also got a chuckle out of the late 1D star by pointing out, “You’re quite partial to a model, aren’t you?” before getting him to open up about the overwhelming anxiety caused by early fame and how he self-medicated with alcohol. “Are you close to all the boys?” pushed Lennie in full nosy nan mode. “Nah.” He said. “With someone like Harry [Styles], I just don’t have much in common with the boy.” It was while supporting Styles on tour in Chicago that Ware got her first taste of singing from an arena stage. “I felt like I was kind of cosplaying a pop star,” she says. “In my head I was being Whitney Houston in The Bodyguard and she’s like, ‘I got the statue. I’m the queen’.” Now Ware is the headliner, there’ll be no cosplaying and she’s thinking of the stadium gigs she has most enjoyed. “Prince at the O2. Robyn was amazing there this month too. And I took my daughter to see Taylor Swift [on the Eras tour], and that was amazing.” She sighs, recalling the sweetness of the fans. “All those lovely Swifties, swapping friendship bracelets in the street, on the train…” I ask Ware what she would like her own fans to swap at gigs, and she gives a filthy cackle and an instant answer. She’s witnessed proposals and break-ups at her gigs over the years, and loads of snogging at the back to her hit “Champagne Kisses”. So in her sexy Superbloom era, Ware hopes, “they’ll be swapping their phone numbers!” The UK leg of the Superbloom Tour begins on 28 November