Smooth Operator: meet Jessie Ware, London's best-connected soul diva

By night, Jessie Ware is a soul diva, camp and coiffured and magnificent, delivering torch songs to masses of fans (including gay men mouthing the word ‘goddess’ at her). She’s been nominated for Brits, Mercurys and MOBOs; her debut album Devotion went gold, and her single ‘Wildest Moments’ was deemed sufficiently epic to be used by the BBC over a montage of Andy Murray’s finest shots on his way to the 2012 Wimbledon final.

But at 10am on a weekday, the 29-year-old singer-songwriter couldn’t be more unassuming. She rolls out of her car wearing sunglasses and a baggy jumper, gives me a hug, and the chat begins: ‘I’ve been trying to be healthy since I got back from Glastonbury. I’ve been going to the effort of making that green juice to drink in the morning. And it’s disgusting! I feel sick. It’s that f***ing spirulina,’ she says, spitting it out as if spirulina is a dirty word.

Besides having a good line in self-deprecation, Ware has a special quality that’s hard to analyse, but which comes out in her music: a certain depth, interiority, sincerity. She writes or co-writes all her own material, segues easily between electro-pop, drum and bass and R&B power ballads, and has a habit of working with the coolest collaborators: SBTRKT, Sampha, Romy Madley Croft of The xx, Kid Harpoon, Julio Bashmore of Simian Mobile Disco. On her eagerly anticipated second album Tough Love, producers and guest artists include Miguel, and Solange Knowles’ producer Dev Hynes.

And then there’s what she calls ‘The South London thing’. She went to Alleyn’s School in Dulwich at the same time as Jack Peñate (who kickstarted her career when he invited her to join him as a backing singer at his BBC sessions and on tour) and Felix White of The Maccabees. Florence Welch was two years below her. Adele was bezzies with Jack Peñate, and so it went on. ‘We’re still tight, we’re a good network. I don’t see Adele that much any more, but I was at Glastonbury with Florence. We have a really sweet relationship and we check in on one another. We weren’t close at school but we’ve known each other a long time in that intense teenage environment. She’s been really good to me and she’s always on hand if I want to ask her anything. She’s a mega-star. She’s been through it all.’

Young British singer-songwriters with defiantly English vowel sounds are hot property in the States right now. Ed Sheeran and Sam Smith have become the first British artists to top the US Billboard album chart in more than 20 years (at the time of going to press their new albums are at number one and number two respectively). Ware, of course, is part of their crew, too — she is so tight with Smith, he insisted she missed Dolly Parton to watch his Glasto set from the side of the stage, and as for Ed Sheeran, while they were both in New York earlier this year she bought him lunch in Whole Foods and they wrote a song in 30 minutes that looks to be one of her new album’s biggest hits.

Ware is Jewish and her ‘fabulous, magnetic’ mother Helena is ‘the most important person’ in her life. ‘She’s also quite an anxious wedding planner. My sister says she’s playing the song I’m going to walk down the aisle to every night and crying. Happy tears, you know… She’s obsessed with her children and she supports us all the way. She would probably come to every single gig I played if she could.’ Jessie’s younger brother is going to be a doctor, much to her mother’s satisfaction (‘She’s got the Jewish doctor son now’) and her older sister Hannah is a TV actress in LA. ‘Not that either of us were going to be actors or singers when we were little. Maybe we get it from my mum. She’s a social worker for a living, but she’s a performer. She’s a great DJ actually.’ Her father is the former Panorama journalist John Ware. Her parents separated when she was ‘about nine, ten’. ‘My eyebrows and my furrowed brow come from my dad.’

Ware’s husband-to-be (‘fiancé sounds so smug, doesn’t it?’) is a PE teacher turned personal trainer who is unimpressed by all her famous friends. ‘Sam couldn’t give a shit about any of it. You have quite a lot of mad moments like when you have to pinch yourself because you’re having a drink with Lana Del Rey at Chateau Marmont and she looks so perfect sipping her Shirley Temple and she smells so sweetly and he’s just like: “Chateau what?” He’s happy for me, but he’ll only come along to support me, not because he’s interested in any of it. When we went to Glastonbury we passed the VIP area, but he didn’t want to go near any of that and that was great. I think that’s so good and so important.’ They met at school. ‘Our wedding invite is a picture of us on the swimming team in 1996 when we were 11. I’m a little taller than him there… We met again at drum and bass nights when he was DJing on Streatham High Road and our friends had a night so we’d meet at Mass in Brixton.’

Although ‘Wildest Moments’ is, in fact, about her female best friend, and several of her songs chart ‘someone else’s relationship, a relationship I’m very close to, as a voyeur’, Sam can take credit for some steamy semi-autobiographical tracks. Spending time apart; flirting while on a break (‘I love flirtation songs’); sealing the deal with their engagement. ‘I wrote a song for the new album about me waiting patiently — or not so patiently — for him to tell me he wanted to be together with me for-ever. I wrote it after we got engaged on Skopelos. It’s about waiting. It’s about celebrating somebody.’

On the new record she sings: ‘I want to feel burning flames when you say my name.’ She sounds like Stevie Nicks. ‘Ooh, thanks,’ she says. ‘I wanted a real Fleetwood Mac feeling to that song, bright but desperate, with a really melodramatic chorus. I kept saying, “Can we make it more Kate Bush?” ’

Previously she sang about her need for love and companionship in the track ‘Night Light’. ‘Am I still afraid of the dark? Yes, I am,’ she confesses. ‘What’s wrong with me? I guess that’s just a vulnerability, being scared of what’s around the corner. I’m scared of intruders and ghosts. I’ve never seen a ghost, touch wood. But I know they exist. I close my eyes really tight at night in case I see one.’ She decides to lighten the tone: ‘This probably all stems from watching Poltergeist too young.’

Touring America this year she discovered a new demographic. ‘My audience there is very gay and fabulous. I didn’t realise that at first and I was wondering why there were so many beefy guys in plaid shirts in the audience. I even asked that out loud, and this big guy said, “Because the gays love you, honey.” ’ In the States, she says, ‘They love to queue up and meet you after the show and give you little presents. I tweeted that I was desperate for some Marmite and every single night after that I received Marmite, one to four jars a night.’