Celeste

From Brighton to the Brits, Celeste’s voice has always carried weight. As she prepares for the release of her long-awaited sophomore album, the singer-songwriter reflects on the complexities of identity, creative intuition and reclaiming her narrative

Jewellery by Cartier throughout, photography Clare Shilland

Celeste Epiphany Waite has spent a lot of time in the studio lately. She’s working dedicatedly on her new album which is due out in September, but when we speak she’s taken the day off. “I was singing last night and I was there till really late,” says Celeste with a tired chuckle, before remarking that I remind her of her half-sister. “Even the way you finish your words is similar, it’s so nice. I was thinking, I need to call her.”

It’s a clichéd trope to define someone as an old soul but Celeste has a perceptiveness about her that’s difficult to define otherwise. She’s more softly spoken than I anticipated, considering she sings with a rich vocal timbre reminiscent of a time long before the 30-year-old was born. After performing at the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee in 2022, she met Diana Ross’ creative director. “Apparently, said to him that I reminded her of Lady Day, meaning Billie Holiday,” Celeste mentions with noticeable humility. It’s her emotion-laden voice with its distinctive rasp that led her debut album Not Your Muse to be nominated for both the Mercury Prize and Album of the Year at the BRIT Awards in 2021. Just listening to the lead single ‘Strange’, where she details the unravelling of a romantic union, had me longing for a past love with a visceral ache that only heartbreak can conjure.

Her mother is the person she credits for her intuitive nature. “My mum sought out a freedom that wasn’t necessarily the norm for where she was growing up,” Celeste explains, describing her mum as having an unconventional “bohemian lifestyle” while living in Romford, during the 1980s. After venturing to Hong Kong and Thailand at 21, on a subsequent trip to Los Angeles her mum met Celeste’s Jamaican father. “They didn’t stay together very long,” Celeste says. She and her mother then moved to Dagenham in east London – which is in close proximity to Romford – to live with her maternal grandparents.

After a few years, by happenstance, a former boss offered her mum a job and flat in Brighton. “That was where my mum found her healing. It was about the aftermath of breaking up with someone and finding your confidence,” she says. The two of them “had our own independent bubble there,” Celeste sentimentally remarks, noting that it was the first time she found real friendships. Now settled in London, she reflects on those formative years as influencing, but not defining, who she presently is. “Identity is ever-growing and ever-changing for me because it’s something I find within creativity more so than in a place.”

It’s this tendency to feel into her artistry that makes her songwriting so affecting. “I have to keep this very specific openness. It’s an alignment down to the gut,” she says. “I’m accessing a stream of emotional information and memory that exists within me. It’s from my own experiences but also being a witness to other people’s experiences.” She explains that she can pick up a vibe from passing a stranger on the street. “Sometimes, a form of body language can tell as much of a story without needing to be verbalised.” Suddenly, the roles shift between us. “Do you ever have something like that?” In the act of turning the question around, she demonstrates this propensity to seek out the inner worlds of those around her.

Despite thinking she had a late start breaking into the industry, Celeste’s songwriting talent got her noticed at age 17. She wrote the grief-imbued song ‘Sirens’ about the passing of her father a year prior and uploaded the track to YouTube, which caught the attention of a manager. At age 18, the record and publishing deals came flooding in. “I didn’t take any of it because it was all geared towards me working with certain musicians and I just knew it wasn’t quite who I was.”

The choice wasn’t without consequences. “All of these offers came to me within a year of focusing on music, so I had this idea as a young, naive person feeling a bit cocky that these opportunities would come again in three months’ time.” Essentially, her unawareness of the industry back then and “how fickle it can be” stalled her dreams.

Years passed while Celeste worked at her local pub in Brighton, hoping for a change in circumstances. She moved to London in 2017 with £100 to her name and promptly got fired from her new job for spending as much time as she could making music. Her diligence eventually paid off; in 2016, she secured a record deal with Lily Allen’s Bank Holiday Records, and in 2017 she released her EP The Milk & The Honey before signing with Polydor in 2018. “At 23, I was still super young but I felt a bit more aware and knew who I wanted to be and what not to say yes to just to get somewhere.”

Although she now feels more well-versed regarding the convoluted nature of the music industry, she says it’s a continuous balancing act between herself and her label. She recalls a time when she had to convince her team to allow her to play ‘Strange’ over another song at the BRITs. “You have to let other people feel trusted but also know when to be like ‘I need to shine here, so let me have this piano chord like this’.” She describes the negotiation process as a journey towards greater creative freedom and self-belief. “I have that feeling of ‘Let me be careful because I don’t want to fuck this up and end up with nothing’ but I find my moments and just try to let my singing do the talking at the right times.”

Celeste’s self-confidence is still susceptible to the opinions of others. “I felt like all of the accolades and all of the excitement around my voice came before the album release. Then when it came out, I felt like people didn’t feel it was very good.” She’s convinced that most people only like her best-known song ‘Strange’, which has undeservedly become her Achilles heel. “When people think success has come to you instantaneously because a record label is pushing it, they’re a bit cynical about how talented you must be,” she says. Celeste tells me about a review in The Guardian that came out after her debut. “The writer said I had no backbone in my songwriting.” The way she recounts the story suggests the hurt lingers.

Momentum slowed after the album release. “I went from that high moment of everyone being interested to feeling like very few people were,” she explains. It was when director Steve McQueen cast her in his film Blitz (2024) that Celeste’s confidence had an upswing. “I’d been depressed for quite a long time, so it was great that people could see that someone like that would want me in their film.” McQueen’s conscientiousness has left a lasting impression on Celeste. “When I saw him being very specific on set, I thought, ‘don’t compromise on your sense of intuition and values within your work’.” Although she still feels sensitive to outside opinion, she’s working on reframing the narrative. “I remember Skepta used to speak about underdog psychosis, where people thought he was the shit but he didn’t think they did. He always had to be proving himself, so I feel like maybe I’m that person.”

Celeste sees a clear opportunity to prove herself in the making of her sophomore album, which admittedly comes later than she’d hoped. She’s working with Matt Schaeffer, who previously partnered up with Kendrick Lamar, and another producer who’s collaborated on two albums Celeste holds in high esteem: Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy and 808s & Heartbreak. Although there have been teething problems, the songs are taking shape. “The album is about womanhood and recognising ourselves as complex beings. Even if you can’t undo the riddle of exactly what that means, it’s at least about taking the first step and acknowledging that you’re a person with complicated feelings.” This time around, there’s less worry about how her output will be received. “I trust that I will perform my songs live and that’s where people will hopefully understand my intent and the weight of the pieces of music.”

While she’s currently preoccupied with working on the album, Celeste has bigger long-term plans. “My sense of wanting to express emotions has shifted onto other mediums a bit,” she says. Earlier this year, she directed her first video for ‘This Is Who I Am’, the theme tune for the thriller series The Day of the Jackal. “It wasn’t acting, it was just about going outside and screaming,” she tells me, the result a disturbed, short film noir. This project seems to be just the beginning. “I still have this greater ambition, even if it’s not the most attractive thing to mention,” she says, her most confident comment so far. “You can’t decide what people’s perception of your artistry will be,” she notes, before adding in true empathic fashion, “but it’s about always trying to be more authentic.”

Jewellery by Cartier throughout

Photography Clare Shilland

Styling Natasha Wray

Studio Lock Studio 5

Producer Thea Charlesworth

Hair James Catalano for The Wall Group

Make up Fey Carla Adediji using Elemis

Nails Saffron Goddard