There were moments during the making of her second album when Joy Crookes wondered if it was worth all the pain and strife.
“This was an absolute f**king nightmare,” the Mercury-nominated singer and songwriter says. “Ironically, the album was written quite fast. So it wasn’t the writing; I was concerned that it would be the writing that would be the difficult part, because of the stereotype of the second album.
“But the real difficulty was the production and the amount of life that hit me during the time of making this record. So although I didn’t want to believe the cliche, it happened in its own way to me.”
When Crookes talks about “life hitting her”, she’s referring to a series of traumas that left her reeling. There are dark hints of these troubles on the new long-player, Juniper: its songs House with a Pool and I Know You’d Kill chronicle an abusive relationship; Somebody to You is about a falling-out with a family member (“You’re in every photo on my teenage bedroom wall / Though you’re not even famous, I’m your biggest fan of all”).
These would be daunting challenges for anyone. Crookes was also under pressure to replicate the success of her debut album, Skin, a collection of soulful bangers, from 2021, that drew comparisons to another Londoner with a smoky croon, Amy Winehouse, and was nominated for the Mercury Prize.
Without Crookes ever setting out to become famous, Skin made her a star. The problem was that she wasn’t feeling very starry. Even as she tried to strategise the next chapter of her career, life was hitting her like a ton of bricks. It got dark, she says.
“Artists tend to struggle. We have mental-health problems.” She had become, she says, “a non-working” person, dysfunctional and not sure where to turn. Before she could continue with her career, there were things she needed to put right.
“I had a very real-life experience. Although I am an artist, I am also a human being. There were a lot of things that, as a non-working person and just a human at the time, I had to address and which would be actually quite destructive and consequential for my artistry if I didn’t take the time that I needed.”
There is a reason, she says, why artists are often taken before their time. She is mindful that she is about to turn 27 – a notorious milestone in music, as the age at which Winehouse, Kurt Cobain, Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, Brian Jones and others died.
“So many artists die so young in all mediums of art,” Crookes says. “I’m not trying to make that catastrophic. That is just factual. That is what happens. I’m fortunate enough to have a team of people around me – very importantly, my manager. She was not interested in me becoming an artist that suffered on stage and was struggling very openly. I could do that in private. That’s how it should be. We have the phenomenon of the ’27 club’. I’m going to be 27 in a few months’ time. My life, or lack thereof, could look very different.”
Crookes is friendly and no-nonsense. Her father is from Cabra, in Dublin, and she talks with warmth about the many summers she spent in Ireland. She notes that Blanchardstown shopping centre – “Blanch” being a part of the city with which she is intimately familiar – features on the cover of CMAT’s new album.
“I was wondering the other day if I got my ears pierced in Blanchardstown. It was either Henry Street or Blanchardstown shopping centre. I got them pierced in Dublin for sure. I’ve spent lots and lots of time in Dublin,” she says. “We would go to Castleknock or Blanchardstown. Even as a teen, or my early 20s, I was in the shopping centre, going to Nando’s – I got a Nando’s black card – and loving it.”
[ CMAT: Euro-Country review – Dunboyne Diana’s new album delivers joy and sadness in the same heartbeatOpens in new window ]
Crookes’ father moved to Britain to study engineering. It was there he met Crookes’ mother, who grew up in Dhaka, and whose own mother fought in the Bangladesh Liberation War, against Pakistan, and received death threats for teaching women how to ride motorbikes. Her parents separated when she was young, and she grew up between two households in Elephant and Castle, in south London.
Bangladesh and Ireland are obviously very different countries, but they are united, she says, by a shared colonial history.
“The denominator of being colonised by Britain – if more Irish people knew about Bangladesh, they would have more of an affinity specifically with Bangladesh than they would India. Obviously, being from both, and my parents being born and raised in their respective countries, I’m a first-gen Bangladeshi-Irish person.
“There are so many more similarities than people realise. Bangladesh is a product of decolonisation and wouldn’t exist had it not been for Britain’s participation and involvement and f**keries in India. And Ireland’s history is 800 years long with British colonisation. So there’s so much similarity.
“In Bangladesh, the liberation war that we had was a mother-tongue war,” Crookes says, referring to the fact that Pakistan had tried to force East Pakistan, as Bangladesh was then called, to adopt Urdu in place of its native Bengali. “And the erasure of the Irish language, there’s so many similarities. They were using the same tricks on both people.”
It is because of that heritage that Crookes has been so outspoken about Gaza. At Glastonbury this year she wore a dress by the designer Jawara Alleyne that was styled to resemble a Palestinian flag. In an interview with the BBC at the festival, she also urged viewers to boycott Rod Stewart’s headline set after the singer suggested British voters should “give Nigel Farage a chance” as British prime minister.
There has long been a political streak to her art. One of the most striking songs on Skin is Kingdom, an elegy for what the UK has become under successive Conservative governments, suffering the effects both of austerity and of Brexit. She was full of hope when Keir Starmer and Labour replaced the Tories, but that optimism has turned to disillusionment.
“England has a way of f**king people over constantly,” Crookes says. “If you follow politics, it’s not that shocking. I think the sad part is there was a glimmer of hope when Labour were voted in, because obviously, like, 15 years plus of Tory austerity … You could feel it.
“When [the Conservatives] were re-elected was when I wrote Kingdom. You could feel the anger and the frustration in London even when you were walking down the street. People were so f**ked off about that as an outcome. It felt so, so much that it didn’t reflect how London truly felt.
“That frustration, I think, will always be there until a very big change happens here in the UK. But it’s also not surprising, because they are all themes – and, for lack of a better word, f**keries – that the British government have explored since beyond our time.”
Crookes is happy to be a symbol of a multiracial Britain but does not wish to be defined by it. When Skin came out she was struck by the way the British media constantly defined her by her ethnicity, as though she were a metaphor for melting-pot London rather than an actual person.
“I often was referred to as ‘Bangladeshi-Irish south London Joy Crookes’. When I would hang out with my mates, if I was tired, I would say, ‘I’m a tired Bangladeshi-Irish south Londoner.’ And they’d be, like, ‘What the f**k are you saying?’ I was referred to as that for so long that I ended up calling myself ‘Bangladeshi-Irish south London Joy Crookes.’”
Her father introduced her to all sorts of music, from the lovelorn indie of Mazzy Star to the rumbling reggae of King Tubby. He also passed on to her his fandom of Sinéad O’Connor.
“My dad would buy me books on her, saying ‘I think you’ll relate to her.’ Her dad was also a structural engineer. There were those strange little similarities. She is Ireland’s princess. I felt a huge affinity with her and her voice and, more importantly, how she always, always lived to use her voice.
“I read Rememberings” – O’Connor’s memoir – “slightly over a year ago, and that was a very difficult read. And I think, if I’m totally honest, I got to a position in music where I felt I had the opportunity to meet her. So when she passed I, selfishly, was so sad I never got to meet her. I think she even died in south London – she died not 10 minutes away from me. I’ve always seen her as like a musical godmother, a guardian angel. I wish I could tell her that.”
She sees O’Connor as belonging to the same category of artist as Winehouse: women who were built up and torn down and whose public undoing was regarded as a spectator sport. “There was a huge amount of guilt that people felt. They ridiculed her whole life and treated her like s**t. Similar to Amy, the general public felt there was a green card to mock her and people like Amy.”
Crookes is proud of Juniper and grateful to have come through all the ups and downs. (She is now in a relationship with Moya Garrison-Msingwana, a Toronto-born illustrator.) She sees the album as ultimately representing hope and renewal – its title is a reference to the “resilient” juniper tree, which can grow anywhere.
She’s more than ready to leave the dark clouds behind and continue moving forward. “I feel good,” she says. “I feel like, ‘Jesus, will it just come on?’ The album has been done for a long time. I feel restless, if I’m really honest.”
Juniper is released via Insanity Records/Sony Music