by In a cold oak-paneled boardroom at Sotheby’s auction house, deep in Mayfair, the FKA twigs look out of place. She is bundled up in a “worn, blue Japanese” dancer’s uniform stocking and hood covering with a matching silhouette throughout; it’s the color she’s lived in in recent months because “it doesn’t say anything” but “she always looks good”.
The 36-year-old singer is soft-spoken, at 5ft 2in small in stature, and has a completely different look – her skin is bare of make-up and her head is shaved apart from an ancient Egyptian-style braided ponytail. . adopted after her father (a musician she didn’t meet until she was 18) told her she was “part-Egyptian”. She quickly reminds me, “I grew up in Gloucestershire” and “live a simple life in east London with my partner”.
We’re talking because, after four traumatic years, twigs (real name Tahliah Debrett Barnett) has returned to the music industry, releasing the first track and music video for her new album Eusexua, and putting on a two-week dance performance, Eleven, which is currently unfolding – in all its grunting and unchoreographed glory – in a gallery room next door. “Over the past few years, I have been on a huge healing journey. I had to really learn how to use my body, and how to live in it,” she says.
In 2020 she filed a civil lawsuit in Los Angeles accusing her ex-boyfriend of nine months, Transformers actor Shia LaBeouf, of “relentless abuse” including sexual battery, assault and infliction of emotional distress. The trial date is set for next month, October 14. In the filing she alleges that LaBeouf threw her against a car, woke her up by choking her, put her life in danger by threatening to crash a car they were in, and knowingly gave her. sexually transmitted diseases. LaBeouf denies all the allegations and has said he did no harm to the singer.
“It’s funny, because I think medicine is a dirty word, especially for the British. That puts our backs up a little bit,” says twigs. “But I believe it’s a very beautiful thing in the sense that I believe we’re always healing and it never ends. I have changed a lot in the last five years. I feel really settled with the people around me now.” Since 2022, she has been with Jordan Hemingway, the American photographer and director, after another high-profile long-term relationship with Matty Healy from 1975, 2020 to 2022, and Robert Pattinson, 2014 to 2017.
Regardless of her personal life, twigs is a musical powerhouse and one of London’s biggest exports, with 2.7 million monthly Spotify listeners. She grew up in Cheltenham with her mother, a salsa dancer and teacher, and attended the bursary-fee St Edwards School before moving to a Brits school and later to Croydon College, where she completed her teeth as a backup dancer. .
Her first studio album, LP1, was released ten years ago, and her celebration of the queer community and voguing sent her flying into the mainstream. In 2019, she released Magdalene, which saw her “really digging down into my femininity”. The video for her song, Cellophane, featured her pole dancing, which surprised some. She embraced the conversation and spoke out about sex work, her own experiences of hosting, and in 2020 set up a £30,000 GoFundMe to raise money for strippers and sex workers who have been hit hard by the pandemic.
Don’t forget her album hiatus (in 2022 she released her first mixtape, Caprisongs) for being shy about putting herself in the spotlight. She went viral in January after the Advertising Standards Authority’s decision to ban a Calvin Klein ad that featured her naked and claimed it was a “stereotypical sexual object”.
“People have always been obsessed with beautiful women who promote a strong and amazing body,” she says today. In March, the ASA partially reversed its ban. “I’m thick skinned at this point but I feel sad that my sisters Eartha Kitt, Grace Jones and Josephine Baker did the same and it doesn’t seem to have made any difference. We have not moved on.” In April, she made history by testifying before the US Senate on the threat posed by AI to the exploitation of artists’ works. “I felt so humbled,” she says. “It made a difference.”
His new album is less political. It was born from “going to Prague about three years ago, experiencing techno music there and developing a deeper relationship with dance music. It was on the dance floor that I felt Eusexua,” she says. Eusexua, a word she coined, describes “that moment of nothing just before a great surge of inspiration or creativity or passion. I describe it as a moment before orgasm.”
A member of her team suggested not to name the album with a made-up word, which was not search engine optimized. “A lot of artists do really well when they call their project something that’s really another project so people get it by accident”, she was told. “At that moment, I knew I couldn’t work with that person anymore,” she says, wistfully.
Its long-running Sotheby’s show celebrated Eusexua in 11 stages, attracting reams of London’s coolest art-cum-raver types from far and wide in south and east London to the posh auction house. Around a white dance floor, they looked like twigs and their entourage lurched about, crying, crying, rolling on the floor, and slapping their clavicles to the point of complete exhaustion. It was something unusual to see. “The exhibition is free, so people can come and learn about it. If it was useful to them, that would make me happy. If not, you can be abstract and different… you know?” she giggles.
Another room showed his sketchbook, where the line is handwritten on one sad piece of paper, “My body is the same body I was before anything bad happened to it”, repeated across it.
Releasing new work is not the same for her. “I’ve been making music for a long time. I feel so cold,” she says. “The music goes and comes back around. People don’t like it, then they get used to it and decide it’s going to be rubbish after that. I’m older now and feel a little more practiced. It’s funny though, because in the same breath I feel like I’m just starting over.”
I wonder if she’s famous — she’s got all the markers: 2.5 million Instagram followers, calls Madonna her best friend, is a regular face at the Met Gala, and was on the cover of British Vogue in April of this year this — helps her? She rejects that label. “Everyone is a celebrity. There are cat pages on Instagram that have more followers than I do. I don’t know what fame is anyway, but I do know what cultural influence is.”
She insists that at the heart of everything she does – releasing music, holding truth in power, embracing the inspiration within – is really wanting to change the world around her. “I love changing the cultural DNA. Just this little molecule, then you see it spread and people’s minds change.”
For example? “Being a very small part of changing people’s minds around pole dancing, and then around sex work, then around gambling and the odd scene. Then around handsome people. Then around survivors of domestic abuse. Then the way people move their bodies, the way people dress and how you should wear your make-up or your hair,” she explains. “To be a small part of that change – I feel lucky.”
I wonder if we are lucky. Power to you, twigs.
The Eleven, a lengthy piece featuring FKA twigs, ends today at Sotheby’s. She will be playing from 10:30am to 4:30pm. Her new album, Eusexua, will be out next January
The essential FKA playlist
Eusexua, 2024
Nabác Brat summer – they are already calling it the Eusexua autumn.
Callaghan, 2019
Songs for moments of time. It’s a pole dance video that changed the conversation.
Two weeks, 2014 of charge
The one she put stratospheric.
Papi Pacify, 2013
Personable, engaging – many twigs are a fan favorite.
