As Beabadoobee prepares to release new album This Is How Tomorrow Moves on August 9, here's a chance to read our Music Week cover feature from 2022 to mark her previous LP, Beatopia...
Over the space of five years, Beabadoobee has gone from learning guitar in her teenage bedroom to becoming a hard-touring, viral indie sensation, writing heart-on-sleeve anthems and straddling rock and pop in a way few other artists can. Her second album, Beatopia, is about to unshackle yet more of her personality. Here, Music Week meets the star, alongside All On Red Management and Dirty Hit boss Jamie Oborne and agent Matt Bates of ICM Partners, to talk independent success, growing up and creating a lasting legacy…
WORDS: ANNA FIELDING PHOTOS: THOMAS DAVIES
Bea Laus woke up one late May morning because the bunk in her tour bus was sloping sideways. She looked out of the window and realised it was stuck on the side of a north Florida freeway. Every time a car passed the whole bus would shake. The night before, the vehicle had been making very strange sounds and now it had broken down completely. The singer and her band got towed – which, she was told, “was kind of illegal” – to a gas station half an hour away.
“And it was super-weird and racist,” she says. “The people who worked there were really lovely, but the boys said there was racist graffiti in the bathrooms and the customers were [too]…”
Laus, known to her millions of fans as Beabadoobee, was a long way from home. She was even a long way from Jacksonville, Florida where she and her band had been due to play a show that night.
“Even if we had managed to get there, all my guitars and all our equipment were stuck on the bus,” she explains.
When she fired off apologies via all her social media channels, the response was rapid: Beabadoobee’s fans were concerned for her safety.
There’s a lot of love out there for Beabadoobee. The 21-year-old would make a brilliant main character in an indie rom-com, combining the Gen Z fluency in talking about difficult emotions with a retro aesthetic of cassette tapes, ’90s cool and the clothes worn by the coolest girl who works at the record store. To go with more than 10.5 million monthly Spotify listeners, she has 1.4 million followers on Instagram and over 750,000 on TikTok, where she also has 14.2m likes.
Beabadoobee’s current tour is for her second album, Beatopia, out on July 15 via Dirty Hit, the successor to 2020’s Fake It Flowers, which debuted at No.8. It will take her as far as Sydney, Osaka and Warsaw. For the US leg, she is one of the acts supporting Halsey. Other Halsey support is coming from PinkPantheress, who has collaborated on the Beatopia track Tinkerbell Is Overrated, and Wolf Alice, Laus’s label mates at London-based indie Dirty Hit.
She’s speaking to Music Week from the now-moving tour bus, tucked into a corner as they head up to Tennessee.
“I really love playing live, but that’s the sugarcoating,” she says of being on tour. “It is hard, being away from people you care about and always being on the move. That makes you feel that this is actually a job. But then… When I’m on stage and out meeting all the people who help make this possible, then I think that if I can just make a living doing this, then I will be making a living doing very cool things.”
For her live team, this particular tour is important.
“Obviously, for two years we had nothing at the most important time in her career,” says Beabadoobee’s agent Matt Bates, ICM Partners head of international, referring to the toll taken by pandemic restrictions. “Her early gigs were really well attended and she did some big shows and big support slots and it was all going so well, but 2020 should have been her big breakthrough year with people discovering her at festivals. And that never happened.”
For an artist who got a taste of arenas very early on tour with The 1975, who are also on Dirty Hit, the pause was painful. In 2020, she won NME’s Radar Award as well as a place on both the BBC Sound Of poll and The BRITs Rising Star shortlist. Momentum and progress screeched to a sudden halt. But Beabadoobee, says Bates, is already catching up.
“It’s not just about losing exposure,” he says. “It’s about the artist getting used to playing bigger rooms, learning their trade. Here, [on her current tour] we’ve gone straight into big rooms and she’s been able to do it, to step up and play without the learning steps in between. One thing that worried me in the very early days was confidence because she was such a young girl, but look at her now. She holds the stage, she commands it.”
Laus is quite sanguine about her own time in lockdown. She tried out living with her boyfriend for the first time and spent time in the studio.
“I could write and then make things on the spot,” she says. “And [on Beatopia] I could speak about how I was feeling, about things that were specific to that time and things I’m feeling now.”
The singer will be 22 in a few weeks, but she’s been around the industry since 2017, which was also the year she learned to play the guitar. Alone in her West London bedroom, she had written a song called Coffee – gentle, acoustic and with a simple promise of togetherness. She put Coffee up on YouTube, along with a cover of Karen O’s The Moon Song, and word quickly began to spread. The music soon reached the ears of Dirty Hit and she signed to the label, with co-founder Jamie Oborne also becoming her manager through All On Red. He has the same set-up with The 1975 and Pale Waves.
“Bea is such a beautiful human,” says Oborne. “When I first met her I was struck by how pure and unaffected her desire to be an artist was. And, as the years have gone by, we’ve tried to facilitate the notion of her being able to follow a creative path without trying to colour it too much.
Obviously we guide her and we help her and we put her in situations that will help her achieve her high potential, but really we’ve stuck to what we felt on day one. For me, Chris Melian who works with me on management and Chris Fraser who is a brilliant, brilliant A&R, we have always shared the belief that she was kind of perfect and we just needed to keep other people’s opinions away from her.”
“My relationship with Jamie is very ‘dad,’” smiles Laus. “He’s great and I always know I can speak to him, he listens to me, I trust him and that’s important. It’s a great relationship. I am scared of major labels and what they might do. Being on an indie means they focus on me and my experience, so an indie label is a blessing for someone in my position and for me as a person.”
Apart from wanting to make a living, the singer isn’t dreaming of superstardom. When asked if she would enjoy the level of success The 1975 have achieved, she breathes a small sigh.
“Oh, it doesn’t matter,” she says, sounding casually sincere rather than affectedly humble. “As long as I’m able to continue making music then I’m fine. The 1975, their level of success is amazing and it would be such a blessing to be in that scenario, but I’m quite content with everything I have now.”
Beabadoobee and The 1975 have collaborated, with Laus co-writing her Our Extended Play EP with Matthew Healy and drummer George Daniel, who also produced it. She also wrote and sung with Healy on the Beatopia track Pictures Of Us.
“It’s always really lovely working with him, he’s a really great songwriter,” she says. “It was eye-opening. For me, it was learning to be open to ideas, that you can stand back with music and learn what other people want to do to your song. I began to feel like two heads are better than one.”
Her career received a shot of adrenaline when, in 2019, Canadian rapper Powfu took a few lines from Coffee for his track Death Bed (Coffee For Your Head). It went viral on TikTok and currently has been used as a sound 4.5 million times. By 2020, the sample was cleared and the track became a worldwide hit. To date, it has 1.25 billion streams on Spotify.
“I used to be a rather classic 19-year-old about it,” says Laus. “You know, ‘Oh my God, it sounds nothing like my music!’, but now I’ve fully accepted it as an amazing thing. It’s great that people are able to connect with that song. And it’s a great way for them to discover my music, and realise that I’ve got lots of different types of songs. It has only worked in my favour.”
Beatopia shows more willingness to let others into her world. It isn’t glossy, but it isn’t afraid of sounding more polished and softer than the deliberate grunge of Fake It Flowers. It’s also more open to variety, as with the folky strings on Ripple, the strolling rhythm of You’re Here That’s The Thing and the fuzzed guitars of Talk. Her main collaborator has been Jacob Bugden, the guitarist in her band.
“It makes sense to me because all the bands I love have the singer and the guitarist working very closely together,” she says. “But he’s also one of my best mates.”
The latter is especially important given the personal nature of Beabadoobee’s lyrics. On Beatopia’s second single See You Soon she sings, ‘I guess I have to take it, I’m deteriorating/Feeling blue/I try to have a meaning, and it looks appealing’.
Does Laus ever feel like she’s sharing too much?
“Well, Jacob doesn’t mess with the stuff I write about and I don’t necessarily have to explain to him what everything means in great detail,” she says. “But we are as close as we are, we’re making music together and he lives quite close to me, and I probably see him the most out of everyone so he quite naturally knows a lot of the details about my life. Sometimes, explaining things to him would be like telling him about the weather.”
“The two of them have become quite a formidable songwriting and production duo,” says Jamie Oborne. “They have incredible taste and sonic ambition and I really feel like the handbrake was off, creatively, on this record.”
Oborne also points out that the new album is where Laus, who previously thought of herself as a bedroom artist, discovered the studio and all the possibilities that it entails.
“We sent her to a residential studio in Oxfordshire, one of the few places that was open during lockdown, and she came back full of ideas and possibilities,” he says. “It’s the biggest victory for me to see any Dirty Hit artist developing and this is a real creative evolution and certainly the thing I’m most proud of. We’ve been very hands off and just given her and Jacob the space they needed to make it.”
Looking ahead to Beatopia’s release, Oborne isn’t overly focused on record sales.
“I think there’s commercial potential there,” he says. “But I’m always more interested in an artist’s cultural potential. What can they do that will really affect the culture and stand the test of time? In my opinion, especially for alternative artists, the more cultural impact they have the better the sales will be. So that’s always the pursuit. I would never put pressure on an artist and say that I expect them to be as big as Artist X. That’s not how we operate and, in my opinion, any label that says they know how to create that is talking utter shit, to be quite honest. Maybe I’m an idealist.”
Dirty Hit want the release of Beatopia to be considered and without gimmicks.
“I would like it to move forward from the last record,” says Oborne. “It already has creatively, I feel that it’s going to do that commercially. And in the live arena I would like it to grow her as a touring artist which, again, feels like it is happening. I think the key thing for us is to continue growing the audience and to build something with a solid foundation, rather than something that’s based on an airplay hit or a TikTok moment. We don’t really sit around in our marketing meetings praying for viral moments, that’s not really having a plan.”
The plan they do have revolves around the idea that Beabadoobee appeals equally to tech-led kids and vinyl lovers. Her relationships with DSPs have been strong from the start, and this campaign has already seen Beabadoobee beamed onto a Spotify New Music Friday billboard in Times Square, New York. Meanwhile, the physical merch on offer includes multiple vinyl, CD and cassette formats, not to mention T-shirts, tracksuits and beanie hats.
Oborne praises Perdi Higgs, Dirty Hit’s head of streaming and partnerships, and says the company’s good relationships with DSPs are key.
“It is the primary place for music discovery,” says Oborne. “But we’re lucky, these places are staffed by real music fans, so they will connect with what you’re doing. Physical is important for identity building and we are putting out vinyl and cassettes, which Bea loves.”
Laus still purchases cassettes herself, having picked up a Silverchair album the day before we speak (“I am hyped to listen to it,” she says).
She even had a Walkman as a teen in the late 2010s.
“It’s because my phone was always busted,” she says. “But there I was, getting on the bus with my headphones and Walkman like it was the 1980s, how pretentious...”
The origins of the second Beabadoobee album can be traced back to Laus’s childhood, when Beatopia was an imaginary world with made-up countries she could escape to.
“It was somewhere I could pretend to be, away from the chaos of my real life,” she says. “It was even physical. I made a poster with all the different countries on it. I made a logo. I even created an alphabet for it. I loved it.”
Once, having taken a homemade Beatopia poster to school, she left it on her desk while she went for a music lesson.
“When I came back into the classroom everyone was staring at me really badly,” she recalls. “And the teacher I had at the time – who was a dickhead – was like, ‘Is there anything you want to tell us?’ and he put the poster on the wall for everyone to laugh at.”
That sounds like a horrible experience?
“Yeah, so I decided it was a stupid idea and I swore that I was never going to think about it ever again, I was just embarrassed by the whole idea even though I also missed it,” Laus says. “So with this album I’ve thought about it again and accepted it. And I’m proud of that.”
Now, she says, Beatopia is more personal, centred on exploring her feelings, her innermost thoughts.
“It’s perhaps a bit less conceptual than it was when I was a kid, but I had to dig in and find it within myself,” she explains.
Laus was born in Iloilo on the island of Panay in the Philippines, and moved to London aged three. She always felt like an outsider at school, especially while attending an all-girls Catholic school during her teens.
“I was probably about one of three Asians in my year,” she says. “All the girls were quite rich and predominantly white. I was expelled in the end, although I don’t think my grades or behaviour were enough to justify that. Let’s say there was a certain similarity between the girls who were asked to leave.”
Music became a refuge. She played the violin for seven years, before picking up a guitar at 17. She was still at school when she started recording her first EP.
“It was a relief to be able to go into the studio and make something after a shit day at school,” she says. “Even if the sound engineer was telling me to go and do my homework between takes. Which I did – I did the homework.”
She grew up with her mum playing artists like The Cranberries, Alanis Morissette and Sixpence None The Richer. Her own discoveries led her to bands like Sonic Youth, Mazzy Star and Stereolab. You can hear their influence on her music: sweet vocals and acoustic playing that could harmonise with Sixpence’s Leigh Nash, or with ’90s alt favourite Juliana Hatfield over scuzzier guitars.
“Perhaps [those influences are there] on a subconscious level, but I think that all young people romanticise the past,” she says. “Although, the first time I saw a Nirvana video I was quite a small child and I was terrified.”
Beabadoobee’s music is by no means a ’90s pastiche – that would be a disservice – but it occupies a similar cultural space to TV shows like Sex Education or The End Of The F***ing World and the films of Wes Anderson, Greta Gerwig or Sofia Coppola. Her track Tired (63,947,788 Spotify streams) has appeared on the hit Netflix series Heartstopper, and Laus is beyond thrilled, not for any financial reason, but because she wants to be a part of a successful show that has meant so much for gay teens. You can see why her Beatopian universe appeals to so many people.
“My fans are excellent,” she says. “Firstly, they are very well dressed. Secondly, they have great taste in music. I know they follow my Spotify playlists and I see theirs. I do feel like they are friends and when I meet people around the world who like my music it feels like we know one another.”
Laus is also appreciative “of girls who look like” her.
“Filipina girls telling me I’ve inspired them to pick up a guitar or that this music can be for them really means a lot to me,” she says. “I didn’t have that sort of representation growing up and so I very much want them to have it.”
But Laus says that she has encountered stereotyping in the industry, too.
“I think maybe in the beginning,” she says. “It’s an inevitability, especially with POC musicians. But there are a lot of amazing Asian musicians coming up like Mxmtoon, Japanese Breakfast and so many more. It’s really lovely being part of that, but you don’t want it to be all that anybody talks about, like, ‘Oh, I’m a female musician, I’m an Asian musician,’ because that’s not what describes me as a person. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t talk about it either, because the more normal it becomes, the more girls will learn and be inspired. I do have a platform and it’s important to use it.”
Laus is similarly passionate about mental health and she has been having therapy since the age of seven.
“It’s so English not to talk about mental health, but those conversations are starting to happen,” she says. “Therapy is something that everyone should have. It’s taken years to find a good therapist, but I finally have one now. I feel that it’s important to talk about your feelings. To know where the anger comes from, know where the frustration comes from, and be able to leave that [behind].”
She’s helped and protected by Dirty Hit, who have a wellness fund that their artist can access if they need professional support.
“I don’t want to get too much into the details because people deserve privacy,” says Oborne. “But I have never met an artist who doesn’t need emotional or wellbeing support. These people are very sensitive, they often seem to feel more than the average person and that’s why they can create these amazing, emotive pictures that resonate with all of us. Bea is an incredibly special and sensitive young woman and we will support her in any way we can, whether that is practical help or something as simple as a conversation at the right time.”
Right now, Beabadoobee is looking for distractions on tour, to counteract feeling a little homesick having just moved in with her boyfriend, video maker Soren Harrison.
“We’ve been together since we were 15, we grew up together,” she says. “It’s nice knowing that there’s someone there that I can always talk to. I have this one person who is my most intimate [relationship] and has seen me at my worst and also at the best I could possibly be.”
Harrison’s mother is currently sending her pictures of homeware and design ideas: “It’s making me want to get back, see all these cute things and be in our little house,” she says.
But with Beatopia about to be released into the world, home must wait. She’ll be on the road all summer and into autumn, wrapping up with a headline show at O2 Academy Brixton in October.
“It’s about putting her in front of people,” says Bates. “When you have an artist that’s as good live [as Bea is] and with a good following, well, it’s not rocket science. Right now, her live gigs and the festivals are about winning over people who haven’t seen her before or who might be on the fence. An arena tour is the eventual goal and by the next album that should be a conversation we are having.”
“I think she’s an important artist,” sums up Oborne. “She speaks the truth and she’s a conscientious young act who takes her work seriously.”
Beatopia is about to show the next phase of Beabadoobee to the world, that she is no longer a girl with a guitar and an iPhone in her bedroom. No one will laugh at this version of Beatopia, because this is Beabadoobee’s world now.
Before we leave her on the bus, she confides happily that Beatopia is her favourite release yet.
“With Fake It Flowers I was processing past trauma, and this record is more accepting, hopeful,” she says. “I can’t think of anything I’d change. Right now, as an artist and as a person, it’s the most perfect representation of me.”
