BEABADOOBEE

When beabadoodee started out in music, she kept changing her hair colour. Red, orange, pink, purple, blue, even yellow-y blonde – the FilipinoBritish musician, real name Beatrice Laus, reached for every colour under the rainbow, so long as it wasn’t her own, dark hue. “I was trying to be someone I’m not,” beabadoobee says simply about the frequent visits to the haircare aisle in Boots. “I literally wanted to be Ramona Flowers.” Cool, iconic, and the star of a zillion cosplay costumes, Flowers was a Scott Pilgrim graphic novel character whose locks were ever-transforming to the point she couldn’t remember what her hair actually looked like. This was, for beabadoodee, at least part of the point, too. Sure, the kaleidoscopic shades of dye felt befitting for the deeply cool, emotive rising star of bedroom pop whose lo-fi guitar songs struck a chord from the moment she first uploaded them to the internet. But it was also about not remembering what her real hair looked like; a relatable feeling for any of us who grew up as minorities in a place with Eurocentric beauty standards – naturally dark hair never felt especially desirable for nonwhite people.

But now beabadoobee is sitting before me with hair that’s a rich, dark black hue which cascades past her shoulders: a return to her natural colour. If it feels like an outward, easyto-understand sign of where her head is at more generally, that’s because it is. “I just got more comfortable with myself,” she explains of the change, in her candid, exuberant manner.

We’re in a café in Covent Garden while she eats a late lunch, guffawing that the potatoes are too hot to eat right now and insisting that I try some. “I’m on the road to self-recovery and finally on track to getting better – and I feel like the first step is being comfortable in my natural hair.”

There have been other ways that beabadoobee has gotten on track. She thinks her first ever shroom trips helped, even though a recent adventure in hallucinogens at Coachella was ‘a mistake’, she concedes, laughing. But her improved mental health is also the result of years of therapy, lockdown introspection and a new period of self-acceptance that feels near precocious for someone so young. But beabadoobee takes it in her stride. As she releases her second album, Beatopia, it feels like she is coming into her own.

It has been a journey to get here. Born in the Philippines, beabadoobee and her family moved to West London when she was three. Her childhood was not the happiest: she experienced racism and ostracisation at her majority white school (“I felt like an alien”), while her home life was fraught with financial strain and the stressful realities of immigration, as she and her family left behind a comfortable life in the Philippines to start again from scratch. There was also family trauma to deal with. She understandably doesn’t go into the details of this, simply saying: “I was experiencing a situation I don’t think a child was meant to be involved in”. Perhaps due to these pressures, her grades and general behaviour suffered, with beabadoobee and her school friends becoming known for partying and taking drugs. Eventually, she was kicked out of school aged 17.

Following her expulsion, beabadoobee experienced depression, and it was then that her father bought a guitar to cheer her up. Her first guitar was a second-hand acoustic which she taught herself to play by following YouTube tutorials.

Playing guitar became a therapeutic comfort to her, and shortly thereafter she decided to start uploading the music she was recording in her bedroom under the silly play on her name, carelessly chosen because she had never really expected anyone to pay attention to her songs; she was just putting them online for her friends to hear. Music was never the plan; her childhood career ambitions included being a nun, a surgeon, or a primary school teacher (the latter she is serious about, and says she hopes to pursue in the future – perhaps to make up for her own school experiences).

But then, “Coffee” happened.

In 2017, beabadoobee uploaded a cover of “The Moon Song” by one of her heroes, Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ frontwoman Karen O (“If I met her I would probably collapse on the floor!” she says), plus an original track called “Coffee” to YouTube; the first thing she ever wrote on guitar.

A sweet ballad that sways in soft sepia tones, “Coffee” benefitted from immediate buzz, going viral then and again in 2020, after being sampled on a track by Canadian rapper Powfu. Second time around, the song became a sleeper hit on TikTok and led to beabadoobee’s first chart success. “The fact that that song has gotten so much attention from people that I would never have imagined would have listened to my music otherwise, is crazy to

Beabadoobee signed to renowned indie label Dirty Hit in 2018 me,” she says. “Not least because this was never a planned thing. So it was overwhelming, and it’s given me so many opportunities.”

– home to The 1975 and Rina Sawayama – through which she’s already put out several EPs and an acclaimed debut album: 2020’s Fake It Flowers, with its scuzzy nods to 90s lo-fi rock. Alongside receiving a heap of industry accolades that year (making the BBC Sound poll longlist, earning a Brits Critics Choice nomination, and winning the NME Radar award), she also gained impressive new fans –Taylor Swift and Harry Styles have both cosigned her work.

Though her music started out as a way to help her move through her own feelings, beabadoobee’s songs have become a yearning, soaring soundtrack for a generation to attach to the ups and downs of their own lives.

But success came with its own set of issues. Popularity put pressure on her privacy; while she’s generally extremely candid online (she did a live stream of herself just sobbing after she had to cancel her first Coachella performance due to illness), she and her long-term boyfriend, Soren Harrison no longer post photographs of themselves together on social media. More than that, beabadoobee felt stuck in a derivative place musically. “I felt like I had to stick to this genre of, like, pop, rock and 90s alternative grunge because “Coffee” was going viral,” she explains. Her taste had always been so much vaster than those references allowed for – in our conversation she mentions The Beatles, Chemical Brothers and Broken Social Scene, for example. Coupled with the relatively emotional, hearts on sleeve nature of her lyrics back then, when Fake It Flowers was

Beabadoobee

released after a lengthy delay, beabadoobee already felt like it was an album that was at odds with who she was in the present. It wasn’t, not to put too fine a point on it, where her head was at. “I had grown up before the album admits, “So it almost felt like I had to force myself back into the Fake It Flowers world when I was talking about the record, because it also got delayed and then lockdown

Releasing your debut album during a pandemic is obviously less than ideal, but as beabadoobee says, “as fucked up as it was” the time spent at home –at that point she was still living with her parents –allowed for introspection and healing. It helped that, like a number of young people during the pandemic, she started experimenting with hallucinogens. Her parents don’t mind her being open about her drug usage, she says. While they had once been strict, they’re now “the most accepting people ever – they were so supportive with everything I did.” lockdowns, beabadoobee understand the demons she was running from. She had spent so long believing the narrative of the alien girl who got made fun of at school for bringing in ‘weird’ food, and for her vast sense of imagination, that she embodied a character to protect herself. Which is where Ramona Flowers and all that hair dye comes in – it felt easier than accepting herself for who she was.

It was a confusing time. “I remember when I had blue hair, I would be so jealous when I saw Asian girls with black hair,” she explains. “And I would want to dye my hair black, and be like ‘Then why the fuck don’t you!?’ – but then would stop myself because… I was trying to be Ramona Flowers?!” She felt she had to pursue this fantasy as a form of self-preservation. She puts on a high-pitched voice, as though mocking herself: “‘I’m trynna be Ramona Flowers!’ I was being sidetracked, even though I think it was a necessary part of my life. Fake It Flowers was a phase I had to go through to get to where I am.”

Thus, we arrive at Beatopia. Beabadoobee can pinpoint the moments in her life that have proved pivotal; the events that represent a fork in the road, from which turning one way or the other might have led her on different, perhaps darker paths. One such turn might represent her “villain origin story”, as she, the comic book fan, puts it.

There was a moment when she was seven years-old that feels exactly like that. She tells me about an imaginary world that, as an unhappy child, she dreamed up to escape reality. Beatopia was a deeply intricate universe, with an alphabet, countries, cities: she made a poster which detailed this place in all its splendour. But one day in school, she returned to class after a violin lesson, and found her classmates laughing. They had found the poster; their teacher, meanwhile, did little to stop their ridicule, and even joined in.

It was a moment that stung. “I was completely embarrassed,” she recalls, squirming slightly, “But me being a Gemini, I was like, ‘ha, yeah, idiot!’. I had to play it off as a joke, but I had been so passionate about this thing, and my world came crashing down. And I just completely erased it through and healing. And really, rather than thinking of Beatopia as solely her preserve, she wants her audience to think about the power of imagination within themselves. “There’s maybe a misconception that Beatopia is a conceptual album,” she says, “but I think everyone has a Beatopia inside of them – it’s just finding it within yourself.”

The record is also a very personal statement. “It feels so special, it’s a feeling I’ve never felt before with a piece of music I’ve created,” she says. “I feel like I’m gonna live in this world forever, I feel like I’m gonna talk about this record forever.”

This makes sense when you hear the scope and ambition of the album: Beatopia moves past her and Bugden are both double Geminis, which, she explains, denotes an innate understanding of one another: “We had so many emotional conversations, so many conversations with just us crying. I’ve never been so close with a boy platonically.”

The process behind Beatopia felt much freer and exploratory than that of Fake It Flowers, she says. There are songs she developed while smoking zoots with Soren. She also worked with The 1975’s Matty Healy and Bombay Bicycle Club’s Jack Steadman to create a vast sonic world, a record that flies through genres, from her lo-fi calling card, to licks of bossa nova, nods to hip-hop, and a dollop of folksy sweetness, replete with violins (courtesy of Georgia Ellery from the bands

Jockstrap and Black Country, New Road). The package is topped off with lithe vocals and lyrics that pour out so soft and fuzzy it feels like they’re holding you.

Outside of Beatopia, beabadoobee’s real world has changed too. After lockdown, she moved into her own house for the first time – something she can afford thanks to the music. As she finishes up her plate of broccoli, burrata and potatoes, she says that she’s been learning how to cook, and buying furniture. The experience means she’s able to see herself as someone who can do this. “It’s all starting to feel real,” she beams through those spidery, mascara-heavy eyelashes, “It feels like I’m going to be the musician I never planned to be.”

Beabadoobee has become one of the most lauded names in guitar music, no mean feat in a critical landscape where the “is guitar music dead?” conversation crops up regularly. It is particularly notable for a young woman of Asian heritage, and she speaks about still having to work twice as hard to get recognition. “As annoying as it is, you have to talk about these things,” beabadoobee says. “It’s annoying having to talk about being a ‘female musician’ when we’re just fucking musicians, but also you have to inspire girls if we want to get to a point where we don’t have to talk about it anymore. Yes, I’m making music, but I am also an Asian woman, and I would like to think that I inspire girls that look like me to pick up guitar.”

She already does. Young girls of Asian origin have told beabadoobee she’s inspired them to do exactly that. “I was itching for someone to look up to who looked like me,” she recalls – and where once, she put her energy into playing a character instead, in being herself beabadoobee has become that figure for a younger generation, too. She’s also ready to collaborate with more Asian musicians moving forward. For now, on Beatopia, beabadoobee is embracing her history, her vast musical loves and yes, her natural hair, that outward sign that everything is getting better. “I can finally accept my past and appreciate all the opportunities I have, and keep both my feet on the ground and treat everything with love – and realise ‘It’s not that bad, Bea’,” she smiles in a way that seems genuinely content. “I’m finally learning how to appreciate everything in my life.”