Beatrice Laus’s ideal 24 hours in the city looks much like that of any 26-year-old Londoner with a penchant for weed and mischief. “Wake up, smoke a spliff, cuddle the cats, watch Scrubs all day and then go for a walk by the canal,” she muses. “Eat some food in the market, meet some friends at the pub, get all of them back to my house and stay up till 5am. That’s my classic day!” And yet when the Filipino-British singer calls on an overcast Tuesday morning in September, she’s having a very different sort of day indeed.
Surrounded by so many pre-orders of her fourth album Pylon that she’s had to change her signature to “basically a scribble” in order to scrawl on them all, today Laus is in Beabadoobee mode. Where Laus is a homebody who just wants to sit around with her furry pals, Beabadoobee — the artist moniker she adopted almost a decade ago — requires a lot more.
Right now, that means sitting in the west London office of her record label Dirty Hit (also home to The 1975 and Jack Antonoff) and conducting interviews while trying not to develop RSI. But over the past six years, since the release of 2020 debut Fake it Flowers and the turbo success of her Powfu collab, Death Bed (Coffee for Your Head), which stands at two billion Spotify streams and counting, the demand for Beabadoobee has grown in every way.
In 2023, the singer joined Taylor Swift’s record-breaking Eras Tour for 12 dates of its American leg. The following year, her third album This is How Tomorrow Moves marked her first UK No 1 record. Later this autumn, following the release of Pylon, Beabadoobee will graduate to arena headlining status herself, with a quartet of British November dates culminating in a London show at The O2.
In conversation, Laus is effusive, funny and sweary. She’s completely unguarded in a way that precious few famous pop stars are, and clearly has no desire to change that. “There are a lot of things that I don’t like about myself, but one thing that I truly love about myself is that I am incapable of not being myself,” she decides. If Reginald Dwight pops on the sparkles to become Elton John, and Madonna Ciccone drops the surname to assume her own superhero identity, then Beabadoobee is less an alter-ego than an extension. However, with this rare lack of artifice comes its own problems.
“I think [being myself] is what’s kept me grounded, but it’s also what’s made a lot of other things really difficult for me,” she considers. “It’s hard to be a healthy person [on tour]. It’s hard to have a healthy relationship when the universe doesn’t want you to be together — I know, it’s so sad!” she laughs, despairing at her own phrasing. “But it’s not just romantic relationships, it’s also struggling with watching how touring changes people and how this industry changes people that I once loved. I honestly have such an issue with people changing, and I think the issue is that I just haven’t [changed at all].”
“I really don’t know if I’m dealing with it well”
Laus is, to put it simply, way more of a normal person than most people who find themselves in her situation. “I really don’t know if I’m dealing with it well. It’s an extraordinary, very rare, confusing thing to go through — especially for someone who just made music because she was depressed and bored,” she admits. Earlier this year, the singer found herself attending Swift and Travis Kelce’s A-list wedding in Madison Square Garden. Like any self-aware twentysomething deposited into the centre of celebrity madness, when the subject comes up today she can’t stop giggling. “I’m just really grateful that I get to bring my boyfriend to these things so at least I’ve got someone who’s thinking the exact same thing as me,” she notes. “If I could bring all my friends to everything that I do, it would make it all so much more incredible and hilarious…”
Pylon is so named because of the telephone power lines that would stretch out across the long drives between tour shows, reminding the singer of these connections back home. To combat the disorientation she was feeling from being away, Laus would write lists on her phone of possible solutions: bring a friend with her, bring her boyfriend, get sober. “I’ve done all those things now and none of them really worked,” she shrugs.
What did start to work was writing an album about it, and leaning into the emo and rock sounds that first fuelled her around Fake it Flowers. “Writing Pylon, I can say that I was probably the closest to who I was when I was 19, and I can say that proudly because I think she had something going. She dressed cool, she was so unapologetically herself and she didn’t give a f***. Just because I’m in my mid-twenties and I’m ‘an adult’,” she says, adopting the sort of mocking voice that suggests she might not be there quite yet, “doesn’t mean that I’m gonna be super mature. Right now, I just want to be f***ing angry and sing about how I have no idea what I’m doing.”
Pylon does this, but it also brings a cast of friends and peers along that her 19-year-old self could only dream of. Credited across Beabadoobee’s fourth are her own personal Mount Rushmore of influences: Paramore’s Hayley Williams, Turnstile’s Brendan Yates, Deftones’ Chino Moreno, Evan Stephens Hall of New Jersey rock band Pinegrove, and Matty Healy and George Daniel from labelmates and mentors The 1975. “Even if we had come out with absolutely nothing and I had none of those names on the back of my record, getting in sessions with those people would be enough for me to feel great for the rest of my life,” she grins.
Williams, in particular, is a collaboration that makes a lot of sense. On the pair’s duet Nothing to Prove, they deliver an unapologetic kiss-off anthem inspired by studio conversations about “being a woman in the industry and feeling like your opinions aren’t heard or taken seriously”. “She’s so confident and she’s the freaking blueprint. Like, she’s Hayley Williams,” Laus beams. “She was the pioneer in such a male-dominated genre of music, and it’s so validating being in a room with someone who’s gone through that.”
Despite her own objectively massive success as an artist, Laus doesn’t hesitate when asked if she still finds herself dismissed in rooms full of men. “Of course! Like, YES,” she nods firmly. “I think it’s just being a woman in general — that exists in every room, in every different industry. I think it’s almost inescapable.” But with initiatives like Olivia Rodrigo’s recent Daisy Chain Fields festival “standing up for the right things and encouraging girls to be unapologetic”, Laus feels a “silver lining” of hope. “All that bullshit exists in the world, but [good] stuff like this also exists and people talk about it now; it’s more out in the open,” she says.
If receiving a “pat on the back” from her heroes was a major energy boost in creating Pylon, then so too was getting off social media and forcing herself to connect to the real world. “When I was writing this record, it was the most offline I’ve ever been. I had no idea what was going on, and it was amazing,” Laus admits. “I still got sad a lot of the time but I didn’t then feed into that sadness and make myself feel even more shit by doom-scrolling endlessly on my phone.”
Becoming too obsessed with the comments section had left her feeling pulled in the wrong direction. “I’d be like, ‘People love my acoustic stuff and those are the songs that do well so maybe I should do that’. I lost myself for a second because the internet just feels so loud and so consuming that you think it’s real life, but it’s just not real!”
“The thing about being vulnerable is you never know how intense the aftermath is going to be”
In order to let herself be as vulnerable and open as she needs Beabadoobee to be, the only answer was to step away and not think about her audience at all. “The thing about being vulnerable is you never know how intense the aftermath is going to be. I’m vulnerable in the moment and then, all of a sudden, thousands of people are going to listen to it,” she ponders. “But when I love an artist, I don’t think, ‘They wrote this song about x, y and z, and they broke up with this person which means this is what was happening’.”
That is, however, the exact level of fan sleuthing that occurs with her old tourmate Swift. Could Laus imagine reaching that degree of intensity? “Oh my god, no!” she says, hooting with laughter. “I’m just about dealing with this! And also my fans have gotten older and they’re self-aware. I’ve been out and about a lot in London and met people quite often, and I’m graced to have people who listen to my music who also dress cool and listen to all the bands I like and who I’d hang out with myself. There’s a general understanding between me and my fans that we’d all be friends in another life and I don’t think we’d ever be super weird to each other.”
A lucky percentage of those fans joined Beabadoobee last week when she played a special one-off show for Spotify’s Hometown series in her native west London, also participating in a songwriting workshop with a handful of young people at local youth project The Avenues. Despite the music industry’s fixation with LA, you won’t find Laus relocating any time soon. “I’m not getting my ass to America unless it’s to tour. Not tempted, not even once mate,” she affirms.
Beabadoobe by numbers
2bn Streams of Dead Bed (Coffee for Your Head), her single with Powfu
4th Despite being only 26, her new record Pylon is her fourth album
1975 As in “The”; her labelmates and mentors
3 Age she moved from Illoilo City in the Phillippines to London
17 Age she was expelled from Sacred Heart High School in Hammersmith for misfit behaviour
17 Also the age when she bought her first second-hand guitar and starting writing music
“I love London. I love the way it feels to be in it, and I’ve got so many memories here. I went to school here, got kicked out of school here, went to another school. I’ve had so many experiences in this city. There’s a corner where I’ve pissed in every place in west London!” she declares before caveating: “Well, gotten pissed, maybe also pissed…”
Her PR may be sighing, but Laus has an unfiltered turn of phrase that’s hugely endearing and rarely found among her Radio 1-friendly peers. “How do you find a guitar tone that makes you feel like you want to die? Or what dissonant chords are there that make you feel sick?” she questions, describing her songwriting process on Pylon. While Beabadoobee’s latest might reroute her from the pop path she was heading down on LP 3 back towards the rock-leaning sound of old, it’s clear that Laus probably fits more naturally in the realm of the emoters and the chronically honest anyway.
These days, Laus still doesn’t have everything figured out, but she’s getting better at seeing the bigger picture. In a decade, she can envision herself as “a mum with an electric guitar. I’m always gonna make music, I know that for a fact, but I also know that it’d be nice to have a little version of me and my boyfriend,” she smiles. Looking back on the decade past, meanwhile, she’s learnt to be equally gentle with herself. “I love every version of me who was f***ed up. I love blonde Bea — she was a crazy bitch! I appreciate all the madness that I had to go through to get me to the point I am.”
When Beabadoobee walks onto The O2 Arena stage this autumn, she’ll have the chance to redo the experiences of that inaugural era, when she first played the venue supporting The 1975. Back then, Laus was 19 and completely overwhelmed. “I had a panic attack, so I actually need to play it again to make some new memories.” This time, she might be “touring an album about how difficult it is to tour that I have to play on tour,” she notes wryly, but she’s also ready to step up and own the moment in her own way: not as a perfect pop product, but someone infinitely more relatable and human.
“As hard as this is and as much as I can complain about how much it affects my mental health, deep down I am so extremely grateful that I get to be able to make music,” she says, picking up her Sharpie to sign the next thousand CDs in the never-ending pile. “There’s definitely a little girl inside me that always wanted to do a tour like this. Who wouldn’t? So I’m gonna take the opportunity by the neck, and I’m going to cry and scream and laugh, and it’s gonna be epic.”
Pylon is out now; Beabadoobee plays the O2 Arena on November 18
Photography by Erika Kamano
