Emeli Sandé can still remember that moment in 2012 when, sporting a vertiginous, blonde quiff and an emerald dress, she belted out her smash hit “Read All About It” at the London Olympics closing ceremony. “It’s one of those memories that I can still visualise so easily,” Sandé, now 36, tells me on a video call, shutting her eyes briefly as if to conjure the scene. “I can remember seeing all those eyes on me and thinking, ‘You really don’t want to mess up.’” It was also a moment that seemed to perfectly encapsulate the spirit of the time: “There was a feeling of togetherness and this collective hope. Everyone was excited for the next decade and the future. A lot has changed, obviously. There are things we didn’t see coming, and deeper divisions now.”
It’s a rare solemn note in our conversation, which finds the Scottish artist in good spirits, speaking from her home studio in Aberdeenshire – not far from the house she grew up in and where her parents still live. For Sandé, the decade that followed the 2012 Olympics has been a fruitful one. She is on the cusp of releasing her fifth album How Were We to Know, a confidently written and unashamed paean to pop’s eternal subject: love. Something Sandé, a self-professed romantic, is very much in the throes of with her partner, and now fiancée, the classical pianist Yoana Karemova.
