As a best British female Brit award winner and recent inductee into the rarified Spotify Billions Club for 2019 single Don’t Call Me Up, stepping back into the limelight should have been smooth sailing for Mabel McVey. But when the mononymously known pop star teased her return on Instagram in March, the message was filled with heavy allusions to the difficulties of what had come before.
“I don’t know if anyone really knows who they are in their twenties, but the only way for me to start figuring that out was to turn down the noise,” she wrote. “I definitely don’t have the answers on how to navigate this industry any more, but I do know that it will be a hell of a lot easier with you by my side.”
Launched into the spotlight in her late teens, Mabel had her first Top 10 single — 2017’s Finders Keepers — shortly after turning 21. Now 28, the interim years were a steady cycle of “make a record, then promote the record, then make the next record”, coupled with the even greater pressures of being simultaneously moulded by the industry and judged by the world.
By the end of the release cycle of her second album About Last Night, in 2022, she felt completely disconnected from herself.
“All these opinions about the way you look, all these things that come with being a female pop star — these expectations and meetings where they talk about you like you’re a product rather than a person — can slowly grind you down into a place where you don’t know who you are,” she says.
The industry itself had also begun to shift and react against its old methods. Where, she says, “there was a formula before, and I know that because I had it used on me many times”, audiences were now craving authenticity and real characters; flawed, relatable heroes instead of perfectly manicured stars.
“When that changed, it felt really positive but I just didn’t know how to do it,” says Mabel. “I came from an age where there was a glass wall in between you and the viewer. I didn’t know who the f*** I was because there’d been so many opinions from other people and comparisons between me and other pop stars that it had taken me to a place where I didn’t even know how I liked my eggs.”
So Mabel followed her gut and decided to take an 18-month break. She spent time with her family — her mother, the musician Neneh Cherry, and father, music producer Cameron McVey. She rode horses and travelled; she embraced evenings “cooking and doing little things that I’d missed out on for years”. Sooner than she’d expected, she felt the urge to start writing once more, working on new tracks with her brother Marlon in the way she had before all the fame set in, “when there weren’t other people involved and I was just making what felt good”. When her parents moved into her west London house while theirs was being renovated, she also started using them as a sounding board for the first time.
Perhaps because she’d already established her own career before the term fully took on its current buzzword status, Mabel has never really been slapped with the “nepobaby” card. It’s a concept that, these days especially, she finds easy to shrug off. “When I first started out I was really stressed about it but now I’m like, my parents are who they are and I am who I am because of them, and I’m so grateful,” she says.
“Now, because I’m comfortable in that I work hard and I’m talented and I deserve to be here, all those nepobaby things have gone away. Now it’s like, let’s go to fashion week together and shoot magazine covers together. It’s less lonely. And maybe it’s an unusual situation but I’m in it and I’m gonna enjoy my family.”
Having a parent who has also been subjected to the scrutiny of the public eye has, Mabel says, been equally helpful and disheartening. “So much hasn’t changed,” she notes. “When my mum did Top of the Pops eight months pregnant, they got so many complaints about a woman wearing a sexy outfit and doing ‘provocative dancing’ while having a baby bump.
“The presenter on the show asked her if it was safe for her to be doing this while she was pregnant and my mum was like, ‘It’s not a disease…’ I talk a lot to her about how she felt in her body, and what people were saying, and being a woman of colour in the industry at the time. There are so many things where, actually, it’s really similar and I’m going through a lot of it now.”
Her recent single, Look At My Body Pt. II — featuring fellow London singer Shygirl — takes aim at this, addressing the damage caused when your physical image is seen as currency and flipping it into a confident empowerment anthem.
In the studio, she says, the pair spent time swapping war stories from the frontline. “I’d be 21, going for food with some friends and the headline would be: ‘Mabel puts on busty display while going out for dinner.’ Like, I have boobs, and they came with me to dinner!” she laughs. “You can obsess about those things because other people obsess about them, so you internalise it. Is it a good thing? I guess I made it in the papers when I did that? So we spoke about that, how you can make the most incredible song and people will still just be talking about your tits.”
The second in a run of recently released singles that are slowly leading towards a third album (“There’s a full project [ready], but I’m taking it day by day”), Mabel’s current era is a purposeful move away from the slick pop aesthetic of her last work. Ty Dolla $ign collab Stupid Dumb was an exercise in “living out my R&B fantasies”, rooted in her experience of going to black churches in LA, while her aesthetic is “a lot more toned down, and how I look on a day-to-day basis”.
It’s lost her followers, she says. “I think lots of people — probably men — were there because I was a pretty girl and I was always thinking about being snatched [looking good] and having my face immaculate.” But Mabel is at a point where she’d rather be liked for who she is than loved for who she’s not.
She gushes over close friend Raye, a long-term sounding board and collaborator who has also been through the industry mill. There are, she says, many Raye co-writes still in the vaults. “We went through a phase of writing so much together, and we write together really effortlessly so a [proper collaboration] has to happen.”
I talk to my mum about being a woman of colour in the industry. So much still hasn’t changed
Mabel has also been using her platform to push conversations around the ongoing lack of justice for Grenfell — she lives 10 minutes round the corner — back to the fore, working with The Grenfell Foundation on projects to support young people affected by the fire in 2017. “Everybody is heartbroken about there not being justice served yet, so what I can do is make sure we’re still feeding and watering the next generation,” she says.
The Mabel McVey that’s returned, then, is one who’s putting her energies in the right places; who has taken the time to reassess what and who matters, and is consciously working to shut out the noise. “I had to start thinking about where I want to get to and who I want to be as an artist,” she says. “I’d like to do an O2 [Arena] and know that all those people are there because they’re my actual fans and they’re invested in who I am as an artist and as a person, and not just because I’m the girl with the song about the phone.”
