Singing sensation Rumer on how she beat the maddening pressures of fame | Music | Entertainment | EUROtoday

Sarah Joyce vividly remembers the day her life modified ceaselessly. She was with Steve Brown, her first producer, at the back of a cab driving by means of Shepherd’s Bush. “Suddenly we saw this massive billboard with a huge picture of my face on it,” the star higher generally known as Rumer tells me. “It was an ‘Oh my God’ moment. I couldn’t believe it. I thought I’d made a jazzy record that might have a few reviews, I didn’t even think about it getting into the pop charts.”

That album, 2010’s Seasons Of My Soul, offered a couple of million copies within the UK.

Before then, Rumer had been a barmaid in Herne Hill, southeast London. Eighteen months later, she was singing for Barack Obama on the White House; and her followers included Elton John, Richard Carpenter and Burt Bacharach who flew her to California to listen to her sing.

Her life has been a rollercoaster of highs, lows, and cleaning soap opera worthy twists – like discovering out that her actual father was a Pakistani prepare dinner when she was ten.

Yet Rumer, 45, remains to be as all the way down to earth because the pubs she used to work in. Critics hailed her heat, velvety, soulful voice as ‘the most beautiful since Karen Carpenter’.

Steve Brown, greatest generally known as band chief Glen Ponder on Alan Partridge’s TV present Knowing Me, Knowing You, was her first superfan. “Steve saw me at a pub gig and paid for the album. He had a studio and a few quid and he backed me. I had a full-time job so one day a week, every Friday for three years, I’d go from South London to Turnham Green to record the album. It was a very organic process.”

Her subsequent super-fan was Max Lousada, boss of Atlantic Records UK. “All that promotion, the billboard, the TV appearances, was down to him barking orders from the top of the building. But I was 30 when I was signed up, and I’d lived about 1000 lives. I’d had different jobs, I had friends and relationships, my mother had died… I didn’t easily adapt to being pushed from pillar to post.”

Back then, earlier than social media and on-line interviews, artists needed to go all in.

“For the first two years, my life was: flat to car to airport to hotel to huge show or promo event, and then repeat. It was my rabbit in the head-lights era. I was exhausted and I felt trapped. The travel tires you out and talking about yourself wasn’t natural for me. I was raised very Catholic. You’re taught to put others first, not yourself, so I found it very pressurising.”

“People don’t realise that when you become this thing, it takes complete control of your life. Everything is 1000 miles-per-hour. You’re out of touch with everyone you know, and you replace people who love you with people who want to extract whatever they can from you just for the sales graph.

“If you had any residual trauma or mental health issues it triggers them. And I did. I felt constantly triggered. It’s not just overwork; it’s the loneliness. It’s a bit like it’s your birthday party every day. You lose your mind. That’s why many young artists get ill and get addictions and can’t keep a relationship. It can be tragic. Liam Payne was incredibly lonely. Attention is focused on the addiction, the real problem is the loneliness.”

She suffered panic assaults on stage. “I’d be standing in front of thousands of people, trying not to faint.”

Some of Rumer’s interviews again then emphasised her psychological turmoil. “The over emotional stuff,” she laughs, her brown eyes glowing. “Yeah, it was journalists from North London, you know the type, with little beards. They looked like therapists, so I opened up. At one point my sister texted me saying ‘Stop saying you’re mental!’ Nobody was talking about mental health back then.”

Recording her second album in 2012 Rumer and Brown fell out irreparably. By the time it went Top 3 she had decamped to Los Angeles.

“I was escaping the English press, Prince Harry style,” she chuckles. “Except I hid. I disappeared deliberately.”

Rumer loves at the least one British newspaper. “I’m a secret Express reader,” she says. “The Express does the Royal stuff better than anyone else.”

She met future husband, American composer Rob Shirakbari in LA – they’ve one son – and moved to Arkansas.

“It was like a witness protection programme,” she laughs. Away from the insanity, she received a canine, loved nature, and healed.

Sarah was 18 when musician Malcolm Doherty heard her sing throughout a lock-in at Herne Hill wine bar Bolland’s, simply three doorways down from the Half Moon pub the place she poured pints.

“He asked me to sing in his band, La Honda. I was with them for a year or two in the late 90s doing indie pop. We had a lot of fun. We supported Drugstore, we had a song on a Tic Tac advert.”

They had been about to play Southwest Fest when her mom Margaret was recognized with breast most cancers. As the one sibling with out kids, she give up the band and decamped to a caravan on the south coast to be close to her, getting a job within the village pub.

“In La Honda I was just a singer, but in the caravan, sitting there with a guitar with fairy lights, I wrote my first songs” – a lot of which ended up on her debut album.

“Mum died in 2003. I felt a bit lost so I went back to London and continued songwriting.”

Her mom’s guide assortment included writer Rumer Godden, who impressed her stage identify.

Sarah was born in Pakistan the place her British father was Chief Engineer on the Tarbela Dam venture. But aged ten, her mom Margaret instructed her that her actual dad was their Pakistani prepare dinner.

It defined why she had brown eyes and brown hair not like her blond, blue-eyed siblings.

“Mum lobbed it into the conversation like a hand grenade and then walked away, never mentioning it again until she was dying” – which was when Margaret requested her to go to the North-West Frontier to fulfill him. Sadly he’d died two weeks earlier than she arrived, however she did meet her half-brother Saeed and his household.

Growing up, Sarah did impressions of Judy Garland to entertain her household. “I was obsessed with her. I remember taking a video of Judy Garland, Lana Turner and Hedy Lamar to a friend’s party. I put it on and they all walked out.”

Rumer’s profession highs embody performing on the Palladium with Bacharach, and naturally the White House – “a very small room, the audience is two feet away; I can only describe the experience as total fear.”

All her studio albums have gone Top 20 aside from 2016’s This Girl’s In Love (Bacharach & David songs) Songbook) which conked out at 27. In 2020 she launched Nashville Tears, celebrating the work of Nashville nation singer-songwriter Hugh Prestwood.

Now again in southeast London, Rumer has launched In Sessions – a choice of her songs re-interpreted with a reside band. She excursions the UK in October, solely now she does issues at her personal tempo.

She loves assembly followers after her exhibits. After one final November at London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall, she says, “A whole family told me they’d grown up listening to my music – that’s quite something, being part of their growing up.”

Husband Rob thinks her greatest attribute is her kindness. “My worst is I’m disorganised and chaotic. I like a rummage around second-hand shops, I like antiques” – which is not any approach to discuss Crystal Palace FC.

She’s humorous, articulate and open. “I am a lairy bird,” she tells me, smiling. “Ironically, the music I love is so peaceful but I’m southeast London for life.”

*Rumer’s full-band fifteenth anniversary of Seasons Of My Soul tour begins on 13 October. Tickets from ticketline.co.uk and ticketmaster.co.uk