Paloma Faith: ‘Dads aren’t ‘helping’ with their baby – they’re doing their job’

Paloma Faith is on the move. “I’m in the car on the motorway, going to my friend’s wedding,” she explains, “so if it cuts off, I’ll jump back on again.” And if a dodgy signal weren’t enough for her to contend with, I can hear a baby – her third child, just nine weeks old – in the car, too. All in a day’s work for the queen of multitasking, who posted to Instagram about pumping milk in the loos at the Baftas last week. As a new mother myself, I’m in awe of her juggling. Does it get easier, I ask? “Obviously the first one’s filled with anxiety because you don’t know what you’re doing, and you’re shellshocked,” Faith recalls. “But I found having this baby super healing, [because] I’m [doing it] in a different set of circumstances, with a) experience, and b) knowing that it does take a village,” she says. “There are so many variables, and we women blame ourselves – but you need your partner to be involved, and if they’re not, then other people need to step in. If they don’t, there’s a reason why you’re floundering and you’re stressed and you’re sleepless.” At one point, Faith breaks off to confer with her baby’s father, the music venue director Stevie Thomas, as he administers a dummy – “He’s bleeding from the sacrifice!” she jokes, referencing the overzealous praise heaped on men who contribute to childcare. “We need to abolish the word ‘help’ when it comes to dads,” she scoffs. “They’re not ‘helping’ [by looking after their baby] – they’re doing what they’re meant to do.” She’s not working much at the moment – admittedly a ridiculous thing to say about someone with a tiny infant – but Faith is making exceptions for the things that really count. “Going to the Baftas was important to me and Alan [Carr], because we wanted people to stop saying that he was a meanie,” she laughs, of the fallout from her longtime friend “murdering” her on The Celebrity Traitors last year. Are they still best pals? “Yeah.” Well, consider that record firmly straightened. Paloma Faith (right) is a mentor on ‘Your Song’, along with Sam Ryder, with Alison Hammond as presenter (Photo: Channel 4) Faith made her name as a pop star when her 2008 debut album Do You Want the Truth or Something Beautiful? spawned multiple top 20 hits. Since then, besides making music, her working life has expanded in myriad directions – acting, writing, coaching on The Voice, to name a few. So when she calls her latest role, a mentor on Channel 4’s amateur singing competition Your Song, a “career highlight”, that’s really saying something. While it’s her job to hone the participants’ singing skills, “the reason why I like this show is because it’s not really a competition”. “It’s about the story being enough. The greatest performers of all time are people who speak to us – Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, whoever. These people don’t have perfect voices, and they didn’t all come with the ability to perform either – but they found ways to be their authentic selves. Seeing someone break down on stage because of inner turmoil, and then relating to that joy or brokenness, is what [Your Song] is all about.” Certainly, singing has a universal appeal that other art forms struggle to match. “[Your Song is made by] the same production company as The Piano, but the joy of singing is that anyone can do it,” says Faith. “It doesn’t involve, like, having parents that made us go to our piano lessons, you know what I mean?” That accessibility is something she is hugely passionate about. “When you think about fine art, theatre, musicianship, they’re all things that involve a certain level of privilege or make people feel ostracised,” Faith continues. “What’s great about this show, and I think what some of the critics have missed, is that it’s for everyone – from the most privileged to the most impoverished, to be able to relate from an equal standpoint of accessibility and humanity,” she says. “That’s why I feel like it’s a career highlight for me, because that’s what I represent and what I stand for.” It’s true that Your Song offers singers a platform, no matter their background – but still, a platform is not a career. What advice would Faith give to a young person trying to carve one out in the music industry today? “I always find this question hard, because I don’t think if I started now, I’d have the career that I’ve got,” she says. “Even then, it was quite elitist – most of the people came from privilege, and I didn’t,” she recalls. “But what was available to me at that time was a platform called MySpace.” The ‘murder’ of Paloma Faith on ‘Celebrity Traitors’ last year (Photo: BBC) Combined with as many live performances as she could land and a whole lot of staying power – “It was 14 years before I got a record deal,” she notes – Faith eventually got her break. “You have to access all the free things you can, and that means putting yourself out there on the internet,” she explains, “but I also think it’s really important to practise playing live in front of people. […] A young person might say, ‘Well, I can get a million people to see me if I do it on the internet, and only 50 people in the pub’ – but [they’re both worth doing].” No question, the mechanics of the industry have changed since Faith found her way in – but altogether less movable is the enduring appeal of music itself, its capacity to speak to millions while feeling intensely personal. Your Song, in which contestants sing something with particular emotional resonance, is testament to that. From grief and heartbreak to new love and belonging, our experiences shape our relationships to music: so how has motherhood impacted Faith’s? “I think that women’s lives are in chapters,” she muses. “We have so many hormonal rises and falls – and there’s more to come with menopause, I suppose. So it’s hard to acknowledge how it changes the music you’re making, because it’s an inevitable and unconscious thing.” Nonetheless, “I write songs about my children,” she explains. “People assume that all love songs are about romantic love – not for me any more.” It’s a feeling many parents will recognise, and one that has inflected Faith’s experience as a listener as well as a musician. “That Nick Cave song, ‘Into My Arms’, is like my all-time favourite,” she says. “I sang it to all my kids – there’s a line, ‘I don’t believe in the existence of angels, but looking at you, I wonder if that’s true’.” As Faith speaks, I am hit by lightning: that song has been part of my own canon since I was a teenager, totally saturated with mopey adolescent longing – but with her words, it is entirely reconfigured, a jigsaw piece suddenly slotting into a new gap. Exit: boy. Enter: baby. I’ll never hear it the same way again. An album on repeat during a break-up. The artist your mum always played. A novel kind of love, flooding old songs with new meaning. Whether we’re writing it or listening to it, music has the power to plunge us back into the past or rewire the present with a single line. “I’ve written my new album already,” reveals Faith. “I wrote it when I was pregnant – so I’m now working on the production side.” Precisely how this new baby will alter her music remains to be seen. As for how her new music alters her audience – that will depend on who they are when they listen. ‘Your Song: The Grand Finale’ airs on Sunday at 9pm on Channel 4