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There is something about twigs that
will always feel other, even now. She’s not often
been allowed to fit in. When she moved to London and
enrolled in dance college, she missed the first two
weeks because her mother was looking for somewhere
for them to live. Before she arrived, the teacher
told the whole of her year and the year above that
they had better start working, because this brilliant
dancer was about to join them – twigs –
and was going to wipe the floor with them. “So
I turn up on my first day, in my pink leotard with
my hair in a bun, with my farmer’s accent, like,
‘Hi guys!’ and everyone’s like, ‘No,
absolutely not.’ My shoes went missing, my leotards…
I think I lasted a month.”
"People
thought I was odd-looking,
until a white male validated my beauty.
But if I sing well, you can’t question that"
She went to Croydon College to do
six (six!) A-levels – sociology, psychology,
fine art, English literature, philosophy, French –
but found it hard moving into a class of 30 kids when,
at her previous school, there were only 12. Everything
was confused and confusing: she remembers going into
an exam, looking at a question and thinking, “We
haven’t been taught this.” After college,
she wanted to get into the music industry, but couldn’t
work out how you did it. So she was a youth worker
in Borough and Tower Bridge, a shot girl at Tiger
Tiger. She continued with her dancing. Then, when
she was 24, a photographer spotted her and put her
on the cover of style magazine i-D. She got a manager
who started teaming her up with producers – surprisingly,
she learned songwriting for a time with Mike Chapman,
veteran of the Sweet (she tells me he taught her how
to structure a song) – and finally, she released
the four-track EP1, in 2012. Every track was accompanied
by a video, directed by her.
It’s been a while since twigs
has been asked to look so far back, and she is different
now, she says. “I was a young woman, stepping
into my sexuality and owning it. I was sassy! Coming
from the outside and being alternative. Not like a
Nubian queen, not a powerful goddess – but something
just as powerful, but fractured. Like in Japan, where
they smash the pots but join them up again with gold.”
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Winning the best video award at the 2015 Mobos. Photograph: Getty Images
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Now, though less sassy, she still
feels good. “People thought I was quite odd-looking,
until a white male validated my beauty,” she
says. (She means Pattinson.) “That’s frustrating
and I still don’t accept it. But if I sing really
well, you can’t question that. If I dance well,
you can’t question that. If I express myself
honestly, or if I’m pole dancing or wushu-ing
excellently, you can’t question that. I’ve
never felt more beautiful because I’ve never
been more skilled. Everything else is ephemeral.”
She called her album Magdalene because
of the way Mary Magdalene has been written about,
she says: as a prostitute, when she was a healer and
a mystic who washed Christ’s feet in rare and
expensive oil. “An incredible woman who was always
in the shadow of a man,” twigs says with irony.
“I can relate.”
She’s a mass of contractions,
twigs: a homebody who sparkles in the limelight, a
seeker of male approval who wants to own her sexuality,
a willing apprentice who’s made for centre stage.
And the next few years will be about her. She might
be in a new relationship – “Don’t get
me wrong, I’m completely open to love” –
but she doesn’t want to compromise, to mould
her life around someone else, man or child. “I’d
like children in my late 30s,” she says, “because
as a dancer, your body doesn’t come back.”
She wants to enjoy her new strength. “It would
be a shame if I didn’t question what it is to
be in a relationship,” she says. “I think
I need to do that, to grow. And to make sure when
I meet someone wonderful, it can be on my own terms.
I hesitate to talk to you about it, because I would
love to have a piece written about me where my name
is not attached to a man.”
But you were dating someone very
famous, I say.
“But my work was so beautiful,”
she says. “It was so much louder than my love
life. It is so much louder.”
The album Magdalene is out on 25 October.
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