With her latest album, Choices, recently debuting at number 5 on the UK Albums Chart, Lucy Spraggan talks about a change of direction and new lease of life
BY BEN WEST
Singer-songwriter Lucy Spraggan shot to fame in 2012 after appearing on the TV show X Factor. Supremely talented, feisty, and never short of something to say, she has hit the headlines on a good few occasions since.
Music snobs may readily discount anyone discovered on a reality TV show before even listening to the music, but you just have to hear a few bars of her songs and it’s clear that Lucy, 29, is an accomplished musician with diverse, lively compositions ranging from introspection and intimacy, to those brimming with humour.
Coming out as lesbian aged 14, she is also a champion for the LGBTQ+ community. She has recently lived a heady couple of years that included a split from her wife of three years, getting sober, and an impressive physical transformation that embraced weightlifting, running and a protein-rich diet and which resulted in an astonishing three-and-a-half stones weight loss.
Her rich life experiences have resulted in a new album, ‘Choices’, which have at the time of writing already had nearly 3.5 million plays on Spotify alone.
“The album is about – as the title suggests – choices, really,” she says. “Over the last couple of years it’s become more apparent to me that life is just a series of choices, and how you make them define your future and your present. And the ones you’ve made have defined your past. This album is about moving forward and those choices that you make, moving forward.
“I really enjoyed making this album, despite it being during lockdown. I was working with Pete Hamilton on the record – he’s such an experienced producer. He’d gone to a studio in Scotland, and that’s where I ended up recording the album, in isolation. So I stayed in this little cottage, waking up with cows in the garden, amidst the huge, huge changes of going on around the world. So it was kind of a welcomed break from that.
“Recording is a torturous process – because I am a tortured artist,” she jokes. “Usually, I sit behind the producer saying ‘I don’t like that hi-hat, I don’t like that snare sound.’ But this time I wasn’t allowed to be in the studio for that. Pete sent me the tracks, I would send them back. But because he’s really good at what he does, most of the stuff that he sent to me, I was this time saying ‘this is really good.’”
What do you like most, playing or listening to music?
“That’s such a hard question. I find the two totally different experiences, but if I had to pick one for myself, indulgently it would be playing.”
I ask her what she thinks makes a musician stand out, why she thinks she has been so successful.
“I think self-belief is so important. I’m writing about that at the moment, I’m writing a book, and writing about how relative success is. I think the moment you stop comparing your success to other peoples’, and make your success just completely independent to you, that’s when you start to stand out a bit more, because you’re not really playing by any other rulebook.”
Splitting with her wife Georgina Gordon, whom she met shortly after her X Factor experience, was clearly a profound change. The couple had fostered children together and been undergoing fertility treatment to have children of their own.
She has admitted that her way of escaping until around 18 months ago was through drinking, and so she decided to become teetotal, as well as embark on a major fitness routine.
“I think it was just that I was working a lot on acceptance,” she says. “And I accepted that my life was not heading in a direction that I wanted it to, or that felt truly authentic to me. So I decided to pretty much change everything that I didn’t like.
“I do a lot of fitness, a lot of training, and research on nutrition, and the best ways to provide optimal training. I’m now also a qualified personal trainer with Future Fitness. I just decided to get the qualification, I may as well while I’ve got nothing else to do!”
She also launched her own fitness brand, Fully Rewired, and hopes to open a community not-for-profit gym.
“The plan is to open a community gym, based around not just fitness gains. Because I find gyms really daunting, even as somebody who, to look at you’d be like, ‘well, you go to the gym’. And so I want it to be a gym that’s about mental well being, that’s attached to physical well being. So it’s not about like losing a stone. It’s about being able to deal with sadness, or neutralising fitness, to make you happier.”
So you’re going to more and more go into fitness, rather than music?
“No way!”
But you’ve trained as a fitness trainer…
“I know, it doesn’t make any sense. But the gym I see as being somewhere I can employ people, because I want to offer more employment out there. That’s why it’s going to be a not-for-profit because it’s a passion, I want to improve other people’s lives. Music has always been there the whole time. And I also don’t know enough about fitness to really do much with it, but all I know is I want to share, spread the message.”
I ask her what she would have done if she’d not been a musician.
“I went to college to become a firefighter. At the time I had just finished being an apprentice plumber, and I’d taken on a job at a demolition site, and I fell over and broke my leg. And so, I couldn’t be a firefighter because I had some long lasting damage to my leg.”
So maybe you’re into fitness because you really appreciate being fit from an experience like that?
“I now appreciate the body far more than I ever have. And I’m always amazed by what it can do. I’m a runner, I run long distance, so I could just head out the door and do a half-marathon.”
I ask Lucy who she’s particularly enjoyed working with, and whom she’d like to.
“Well, Beyonce would be great, wouldn’t she? I did a song with Scouting For Girls, which is a band that I listened to a lot as a kid, and I really enjoyed working with those guys and that song, ‘Stick the Kettle On’, has had a lot of traction. It was on Grey’s Anatomy, which is pretty cool.”
What advice would you give to someone wanting to follow in your footsteps?
“I’d say everybody has to carve their own path, and it’s such a weird world that we live in at the moment. Like whether you’re a viral video sensation, or whether you’re going to be scouted by a record label, which never happens anymore. And if you are, you’ll probably be forced onto some kind of television show anyway. Probably the most important thing is to find people that are as invested as you personally, as you are – not financially – which is easier said than done. But it’s all about building a team.”
Lucy has spent much of lockdown alone, aside from her Boston terrier Steve, who has regularly been featured on her social media. Of course, the pandemic has greatly affected her, just like almost everyone else.
“From a business perspective, it’s been pretty catastrophic because being a musician, I’m a touring artist before I’m anything else. But from a sense of well being, I’ve been touring relentlessly for the last decade, and I don’t stop. I do two European tours, two UK and either one or two American tours every year. And that was the first time that I’ve ever had to stand still. And so when I did, I had to actually – without alcohol, without music, without touring – I had to work out who I was without any of that.
“That could have brought on a real identity crisis but instead I had the time to like figure things out. But with writing a book as well, in terms of productivity, it’s been really beneficial, but just not the normal productivity that I have.
“I don’t see a very different place for the music industry once the pandemic is over. I think livestream shows will stick around for a bit. We’re already now looking at touring New Zealand, Australia – we’re back to it, like Covid never happened. I think there’ll be a bigger demand, we’ll sell more tickets for a few months.”
A look at Lucy’s social media posts present someone rather different, quite outspoken, to the quiet and reflective person I am talking to now. Some eyebrows were raised recently, for example, after she posed on Instagram topless and in her underwear after she underwent surgery on her breasts (a mastopexy, raising them, and augmentation, enlarging them) after losing weight meant she was unhappy with their appearance.
“I don’t see myself as being outspoken because I make observations on what I’ve seen,” she says. “But I’m not into this culture of outrage porn, it just bores me that the Lawrence Foxes and the Katie Hopkins have been able to design these careers by saying things for the sake of it, and being outrageous. I don’t really think I’ve ever said anything that was outrageous. And it’s funny what people think is outrageous. A lot of people are offended by me, like putting a picture of me on my in my underwear on the internet. Some people think that’s outrageous, but I think things like racism or sexism are outrageous.”
Is a picture of you in your underwear much different from standing on a beach in a bikini?
“The answer is no. But I’m off social media at the moment. I haven’t been on social media for a week at all. I haven’t even opened it up, and to have been relinquished of all of these opinions that I just don’t care about, never requested, yeah, it’s been incredible to not have them. I don’t think I’m gonna go back on social media.
“Even though it’s been a huge part, social media is how I sell my albums. I have never been given a commercial platform, apart from the one that I put upon myself in 2012 [X Factor]. But apart from that, I’ve only had one song playlisted on national radio in my entire career. And that was three years ago. So social media is a big deal. I’m thinking that maybe I’ll be on it when a campaign is out, but maybe I won’t.
“Most of my confidence has been forced and not very authentic for a long time. I often feel the most outwardly seemingly-confident people are people who are reasonably insecure. I think the confidence that I do have that is authentic, is from believing in myself and what I have to offer.”
This article first appeared in Black + Green Magazine in 2021
