Louise: ‘For years I wasn’t scrutinised. Then bang – everybody had an opinion’
The pop star behind Nineties smashes including ‘Naked’ has returned with a sensational new album that she knows will take listeners by surprise. She speaks to Adam White about not wanting to be a ‘nostalgia act’, her high-profile divorce, tabloid cruelty, and the ‘non-negotiable’ that immediately halted an Eternal reunion
Louise Redknapp had it all planned out. She’d stroll over to London’s Mayfair from Waterloo Station, taking in the city, then settle into a quiet nook of a members’ club for our interview. But as the singer well knows, sometimes life throws you curveballs. “I didn’t realise it was gonna take 45 minutes,” she says, breathlessly, slipping off her scarf. “Have a tea, have a tea!” She calls over a waiter, apologies flowing out of her – the venue we’re in is far busier than she’d expected, and she feels terrible about keeping me waiting. “I don’t want to turn up late for someone who’s taken their time to meet me, you know? It’ll bother me because I am just not an arsehole. Do you need sugar?”
When she was a pop star the first time around, Louise was famously, almost tooth-wincingly nice. She didn’t drink or do drugs. She didn’t slag anyone off. She didn’t punch a single All Saint in a Brit Awards bathroom. And now, in doting mum mode with a journalist she’s only just met, she’s living up to her reputation. I tell her this, to her slight horror.
“Oh God, I’m not that nice!” she hoots. “I’m fair, but I’m not nice.” She curls her lip. “I think I’m a good human, and I would never make someone feel like s***. But if someone crosses me? Then, no, I’m not nice. I have no qualms about standing up for myself. But I’m not looking for a fight. I’m not looking for headlines. I actually don’t look for fame at all. I just really love music.”
She doesn’t think people talk about that enough. “It’s gone completely unnoticed through all of my career. Whether it was being married to Jamie or the FHM days [she was voted the magazine’s “Sexiest Woman of the Decade” in 1998], there’s always been another layer that people have been more interested in. And I get it – some of my music probably wasn’t strong enough to cut through that. It was a bit paint-by-numbers. But that was the era.”
Before she became arguably more famous for marrying footballer Jamie Redknapp and then divorcing footballer Jamie Redknapp, all those lads’ mag shoots dotted in between, Louise was one of Britain’s most successful Nineties pop acts. She found fame within the R&B quartet Eternal then broke bigger as a solo artist, with tracks including “Naked”, “Arms Around the World” and “2 Faced”: bold, glittery, Now That’s What I Call Music!-ready bops designed to imitate the trends of the time. Then, after three albums, she left music behind for life as a wife and mum.
She was, by her own admission, never a boundary-pushing artist. (“People would send songs in for me to record, I’d turn up at the studio at a specific time, then leave when the record was done – you just made music to sell.”) But she was a very good one: a fantastic dancer, with a beautiful face and a rich, soulful voice. That last point, she thinks, gets overlooked too. “I still have people say to me, ‘I didn’t realise you could sing like that’, and it’s like… I’m on my fifth album!”
I got a text from my producer asking, ‘Are there too many sex noises on this?’. And I was like, ‘Jon, there can never be too many sex noises!’
I don’t tell her this, but Louise was the first proper pop star with a wind machine and a flank of dancers I ever saw in concert. This was the early Noughties, and she was cavorting across a stage in the middle of a Bristol field. The chest-thumping, hair-thrashing choreography to “Naked” is still burnt into my brain. She had that pow that seems to emit out of all the best performers like her, but there was a sense – even then – that her kind of stardom was rickety. ITV had started producing manufactured pop bands by the bucket-load. Britney was prowling about with live snakes. Christina Aguilera was slathered in creosote and showing everyone her underpants. Louise was… nice, earnest, a dependable vessel for solid dancefloor-fillers. She didn’t tell anyone that she aspired for more, so the industry reacted in kind.
“I was made to feel that it was over,” the 50-year-old remembers, and particularly after having her son Charley in 2004 (Beau followed in 2008). “I thought nobody would see me as this sort of pop goddess any more, that I’d never get the opportunity to make music again. I was desperate to be a mum, and I loved being a mum, but at that stage, I did think I’d never get back to my career. There’d never be a route for me.”
And it’s why it’s been so heartening to see her become a pop star again. Her new album Confessions, which is released in May, is a summery and sensual collection of nu-disco, dance-pop and funk, with production by Jon Shave, who co-wrote and produced a few tracks on last year’s Charli XCX behemoth Brat, including the standout insecurity anthem “Sympathy Is a Knife”. “I was really adamant about making a progressive album,” she explains. “I don’t want to be a nostalgia act, and I wouldn’t carry on making music and gigging if that’s all I was doing.” Indeed, it’s a great record. Single “Love Me More”, which came out on Friday, veers from swooning love song to punchy kiss-off to a spectacular mess of enveloping synths. “Only Dancer” has shades of Body Talk-era Robyn, Louise pining over a sparse synth bassline. The slinky and dramatic “Confession” is all strobe lights and whispered vocals. “Get Into It” is a punchy slice of new jack swing, swaddled in moans of ecstasy. “I got a text from Jon asking, ‘Are there too many sex noises on this?’. And I was like, ‘Jon, there can never be too many sex noises!’.”
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She talks about Confessions in a way that feels slightly unusual, as if she knows that people aren’t necessarily expecting it to be so good. When she brought the album to one of the heads of record label Absolute, in the hopes of getting their help in distribution and marketing, it was listened to only as a courtesy. “Then he phoned up my manager saying, ‘I am blown away by where this album is sitting – it’s modern, it’s current, it’s honest’.” She smiles. “I’ve had a lot of feedback like that. And I do understand it. I’ve always kept in my lane, done what people expected. Now I’m saying, ‘f*** it!’”
Louise was discovered by a music manager in a London nightclub in 1989, having snuck in with friends. He was looking to form a girl group, with the then 15-year-old Louise teamed with sisters Easther and Vernie Bennett, and subsequently Kéllé Bryan – her classmate at the Italia Conti stage school. Eternal launched in 1992, a British spin on the American R&B girl group En Vogue. They had hits, but Louise struggled within the group.
I tell her I always assumed she was the Beyoncé or Robbie Williams of Eternal – that either her star power just popped more than her bandmates, or that she had aspirations beyond shared fame. “That couldn’t be further from the truth,” she laughs. “I felt really lost. I didn’t feel like I was adding anything. My confidence was low. All I’d ever wanted to be was a pop star and I was miserable.” Eternal supported Take That on tour at one point, and Louise found a kindred spirit in Williams, who’d leave his own group a few years later. “We both felt like the odd ones out within our bands. It was nice to know someone else who felt a bit lonely.”
She quit Eternal in 1995. “It felt weak to leave but actually, looking back, it was strong – I knew I was really sad,” she says. “I was in my early twenties, and you shouldn’t be sad at that stage in your life.” She still owed four albums to Eternal’s label as part of her deal, and was asked to make it up via solo records, which she reluctantly agreed to. “It wasn’t part of the plan, as I actually really enjoyed being part of the band,” she says. “We were just quite different characters.”
There was talk in 2023 of an Eternal reunion – the group’s original line-up had more or less disbanded by 2000 – but it reportedly fell apart after the Bennetts told Louise and Bryan that they didn’t want to perform at Pride events. “There are some non-negotiables in my world,” Louise says, firmly. “The queer community has stuck by me from day one. I wouldn’t have a music career without them, and they have held me up at my darkest moments. I respect that you have your beliefs and that’s where you stand in your life – but that doesn’t mean it has to be my life. I have my path, they have their path. For me, it wasn’t a hard decision to make.”
The right-wing press had a field day with it (“Louise trying to get Christian members of Eternal cancelled” read one headline), but she’s used to criticism by this point, she says. When she and Redknapp announced their separation in 2017, shortly after Louise placed second on a series of Strictly Come Dancing and she began plotting a musical comeback, she found herself targeted by the tabloids and accused of walking out on her family. “I was the villain,” she says. She admits to concealing a lot of the sadness she felt at the time. “I’d been lucky in my career because for many years I didn’t really have a lot of scrutiny. Then bang, everybody’s got an opinion.” She wrote a book, which touched on her divorce and the creative restlessness she felt as a stay-at-home mum, but says that she “nitpicked over every word”.
“Anything someone could perceive as negative, I cut out,” she says. “If I ever wore my heart on my sleeve I’d get loads of comments, like, ‘woe is me – you left him’. Nothing I said was right. To defend myself was wrong. To not defend myself was wrong. I felt like I was walking up a one-way street with just nowhere to go on it.”
The centrepiece of Confessions is a track that tackles that time in her life. “Don’t Kill My Vibe” feels vaguely Brat-ty in its execution, with run-on sentences and diaristic lyrics against a chugging synth beat. It carries an emotional honesty that until now has never been Louise’s forte. “It wasn’t easy,” she sings in it, “but I got back on stage and felt like people liked me/ And they liked me for me/ One thing I can say with chest, I built a castle from that mess.”
She’s incredibly proud of the song. “Inside I was breaking, but I just kept going because it was the only way I knew how to handle it all,” she says. “And that song is me basically telling society: don’t kill my vibe. Don’t take away what I love to do. Don’t take away my freedom. Don’t kill off the one thing that I’ve got.”
Louise released an album in January 2020, called Heavy Love, but its promotion and tour were curtailed by Covid, leaving Confessions to feel like her proper return to music. She wants it to do well but adds that she’s a realist about it. “It’s a good time to be making music because you’ve got your Kylies and…” She pauses, as if suddenly aware that it’s tricky to think of another woman in her fifties making hit pop songs. “See, I’m of two minds about this. I think you’ve got to be the lucky one – there’s no general rule of thumb. There are certain radio stations, regardless of the song, that will not play you because you’re of a certain age. I’ve made a record produced by someone who’s just won a Grammy – there is something current there.” She shrugs. “But all I can do is try and break down those walls, and definitely 10 years ago that would have been unthinkable.”
She says she’s in a good place. “I’ve realised that all my biggest fears have kind of happened. I’ve been on my own. I’ve gone through a s*** time. And I survived. I’m all right.”
As we say our goodbyes, she jumps back into mum mode – there’s a hug, another apology about her timekeeping, and an ever-so-slightly-mortifying, “are you going to get home OK?”. She’s not beating the “really nice pop star” allegations any time soon but I suppose, as fates go, it’s not too bad.
‘Love Me More’ is out now, with ‘Confessions’ released on 23 May
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