In 2016, Leona Lewis was partway through a Broadway run in Cats when she realised something wasn’t right. “It was just like, ‘I feel awful,’” she says. “I did not know what was going on. I was like, ‘I’m sick. I’m really sick.’ And I had to just stop.”
The previous 10 years had caught up with her. After her remarkable voice – that huge, beautiful, aching voice – had wowed the country when she won The X Factor in 2006, she became a global superstar: her 2007 debut single “Bleeding Love” went to number one in 35 countries, catapulting parent album Spirit, at that stage the UK’s fastest-selling debut album of all time, to number one in America.
She was the first British artist to achieve that feat with a debut album. Lewis sang for Nelson Mandela and to a TV audience of one billion people with Jimmy Page at the 2008 Beijing Olympics closing ceremony; her second album Echoes went to number one in 2009; in 2013 she made that rare thing – a genuinely classic modern-day Christmas song with her original track “One More Sleep”. In total, she has sold over 35 million records.
But it all took its toll. Back in 2016, after she pulled out of Cats, it turned out she had developed an autoimmune condition called Hashimoto’s, a thyroid illness that left her unwell and with chronic fatigue. It got so bad, she would wake up in the middle of the night unable to breathe. “I think it was a build-up,” she says. “I had just not looked after myself how I probably should have. Body-wise, spiritually, mentally, physically, I just felt I was done. I needed to just go and look after myself.”
It partly explains why the 38-year-old has been keeping a lower profile over recent years. “I think my confidence got a little bit knocked as well,” she says of the ordeal’s effect on her ability to perform. She has had other, nicer things to focus on: her life in LA with her husband, choreographer Dennis Jauch, their one-year-old daughter and their pair of family-run vegan cafes. But while she has featured on other songs very sporadically – notably Callum Scott’s 2018 hit “You Are the Reason” – there’s been no new studio album since 2015’s I Am, an absolute age in the era of social media. Her forthcoming tour in 10-year celebration of her Motown-y, soulful, festive album Christmas, With Love – a sleeper hit that grows more popular each year – will be her first proper UK headline tour since 2016.
“It’s funny – it hasn’t felt like it’s been that long,” she says. “But I just haven’t felt like I wanted to put something out yet, like a whole body of work. I also want to do it in a way that makes sense to me. I’m thinking maybe I want to do something more independent this time.” More about that later.
On the day that we meet at the Sony offices in Kings Cross, Lewis has just been on TV on Lorraine, so she greets me in a proper telly outfit: a glamorous pink power suit with large, elaborate flower protruding from the jacket (I feel decidedly underdressed). She is fun and chatty and very relaxed: in fact, minus the initial shyness, she seems remarkably unchanged from that first impression on The X Factor as the likeable, down-to-earth former Pizza Hut waitress from Hackney.
She grew up in a musical environment – her dad Joe, of Guyanese heritage, was a DJ as well as a youth offending officer; her Welsh mum Maria was a ballet-dancer-turned social worker – and seemed, if not destined for stardom, then at least always determined to make it happen. An industrious, ambitious child, she would make homemade demo tapes and hand them out to whoever she thought might help.
“I went into Kiss FM when I was 12 and was like, ‘Can you play my cassette?’ to reception. And I’d go in there every Saturday – ‘Did you give it to the DJ yet?’” She laughs at the memory. “That’s just who I was.”
She had to be like that: she says she was never afforded the same opportunities as others. She enrolled in the BRIT School aged 14, a student around the same time as Amy Winehouse and Adele. “And they got signed. I went to the same places, and I didn’t get that reception.” Why does she think that was? “I don’t know. You tell me. You tell me,” she says again, leaving the thought to hang in the air. “Exactly. So I was finding other ways to do my thing.”
It’s why her X Factor success was so satisfying. She stormed the competition, eventually winning with 60 per cent of the vote. “That just felt so good. And after a long time of knocking on doors and [being told], ‘No, you’re not what we want,’ I felt like, ‘Wow, well, it doesn’t matter what you think because the British public actually think I deserve this.’ They’re the ones that put me where I am, not somebody sat behind a desk.”
For building her career she credits her mentor on the show Simon Cowell, who, as per X Factor stipulations, not only signed Lewis to his Syco label but was so impressed – he later stated that Lewis “put X Factor on the map” – he actually gave her an unusually large degree of creative autonomy for one under his tutelage. Well, that was until he didn’t: the pair fell out quite publicly over the direction of her music, starting with 2012’s third album Glassheart. One can only imagine Cowell’s face when Lewis told him she’d made a record influenced by Kate Bush and dubstep.
“Well, I think that they definitely saw something else [for me]” she says, smiling. After Christmas, With Love, the label wanted her to do an album of Motown covers. “And I was like, ‘That’s not what I want to do.’ It got to a point where we creatively weren’t on the same page. And then suddenly, I was like, ‘This isn’t working for me anymore.’ It was the hardest. It was like a teenager leaving home.”
It all got a bit difficult: in February 2014 Lewis ended up writing a handwritten open letter and posting it on social media explaining why she left the label, after Syco threatened to tell the world she’d been dropped. She wrote in the letter: “at some points I felt extremely depressed… it got to a place where the downs were outweighing the ups… I cannot make music that does not speak to my soul, and as scary as it seemed, I could no longer compromise myself”.
“When there’s a lot of cooks in the kitchen, things can get messy,” she says now. “There was a lot of miscommunication at the time. It was very upsetting for me. And it really hurt. And I think my fans wanted to know, ‘What’s going on?’ I just wanted to be very, very open, very honest. You know when you’re in a relationship longer than you should be? It was that.”
Despite all this – “we’ve had ups and downs” she smiles – the pair are on good terms now; Lewis recently sold her LA mansion to Cowell for a reported $3.9m. Did she put a few extra quid on the sale price because it was Cowell? “No, he got a discount!” Simon Cowell doesn’t need a discount! “Yeah, he doesn’t,” she laughs.
It feels like Lewis is glad to be past the peak of her fame. For starters, she doesn’t miss the intense media scrutiny. As we know via Britney, Amy and countless other examples, being a young woman in the public eye in the Noughties could be a downright harrowing experience. I say to her in the wake of the Russell Brand allegations (which he denies), people are realising just how toxic the era was. “What allegations?” she asks me. I’m taken aback slightly – she doesn’t know? “I’m so out of the loop on so much.”
She seems genuine: when I tell her, she raises her eyebrows and widens her eyes. Anyway, she says it was a horrible time. “What I hated most was people being like, ‘Oh, she doesn’t look great in that dress.’ The comments on your body were crazy then, and so wrong on so many levels. When it’s like that and just splashed across the papers, it’s just odd. It’s not right.”
She also doesn’t miss the burden of expectation that comes from major labels wanting her to sell records. “I don’t want that pressure. I just want to release my music how I want to do it.”
To that end, she has an intriguing project in the pipeline. In January, she starts shooting a film – a semi-autobiographical musical drama set in a school in Hackney. Lewis has co-written the script with actor Yolanda Mercy, written the music and will also star. “It’s loosely based on a school that I went to, about two young students that are musicians. And it’s kind of about the performing arts and how it’s an escapism for a lot of the kids where I grew up. It’s been a few years that I’ve been writing it and figuring out the concept. I’m really excited.”
She’s enthused by it, and by the prospect of touring again. “I feel pretty good again. It’ll be nice to be able to get out there and sing my songs.”
Leona Lewis: Christmas with Love starts on Tuesday 28 November at the Royal Concert Hall in Nottingham