Hannah Reid of London Grammar: ‘If I’m going to make myself vulnerable, I have to be the leader’

The singer talks about becoming the focal point of London Grammar as they release their third album, misogyny in the music industry and hypocrisy over sex in pop

Feeling positive: Hannah Reid of London Grammar.

Dan Rothman, Hannah Reid and Dominic ‘Dot’ Major of London Grammar. Photo by Crowns & Owls

Feeling positive: Hannah Reid of London Grammar.

Dan Rothman, Hannah Reid and Dominic ‘Dot’ Major of London Grammar. Photo by Crowns & Owls

Feeling positive: Hannah Reid of London Grammar.

John Meagher Twitter Email

April 03 2021 05:00 AM

There are times when Hannah Reid feels enormous frustration. The third London Grammar album — the one that truly finds her taking centre stage — was supposed to come out last summer. Then Covid arrived and the release of Californian Soil got delayed and delayed and, well, you know the rest.

But in those moments when she starts to feel sorry for herself, Reid stops to think of how lucky she is. “A very dear friend of mine is a doctor and she’s been on the frontline saving people’s lives and I’m just sat here feeling really frustrated,” she says, speaking via Zoom from her London home. “I feel guilty saying that, but the thing with art is that it’s a total self-indulgence.”

It’s easy to appreciate her frustration, however. The album was done and dusted long before the pandemic. “We had just shot the front cover photo and the album was mixed and ready to be released,” she says. And then everything changed.

Californian Soil is the most consistently strong album London Grammar have made, and, if it has anything like the reach of their last, Truth is a Beautiful Thing, it is also destined to follow it to the top of the UK chart.

But with the album in limbo for so long, Reid admits to having doubts over what she and bandmates Dominic ‘Dot’ Major and Dan Rothman delivered.

“It’s been sat there for so long that the songs are so old to me now and there have been a few moments where I’ve gone, ‘Oh God, is this album just terrible?’”

When the self-doubt appears, she has a visual reminder in her home that she knows a thing or two about songwriting: it’s an Ivor Novello award, which the band won in 2014 for their breakthrough hit, Strong. “This is my home studio that I’m sitting in right now,” she says, “and just outside the door, I have my plaques up there and if I’m having a bad day, I walk up by the plaques and go, ‘No, no — this is my job. I do write songs and it is OK — something will happen eventually.’”

Reid was 24 when she co-wrote Strong. The critics were wowed by her vocal, married to a soundscape reminiscent of The xx, the London indie band. Being recognised with a celebrated songwriting award was special. “As a new band, it meant everything. We were so wide-eyed and young,” she says.

Californian Soil marks a new beginning for London Grammar. For the first five or six years of the band’s existence, they operated as a democratic three-piece. Reid may have been the vocal and focal point of the group, but they were at pains to talk about how there were three equal participants in every song. Now, on this album, it’s all about Reid. Major and Rothman, for their part, appear to be happy to play supporting roles.

Dan Rothman, Hannah Reid and Dominic ‘Dot’ Major of London Grammar. Photo by Crowns & Owls

She says she felt as though the time had come to step up. She had just turned 30 and had enough experience of the industry.

“I felt like I definitely lost a lot of confidence somewhere along the way,” she says,. “I kind of had to tell Dan and Dot that and be like, ‘If I’m going to have to have the confidence to make myself really vulnerable, I need your support and I need other people to view me as being the leader’. They have to respect me and then we won’t get taken advantage of and we can make the art that we want to make.”

Reid met her bandmates at university in Nottingham. They did not have to toil in the margins for long before making an impact. She admits to not having been fully ready for the exposure — or to be assertive.

“In general, we were quite British — overly polite all the time — and never wanted to upset anyone. Definitely at the start of our career, we didn’t have enough control. We made that first album and then it really felt as though we were battling for control over our lives and our schedule.

“I know that happens to new bands all the time, but I felt it kept on happening to us and I felt that if you want longevity you really have to take it seriously and everything has to be very professional.”

Reid encountered her fair share of sexism. While she was reluctant to speak up at the time, she’s found her voice now. Misogyny, she says, is still endemic in the music industry. One of her first experiences was courtesy of a studio engineer, who had little interest in hearing what the singer of the band had to say for herself.

“It wasn’t that I was being difficult,” she says. “I was really spoken down to. He explained to me what bass was. That sort of thing happened to me a lot.

“There are varying degrees of misogyny, including emotional stuff, and having those experiences every single day can cause long-lasting loss of confidence. And I really struggled with that. It’s very difficult to stand up to because you can’t prove that it’s happening.”

She was gripped by the Framing Britney Spears documentary. “I felt incredibly guilty, even as a Britney fan, because [back then] I was so upset that she cheated on Justin Timberlake. What was I thinking? What she put up with was just so toxic and awful.

“I mean I just never experienced fame on that kind of level — nobody recognises me on the street and I live a very quiet, ordinary life — but I could relate to some of the questions that she was asked [by journalists]... and I definitely felt the pressure more than the boys [her bandmates] about what I wore.

“It was going to define what sort of woman I was — some people were like, ‘You should wear this little sparkly dress’. Other people were going, ‘No, no’. I’d have strangers coming up to me and be like, ‘The dress they put you in... I didn’t think that was very you’. But why does what I wear matter at all?”

She is keen to point out the hypocrisy that so many of us are guilty of when it comes to our attitude towards pop stars.

“Britney was vilified for being this very sexy lady. But sex has always been a massive part of pop music,” she says. “People said the same thing about Miley Cyrus, but they come under fire as well when [they use their sexuality] on their own terms — no one likes it if they’re actually doing it themselves.”

Reid believes the music industry is slowly changing — and for the better. “I feel listened to. I feel positive. I still think we have a long way to go, but so does the whole world in every aspect,” she says. “I feel like this has been a time of reckoning where everyone is suddenly saying all these different things are not OK and we need to self-reflect.”

But there are other aspects of the music trade that trouble her, not least how an all-conquering streaming culture has meant few artists are able to make a living.

“We’re very fortunate in that we’ve made enough money for each of us to have a home and so on,” she says, “but for artists that are just starting, unless they have a hit that’s going to explode on all these different playlists and suit all the algorithms, it’s going to be very difficult for them.

“And the only way they to ease that financial pressure is to tour relentlessly — when we’re all able to get back on the road — but, for some artists, that interrupts the creative process.”

After more than a year of being largely stuck at home, Reid is itching to get back on the road — even if it means being confined to the UK. “I really miss seeing the people in the front row,” she says. “We have die-hard fans that will come to every single gig on the UK tour.

“But I’m finding it really hard to imagine just doing a gig now — we’ve all got so used to being inside our houses for a year, where even going to the supermarket had become overwhelming.

‘Californian Soil’ is out now