Lemar: “I feel blessed”

Twenty years on from his wave-making debut album, Tottenham-born artist Lemar is back and better than ever, he tells Miriam Balanescu

Lemar is undeniably an artist associated with the 2000s: he first stepped into the spotlight while on reality show Fame Academy in 2002, released his hit debut album Dedicated in 2003, and, five albums later, The Letter, in 2015. But then things slowed down, and he held back on releasing his own music for a solid eight years.

Now, two decades on from Dedicated, Lemar has decided it’s the right time to make his return. His new album, Page In My Heart, harks back to his signature style but with a very contemporary update: one part electronic, one part dance. As he created the album, staying true to his own sound while also reflecting changes in music was “the biggest challenge”.

“I like writing certain types of songs,” Lemar says. “We ended up going for a more eighties soul-funk-R&B sound as a way to bring in the electronics, but still feel modern.”

While Lemar may have been out of the public eye for most of the past decade, he’s been keeping busy behind the scenes, writing for other artists and even dabbling in another performing art – acting – namely in Netflix’s Bridgerton spin-off, Queen Charlotte.

“I’ve been doing music for over 20 years now,” he says. “So, it’s always nice to do something different and experience something a bit new.

“Putting yourself out there in a different capacity is always a bit nerve-wracking because you think, number one – am I any good at it, or can I be any good at it? And also, I know that [for] actors who tried to be actors from birth, there’s a certain amount of effort that goes into the craft. So, I’ve never wanted to jump the gun, so to speak.”

There has also been a benef it to writing for other artists, an anonymity which he has enjoyed. “Writing music for other people I f ind much easier, because I can take myself out of the equation,” Lemar explains. “I take out all the personal ghosts that haunt you when you’re trying to reveal a certain part of you or talk about a certain thing that you’ve been through. Or even in relation to sound, I can write an electronic song or a dance song.

“The freedom of just being able to create without limits when you’re writing for other people, that’s a nice thing. When I write for myself, obviously there’s much more consideration because people have bought stuff and I feel I owe them a duty to at least not stray too far from that.”

On whether it feels strange to be returning to releasing his own music now, Lemar says: “It just feels like I’ve just been continuously doing what I do. The number’s strange, but it’s nice to be out doing what I love again.”

True of all his albums, in Lemar’s latest the unity of the track list as a whole is key. “I approach albums the way I approach songs,” he says. “I think if you go and sing everything monotone or you go and sing everything at the top belting and singing all the notes underneath the sun, you’re not really telling a story. Stories have peaks and troughs and ups and downs through them, and that’s what makes them beautiful. That’s what makes people feel emotion when you touch them at the right moment.”

Born in Tottenham, Lemar’s love for the classic soul artists of the eighties – Marvin Gaye, Michael Jackson – he was raised on is infinite, and their influence endless: “Back then, I just think a lot of the proof was in the pudding – a lot of people had to stay on the road and perform and you had to have a good voice and be able to do the live thing. And for me, that’s what I’m all about. You do all of this promotion, but really it is to just get people to come to that live show to see you do your thing.

“I’ve always been attracted to good voices, male or female. So that’s sort of been my muse and that was my training ground, listening to those voices and trying to get my own sound.”

For the singer, the role music plays in his life has stayed constant. “That’s the power of music – you don’t need to speak the language, you don’t need to even necessarily understand what the song is about,” Lemar says. “But the melody of a song, or the sound of a voice, or the story, or the lyrics can transport you to a whole other place, can give you different feelings, help you through bad times, good times. I don’t think we realise how much music is just a backdrop to our everyday, whether it be music coming through a TV or radio, or on your Spotify playlist.”

Things have changed, however, in the way the music industry ticks today, Lemar says, the rise of social media creating extra challenges for artists: “You have to create a huge amount of content in order to stay in people’s minds. “How we buy it, where we place it in our minds priority-wise may have changed a bit.”

With his return to the scene, Lemar has started performing music live again. I end by asking him whether it feels strange to hear crowds singing songs from 20 years ago back to him. “I feel blessed,” he responds. “As an artist, the one thing you always long for is to have a song that people remember or song that people connect with a certain memory in their life. The harder gigs are when you go and no one really knows the rest of the song.”

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