In an era of the forced intimacy of Zoom interviews, it can be hard to feel a real sense of a person over a screen. That simply isn’t the case with Beatrice Laus. Laus, aka Britain's latest beloved rockstar Beabadoobee, is just as palpable when she joins the call from a studio in West London as if she were physically in the room. Taking a break from early recording sessions for her second album, Bea’s energy is impossible to mistake, and anything but fake. Her answers are as honest as they come, and she holds nothing back about her emotional state or the sometimes dark experiences that come along with life as a twenty-something musician catapulted to mainstream fame directly out of high school.
“I’m in the studio right now, and we just finished writing it,” she explains of her Fake It Flowers follow-up. “Well, we’re in the process of... still kind of writing it, but we’re recording it now, properly. It’s kind of a long process, but it’s exciting. It’s still very much the beginning process, finishing lyrics and starting to record. But I just wanted to try everything I want to try.”
Though she only put out her debut album last October, the Beabadoobee catalogue is growing at lightning speed, and so is her sound. Previously releasing a series of EPs before the full-length, last year’s necessary hiatus from touring, due to COVID concerns, only meant more time for writing and recording. And scanning through her run of EPs offers listeners the chance to hear her improve and sharpen in real time.
by CAITLIN WHITE
AUGUST 31 2021
EDITION 6
SEPTEMBER 2021
PHOTOGRAPHY BY: ANDY FORD
Bea's energy is impossible to mistake, and anything but fake.
Fresh off the release of yet another EP, Our Extended Play, in June — this one a collaborative project with her Dirty Hit labelmates, The 1975 — Bea’s already got enough loosies and early hits to fill out a lengthy setlist. And all she’s really interested in doing, at the moment, is writing and releasing even more music, and performing it live for her ever-growing legion of devoted fans. Though she’s been focusing on writing and recording lately, in a few weeks Bea and her band are slated to embark on a 26-date tour in America. This time, she won’t be an opening act, like she was in the past for artists as disparate as Clairo and The 1975, but has graduated to headliner status, bringing her own rookie bands along for the ride.
She’ll have support from Godmode Record’s Christian Leave, as well as labelmates BLACKSTARKIDS, a band that Bea is personally a fan of and hopes to befriend on the road. “I can’t wait to go on tour with them because I genuinely want to be their friend,” she laughs. “I just think they’re the coolest kids. I feel like they’re very forward-thinking. I can’t find anything to compare them to because they created their own sound. That’s really hard to do and I find it really inspiring.”
Laus knows how hard it is to do because she’s just done it. Though rock, grunge, and the heavier sounds of the '90s have been in the background lately, that’s the sound Beabadoobee has honed in on, digging in for inspiration and repurposing it to fit her own needs. Since there were very few women working in that scene, let alone Filipino teenage girls, part of Bea’s process is innate: She’s tapping into an audience who see themselves in her.
The story of Beabadoobee’s rise to fame has been well-documented already, but for those who are new to the narrative, it all started with a tongue-in-cheek Finsta handle and a SoundCloud loosie. Truthfully, she turned to music for the reason so many of us do — hitting rock bottom. Though her parents left the Philippines for London when Bea was a toddler, primarily to ensure she’d get a better education, school was something she always struggled with. The unbearably white atmosphere of the private Catholic schools she attended lit a fire of rebellion that, while understandable, burned a little too hot. After a series of behavior issues and attendance concerns right before her final year led to her expulsion from a prestigious all-girls Catholic grammar school, Sacred Heart High School, a teenage Bea was understandably aimless and depressed.
Concerned about her mental health that summer, it was her dad who picked up a secondhand classical guitar and gifted it to her as a surprise pick-me-up. Already an avid fan of ‘90s rock and a classically-trained violinist as a kid, Bea took to the guitar naturally, and immediately started writing songs as a coping mechanism. “He saw how much of a toll it took when I got kicked out of school,” she remembers. “How sad I was, and confused with life. Giving me the guitar was him showing how much it worried him. Like, ‘here’s a guitar to distract yourself.’ It was completely out of the blue — which is sweet of him. I never really thought about that, actually. It was very nice of him. At the time I was like ‘oh this is random, but ok, cool, thanks.’ And now it’s clear: It really helped.”
Bea slowly taught herself to play her new instrument with covers and used that to begin writing music of her own. “One of the first songs I learned on guitar was ‘Kiss Me’ by Sixpence None The Richer,” she says. “Which has very similar chords to “Coffee” — I’m not trying to say anything, very similar chords — coincidence [Laughs]. I learned “Kiss Me” and knew two chords, and “Coffee” is a two-chord song. So it’s a very easy song to play. When I wrote “Coffee,” I wrote another song around the same time called “At The Zoo” based on that Simon & Garfunkel song… but it’s basically me talking about zoo animals and making zoo animal noises. I’m not going to lie, I think it’s still on the internet and no one’s found it.”
Instead, attentive listeners swarmed around “Coffee,” turning it into a viral hit in 2017 and sparking interest from the independent UK label Dirty Hit, who are responsible for catapulting artists like The Japanese House, Rina Sawayama, and The 1975 to global fame. Stock phrases like “voice of a generation” get thrown around a lot when a great new artist breaks out, and tend to feel like overkill even when applied to the most obvious savant, but that certainly wasn’t what Bea was going for when she wrote and uploaded this simple two-chord track to the internet. Mostly, she put the song up so her friends and family could hear it.
“I honestly wasn’t nervous because I knew no one was going to listen to it,” she explains. “It was just for my friends and my family, it’s really not that deep. I wasn’t nervous because I thought it wouldn’t reach the amount of people it did. Which is so cool, but it was very overwhelming. Overwhelming at the beginning — and even more overwhelming when that remix happened.” After the initial attention “Coffee” received when it was first released, a 2019 remix by Canadian rapper Powfu titled “Death Bed (Coffee For Your Head)” went even more viral on TikTok last year. Racking up billions of plays, eventually the remix went platinum, expanding Bea’s reach to an audience she never expected. Not that she expected any of this, at all.
As for that silly Finsta handle she uses for her project name, it has managed to stick around. “I think it’s funny, and it reminds me of how innocent this whole thing is, and the innocence of where I came from,” she says. “It reminds me of the beginning, and how much I really didn’t expect this to happen. It’s funny. It’s one big comedic show. It's a comedy, just really strange.”
Photography: Andy Ford (@andyforduk)
Designed by: Daisy James (@djamesdesign)
Yung Baby Tate is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.
beabadoobee
as real as it gets
Bea's energy is impossible to mistake, and anything but fake.
It reminds me of the beginning, and how much I really didn't expect this to happen. It's funny. It's one big comedic show. It's a comedy, just really strange.
Dirty Hit founder Jamie Oborne remembers that, like most people, “Coffee” was the song that introduced him to Beabadoobee. But it quickly went beyond the song’s initial appeal, and became about her presence as an artist and a person. “With Bea, it was never about any one thing or any one song,” he wrote in an email interview. “She came into my office after we heard her music and it was like the sun coming out, do you know what I mean? It wasn't any one or two particular tracks that caught my attention. It was more about just her presence, and I just really believed her when she was talking to me.” Oborne and the label officially signed Beabadoobee in the spring of 2018, and she began releasing EPs while finishing her final year of high school at a new place, Hammersmith Academy.
Releasing her first song collection, Lice, in March of 2018, and the follow-up EP, Patched Up, a few months later, Oborne said that some tracks from those early days really left an impression on him as far as what Laus was capable of as an artist. “‘Coffee’ was the first song I heard, but I have to admit that the song that really, really drew me in further was ‘Susie May,’” he said. “At the time, I remember saying to people in the office that I just thought it was an extraordinary arrangement and had extraordinary musical ideas within it. There was just an incredible melodic resolve in the song, and that kind of blew my mind when I realized that she was, like, sixteen years old. So yeah, it was that song that made me think ‘Holy shit. This is really special.’”
At the same time, Laus was still adjusting to the unexpected reaction to “Coffee” and what she calls a “good pressure” that came along with her subsequent record deal. “I just remember being really confused and scared,” she says. “I didn’t really expect that many people to listen to a song I wrote about my boyfriend at seventeen, about making him a cup of coffee when I don’t even know how to make a cup of coffee! It’s a lie! But it was a good type of pressure. I was like ‘Oh, people like this!’ It’s kinda scary, but it’s motivating me. The fact that people like this means I’m kind of good, I guess. And I like writing songs, songs are fun, so maybe I should keep doing it. I hated school, so I might as well focus all my time on music.”
In 2019, Beabadoobee really began to take off. In January of that year, NME named her one of their essential 100 artists for the year, and the magazine later put her on the cover in October. She was tapped to open for Clairo’s Immunity tour in September 2019, and shortlisted for the Brit Awards’ 2020 Rising Star Award, as well as appearing on the BBC’s Sound of 2020 music critics poll. She continued to release new music throughout the year, sharing the Loveworm EP in April of 2019 and an acoustic version of it in July, followed by a fourth EP, Space Cadet, in October 2019, during her tour with Clairo. Keep in mind, this is all happening weeks and months after she graduated high school.
To say it was a surreal time for Bea is an extreme understatement, and her decision to focus on music instead of going to school was also jarring for her parents, at first. “I just remember one conversation I had with my dad when I was like ‘Oh, I don’t know if I want to go to university,'” she says. “‘I might want a gap year to see where this music thing takes me.’ And he was just really not having it. He was like ‘Are you crazy? Are you insane?’ Now, he’s like the most supportive parent, but it was a lot of arguments, a lot of guitar smashing, a lot of guitars being thrown at me.’” But as the EPs slowly began to gain her more and more attention, eventually, Laus began to feel more prepared to work on a full-length. “I wasn’t ready for a debut for the first couple of years,” she says. “It took me a few years to get there. It was building my way up to that. I didn’t want to just make the same type of music for the rest of my life, I discovered new music and artists along the way, and that influenced me.”
'Oh, people like this!' It's kinda scary, but it's motivating me. The fact that people like this means I'm kind of good, I guess.
I didn't want to just make the same type of music for the rest of my life.
By the time early 2020 hit, she’d already written and recorded Fake It Flowers and was gearing up for a year of promo and touring. Obviously, within months all those 2020 plans had changed dramatically. Kicking off 2020 by winning NME’s Radar Award, she headed out on tour with The 1975 in February of last year, with plans to support them during the North American leg in April, as well as perform at Coachella for the first time. When the lockdowns due to the spread of COVID-19 hit in early March, Bea’s attention shifted from music back to her family, because both her parents are nurses. And soon enough, she got sick herself.
“It was really scary at first,” she remembers. “My mom thankfully was working at home because my brother has autism, so she had to stay at home. My dad was a key worker for a while but he had to stop, because he has really bad health problems. They decided it was too risky for him, so he started working from home. They were pretty chill, thankfully. When I got COVID, I took all the COVID from the family. No one else could get COVID in my family, it would be too risky.” After recovering from a pretty severe case of coronavirus, Bea went to stay with her boyfriend’s family, and together they prepped the cover artwork and press photos for her debut album on their own.
“We ended up doing the whole album campaign in his house,” she says. “Because I was supposed to do it all in New York, but we got a camera sent to us and did it all ourselves. His brother took all the photos and we did a music video in his house. Our one walk a day we’d be trying to film shit — it was really bizarre, but probably one of the most wholesome experiences I’ve ever had in my life. We were also smoking loads of weed and playing GTA.”
The sound of Fake It Flowers hews the closest to the ‘90s inspirations that have been slowly seeping more and more into Laus’ preferred style — though early songs like “She Plays Bass” and “I Wish I Was Stephen Malkmus” hinted that something heavier what was coming. Describing the influence of the ‘90s on her own ethos, Bea explains she’s drawn to the simplicity of the writing.
“I think it’s like the un-apologeticness of everything, and how they wrote,” she says. “How they wrote felt so genuine. I feel like they didn’t think about things too much, they just kind of did what they wanted, and how they felt at the time. I take that idea in the way I create a lot. Sonically, it was very much an inspiration to Fake It Flowers, but it was almost like I was trying to find my own interpretation of it and how I can bring it back to sounding like me.”
The evolution of her sound continues to be the most striking thing about Beabadoobee’s music, and she grew by another set of leaps and bounds after collaborating with one of the best rock bands of the modern era. Last summer, with the singles for her debut slated for release, and the DIY album promo finally completed, Laus opened up her notoriously solitary songwriting process to, who else, The 1975.
Opting to head to a farmhouse out in the country for a locked-down writing and recording session, Bea and The 1975 frontman Matt Healy built off their earlier connection as friends and turned it into an artistic collaboration for Our Extended Play. Though the EP was mostly finished last year, it officially released a few months ago, giving fans an even better idea of how quickly Laus’ songwriting skills are sharpening. “Our Extended Play was like a bookend or an extension to Fake It Flowers,” she says. “I feel like it definitely sounds a lot more mature, and all the songs sound so different. There wasn’t one song that sounded the same, it was quite interesting. It almost acted like a bridge from Fake It Flowers to the next thing I wanted to make.”
Since most — if not all — of that second album will be finished and recorded by the time Beabadoobee is back out on tour, it’s not a stretch to think she might debut some of the brand new songs on stage. As far as what the new music will be like, she’s still tight-lipped about the next phase, though she’s unafraid to share that it will definitely be different. The next record includes more collaborations co-written with Healy, as well as lots of influences from her bandmate and guitarist, Jacob Bugden.
“I’m going to try and at least get it done by this year,” she says. “I want to spend my time on it. I wrote some with Matty [Healy] that will be on it. There’s a lot of different types of songs, some songs that people would never really expect me to make, and some songs that will probably remind people of my very early stuff. It’s a very collaborative project I’m doing with my guitarist Jacob. In all honesty, I think it’s very much his album as well as mine, and I think we did this together. It’s really sweet.”
Oborne echoes the idea that Beabadoobee’s sound will continue to shift and change with time. And that’s something he sees as one of the best qualities an artist can have. “I see her continually evolving as an artist,” he said. “That’s the best anyone can ever really hope for, I think. She's already kind of shapeshifting, just between her EP to first album to her upcoming sophomore record. I think she's evolving really rapidly and organically. She's a true artist, so she will continue to be as artistic as she is now.”
I'm going to try and at least get it done by this year...i want to spend my time on it.
In an era of the forced intimacy of Zoom interviews, it can be hard to feel a real sense of a person over a screen. That simply isn’t the case with Beatrice Laus. Laus, aka Britain's latest beloved rockstar Beabadoobee, is just as palpable when she joins the call from a studio in West London as if she were physically in the room. Taking a break from early recording sessions for her second album, Bea’s energy is impossible to mistake, and anything but fake. Her answers are as honest as they come, and she holds nothing back about her emotional state or the sometimes dark experiences that come along with life as a twenty-something musician catapulted to mainstream fame directly out of high school.
“I’m in the studio right now, and we just finished writing it,” she explains of her Fake It Flowers follow-up. “Well, we’re in the process of... still kind of writing it, but we’re recording it now, properly. It’s kind of a long process, but it’s exciting. It’s still very much the beginning process, finishing lyrics and starting to record. But I just wanted to try everything I want to try.”
Though she only put out her debut album last October, the Beabadoobee catalogue is growing at lightning speed, and so is her sound. Previously releasing a series of EPs before the full-length, last year’s necessary hiatus from touring, due to COVID concerns, only meant more time for writing and recording. And scanning through her run of EPs offers listeners to hear her improve and sharpen in real time.
It reminds me of the beginning, and how much I really didn't expect this to happen. It's funny. It's one big comedic show. It's a comedy, just really strange.
Fresh off the release of yet another EP, Our Extended Play, in June — this one, a collaborative project with her Dirty Hit labelmates, The 1975 — Bea’s already got enough loosies and early hits to fill out a lengthy setlist. And all she’s really interested in doing, at the moment, is writing and releasing even more music, and performing it live for her ever-growing legion of devoted fans. Though she’s been focusing on writing and recording lately, in a few weeks Bea and her band are slated to embark on a 26-date tour in America. This time, she won’t be an opening act, like she was in the past for artists as disparate as Clairo and The 1975, but has graduated to headliner status, bringing her own rookie bands along.
She’ll have support from Godmode Record’s Christian Leave, as well as labelmates BLACKSTARKIDS, a band that Bea is personally a fan of and hopes to befriend on the road. “I can’t wait to go on tour with them because I genuinely want to be their friend,” she laughs. “I just think they’re the coolest kids. I feel like they’re very forward-thinking. I can’t find anything to compare them to because they created their own sound. That’s really hard to do and I find it really inspiring.”
Laus knows how hard it is to do because she’s just done it. Though rock, grunge, and the heavier sound of ‘90s has been in the background lately, that’s the sound Beabadoobee has honed in on, digging in for inspiration and repurposing it to fit her own needs. Since there were very few women working in that scene, let alone Filipino teenage girls, part of Bea’s process is innate: She’s tapping into an audience who see themselves in her.
The story of Beabadoobee’s rise to fame has been well-documented already, but for those who are new to the narrative, it all started with a tongue-in-cheek Finsta handle and a SoundCloud loosie. Truthfully, she turned to music for the reason so many of us do — hitting rock bottom. Though her parents left the Philippines for London when Bea was a toddler, primarily to ensure she’d get a better education, school was something she always struggled with. The unbearably white atmosphere of the private Catholic schools she attended lit a fire of rebellion that, while understandable, burned a little too hot. After a series of behavior issues and attendance concerns led to her expulsion from the prestigious all-girls Catholic grammar school, Sacred Heart High School, right before her final year, a teenage Bea was understandably aimless and depressed.
Concerned about her mental health that summer, it was her dad who picked up a secondhand classical guitar and gifted it to her as a surprise pick-me-up. Already an avid fan of ‘90s rock and a classically-trained violinist as a kid, Bea took to the guitar naturally, and immediately started writing songs as a coping mechanism. “He saw how much of a toll it took when I got kicked out of school,” she remembers. “How sad I was, and confused with life. Giving me the guitar was him showing how much it worried him. Like, ‘here’s a guitar to distract yourself.’ It was completely out of the blue — which is sweet of him. I never really thought about that, actually. It was very nice of him. At the time I was like ‘oh this is random, but ok, cool, thanks.’ And now it’s clear: It really helped.”
Bea slowly taught herself to play her new instrument with covers and used that to begin writing music of her own. “One of the first songs I learned on guitar was ‘Kiss Me’ by Sixpence None The Richer,” she says. “Which has very similar chords to “Coffee” — I’m not trying to say anything, very similar chords — coincidence [Laughs]. I learned “Kiss Me” and knew two chords, and “Coffee” is a two-chord song. So it’s a very easy song to play. When I wrote “Coffee,” I wrote another song around the same time called “At The Zoo” based on that Simon & Garfunkel song… but it’s basically me talking about zoo animals and making zoo animal noises. I’m not going to lie, I think it’s still on the internet and no one’s found it.”
Instead, attentive listeners swarmed around “Coffee,” turning it into a viral hit in 2017 and sparking interest from the independent UK label Dirty Hit, who are responsible for catapulting artists like The Japanese House, Rina Sawayama, and The 1975 to global flame. Stock phrases like “voice of a generation” get thrown around a lot when a great new artist breaks out, and tend to feel like overkill even when applied to the most obvious savant, but that certainly wasn’t what Bea was going for when she wrote and uploaded this simple two-chord track to the internet. Mostly, she put the song up so her friends and family could hear it.
“I honestly wasn’t nervous because I knew no one was going to listen to it,” she explains. “It was just for my friends and my family, it’s really not that deep. I wasn’t nervous because I thought it wouldn’t reach the amount of people it did. Which is so cool, but it was very overwhelming. Overwhelming at the beginning — and even more overwhelming when that remix happened.” After the initial attention “Coffee” received when it was first released, a 2019 remix by Canadian rapper Powfu titled “Death Bed (Coffee For Your Head)” went even more viral on TikTok last year. Racking up billions of plays, eventually the remix went platinum, expanding Bea’s reach to an audience she never expected. Not that she expected any of this, at all.
As for that silly Finsta handle she uses for her project name, it has managed to stick around. “I think it’s funny, and it reminds me of how innocent this whole thing is, and the innocence of where I came from,” she says. “It reminds me of the beginning, and how much I really didn’t expect this to happen. It’s funny. It’s one big comedic show. It's a comedy, just really strange.”
'Oh, people like this!' It's kinda scary, but it's motivating me. The fact that people like this means I'm kind of good, I guess.
I didn't want to just make the same type of music for the rest of my life.
Dirty Hit founder Jamie Oborne remembers that, like most people, “Coffee” was the song that introduced him to Beabadoobee. But it quickly went beyond the song’s initial appeal, and became about her presence as an artist and a person. “With Bea, it was never about any one thing or any one song,” he wrote in an email interview. “She came into my office after we heard her music and it was like the sun coming out, do you know what I mean? It wasn't any one or two particular tracks that caught my attention. It was more about just her presence, and I just really believed her when she was talking to me.” Oborne and the label officially signed Beabadoobee in the spring of 2018, and she began releasing EPs while finishing her final year of high school at a new place, Hammersmith Academy.
Releasing her first song collection, Lice, in March of 2018, and the follow-up EP, Patched Up, a few months later, Oborne said that some tracks from those early days really left an impression on him as far as what Laus was capable of as an artist. “‘Coffee’ was the first song I heard, but I have to admit that the song that really, really drew me in further was ‘Susie May,’” he said. “At the time, I remember saying to people in the office that I just thought it was an extraordinary arrangement and had extraordinary musical ideas within it. There was just an incredible melodic resolve in the song, and that kind of blew my mind when I realized that she was, like, sixteen years old. So yeah, it was that song that made me think ‘Holy shit. This is really special.’”
At the same time, Laus was still adjusting to the unexpected reaction to “Coffee” and what she calls a “good pressure” that came along with her subsequent record deal. “I just remember being really confused and scared,” she says. “I didn’t really expect that many people to listen to a song I wrote about my boyfriend at seventeen, about making him a cup of coffee when I don’t even know how to make a cup of coffee! It’s a lie! But it was a good type of pressure. I was like ‘Oh, people like this!’ It’s kinda scary, but it’s motivating me. The fact that people like this means I’m kind of good, I guess. And I like writing songs, songs are fun, so maybe I should keep doing it. I hated school, so I might as well focus all my time on music.”
In 2019, Beabadoobee really began to take off. January of that year, NME named her one of their essential 100 artists for the year, and the magazine later put her on the cover in October. She was tapped to open for Clairo’s Immunity tour in September 2019, and shortlisted for the Brit Awards’ 2020 Rising Star Award, as well as appearing on the BBC’s Sound of 2020 music critics poll. She continued to release new music throughout the year, sharing the Loveworm EP in April of 2019 and an acoustic version of it in July, followed by a fourth EP, Space Cadet, in October 2019, during her tour with Clairo. Keep in mind, this is all happening weeks and months after she graduated high school.
To say it was a surreal time for Bea is an extreme understatement, and her decision to focus on music instead of going to school was also jarring for her parents, at first. “I just remember one conversation I had with my dad when I was like ‘Oh, I don’t know if I want to go to university,” she says. “‘I might want a gap year to see where this music thing takes me.’ And he was just really not having it. He was like ‘Are you crazy? Are you insane?’ Now, he’s like the most supportive parent, but it was a lot of arguments, a lot of guitar smashing, a lot of guitars being thrown at me.’” But as the EPs slowly began to gain her more and more attention, eventually, Laus began to feel more prepared to work on a full-length. “I wasn’t ready for a debut for the first couple of years,” she said. “It took me a few years to get there. It was building my way up to that. I didn’t want to just make the same type of music for the rest of my life, I discovered new music and artists along the way, and that influenced me.”
I'm going to try and at least get it done by this year...i want to spend my time on it.
beabadoobee
beabadoobee
as real as it gets
