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Lounging comfortably on the top floor of a Kensal Green photo studio dressed head-to-toe in a black Ellesse tracksuit, Joy Crookes isn’t the type to be hurried. Over the course of an eight-and-a-half hour cover shoot for ES’s beauty issue, she has insisted on getting to know everyone in the room; sharing out everything from her home-made aubergine salad to skincare and relationship advice. ‘Buy your missus flowers and her favourite sweets from when she was a kid,’ she tells me (she also recommends an eczema cream for my ‘missus’).
Crookes is not averse, it quickly transpires, to speaking her mind. Today, Extinction Rebellion protests are in full swing, succeeding in their mission to bring central London to a standstill. ‘I appreciate that they are using their privilege to take time off work and get arrested, but you know…’ she says. ‘These guys were riding a pink tractor, in central London, and a huge crane. I doubt that’s f***ing electric, that tractor. Is it? It’s funny.’ And then she’s off: ‘I was in Elephant and Castle the morning they started demonstrating last week, and I had to watch so many ethnic mums and fathers and children try and get to — in fact forget the ethnic, just mums, fathers and children — trying to get to school and work, to survive. They were not from a place where they could take two weeks off work to demonstrate. And it’s funny that Extinction Rebellion talk about survival, but there’s also your day-to-day people who want to survive. It’s another long conversation’.
This year has been a good one for the 21-year-old singer-songwriter. In January, Clara Amfo, the Radio 1 DJ, pronounced herself a ‘sucker’ for this ‘honest, soulful British voice’. By June, Dior had selected her to headline the V&A’s prestigious Summer Party, before an acoustic rendition of her single ‘Don’t Let Me Down’ at Glastonbury for the BBC became one of the festival’s most talked-about moments. Meanwhile, her 2018 hit ‘Mother, May I Sleep With Danger?’ has been streamed more than five million times on Spotify. Her singular, sell-out tour has taken her from Los Angeles to Berlin and Amsterdam, and lands at Earth in Hackney the week after next. But though the clamour for more Joy, more music, more shows, more everything is only getting louder — Crookes’ most recent single, ‘Early’, was made Track of the Week on Radio 1 this month — she is determined to resist any outside pressure and proceed at her own pace.
‘I’ve released my last work for the year,’ she says, definitively. ‘I was meant to do more but I don’t want to. I’ve released two EPs and two singles, and I’m happy with how my year’s gone. If I release another one, I’ll just die… I know I’ve got to keep momentum and I need to go into 2020 and write an album now,’ she adds, ‘but I also want to write a fantastic album, one I’m proud of, and I need my time to do that. I’m not asking for three years, but we don’t just s*** songs out, do we? We need to experience some life, and find a flow.’
Strength and independence are Crookes’ signature. But barely out of her teens, she says she is ‘still finding my identity’. Her background is… well, she would rather not dwell on her background, thanks very much. ‘It’s interesting how the Bangladeshi and Irish sides of me are always picked out by people. It almost feels like a disrespect to me.’ Everyone is so much more than where they come from, she insists. ‘I’ve been giving some thought to crafting a signet ring,’ she says, seriously. ‘I want to craft my own heirloom that shows my identity consists of so many things other than just my nationalities or my heritage; it also consists of the memories I’ll make with my brother, who is 11 now, and someday will be 30 and might be getting married; it consists of changing the nappies of my youngest brothers; it consists of my mum and dad’s break up; it consists of so many different things.’
Crookes’ parents had separated by the time she was 14 (her three younger brothers are from her mother’s second relationship) and she moved with her mum from Elephant and Castle to Ladbroke Grove. She ‘didn’t get west London’, and found ‘the disparity between rich and poor’ she suddenly saw around her confusing. On Sunday evenings she sang open mics at a neighbourhood bar, Mau Mau, ‘that took in donations of canned goods for the local food bank’, while ‘two minutes away in Notting Hill there were cafés that were too expensive to buy a bottle of water in. I just wanted to be home.’
Still, there were perks: she once spotted Mick Jones, the lead guitarist of The Clash, ‘on a desolate west London road just after I’d read a book about them’, and made a beeline for him. Wasn’t he surprised a 14-year-old recognised him? No, she says, although he may have been thrown by the fact she was in her Irish dancing uniform (she’d just been taking classes in Streatham). ‘He said, “I thought you were just coming over to ask for directions.”’
In a way, she was: she already knew she wanted to sing. A jazz and blues workshop at her Catholic state school ignited a love of singing, and she’d uploaded her own ‘Laura Marling and reggae’ covers to YouTube from the age of 13. By the time she moved back in with her dad aged 16 in Elephant and Castle, the area had changed as much as she had. It had felt ‘stereotypically quite dangerous, so people wouldn’t come to my house if they knew I lived in Elephant,’ she says. ‘But when I came back it was like, oh my God, there’s a cinema here, and what do you mean you can get a good coffee? And that was hard because it was like the rug had been pulled from under your feet.’ She wasn’t taken in by the flat white-drinking crowd? ‘I’m fascinated by people because they’re the real fabric of this city. Hairdressers, nail technicians, the guy that delivers your post every day, they’re the ones who have stories, and they’re the stories I happen to be interested in. My Irish grandma, Mary, always says: “Oh, you’re like me, Joy, you always hang out in markets.” And I’m like: you find the real people there.’
Crookes’ daily ‘chinwags’ with those people helped inspire her sweeping ode to the capital, ‘London Mine’. ‘London moves faster than I can,’ she says. ‘It constantly reminds me I’m not doing enough. But you flip that on the head and actually it is a beautiful city, and full of knowledge from cultures that have come and lived here, people relocating their foods, their mannerisms, their humour and their dance here, and you’re freely exposed to it.’
Those chinwags also double as talking cures. Crookes has always talked openly about her mental health. She is candid about the struggle to ‘keep my mental health steady’, and writing, she says, keeps her lows at bay. ‘I get my nails done because if I don’t I’ll bite them and they’ll remind me how stressed I am, and that will f*** up my mental health,’ she says. ‘It cures me a bit, going to a nail salon.’ Indeed, her beauty routine is all ‘self-care’, she says.
‘It’s very hard sometimes when you’re in a real low, in a rut, to remember some things, like moisturising your skin in the morning. And actually by doing those practices every day, that’s your little time for your body and the vessel that holds your soul, to be reminded that you care for it, and you love it, and that will feed back to your mental health anyway. When you’re low you don’t eat well, you don’t sleep well, if you smoke you might smoke 10 more than you usually do. It’s almost like the self-care unwinds those times that you abuse your body.’
She’s had to take great care to tweak her diet to cut out gluten and dairy. She has hereditary eczema and occasional stress-induced alopecia, taking antioxidant packed garlic for the latter. She has brought her own hair cream to the shoot today to ‘soften her edges’. Her GCSE art teacher, Mr Jones, came up with her favourite mantra to live by, ‘Keep Joy happy to avoid irony,’ she says proudly of the play on her name. It is, she says, a mountain she climbs every day.
‘Mental health should be an everyday conversation,’ she says. ‘Just because you can’t see mental health, doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be, “Hey man, how you been?” and actually you say, “I feel s***, and I’ve been feeling s***.”
“What kind of s***?”
“Real low.”
“Cool, what you doing about it, what are your fears? All right, look, if you need a hand, I’m here.”’
Joy Crookes is very much here. And without being rushed, she’s not going anywhere.
Photographs by Adam Whitehead, styled by Jessica Skeete-Cross, beauty direction by Rose Beer, make up by Mel Arter using Dior.
