Singer Laura Doggett interview: How a life free of pain is not so good for songwriting

Her passion for knowledge is more intense because while her friends are at university getting degrees, she is spending all her time on music

Laura Doggett

Laura Doggett is a dream to watch. In March this year she performed a short supporting set for Years & Years at Heaven nightclub and there was a lot of love in the room for her, as her deep, smoky and expressive singing voice filled the space. Doggett’s low vocal and quirky performance echoed that of her role-models Annie Lennox, Tracy Chapman, Imogen Heap and Kate Bush and her costume was both eccentric and bold: a capacious white Georgia Hardinge gown with huge sleeves that resembled the wings of some giant dove. “You look like an angel!” tweeted her adoring fans.

Doggett first came to notice as the voice of the theme tune for ITV detective series Broadchurch. She followed that up with TV appearances on The Andrew Marr Show and Later... with Jools Holland and then in Janury 2015 she did a one-off gig by candlelight at the Sam Wanamaker playhouse. Her label, RCA Records, are happy to let her develop “organically”, she says – so her full album is not expected until October – in spite of a hardcore fan base that is demanding more music. Instead, Doggett is releasing a four track EP in May and will then appear at a select handful of festivals during the summer. She’s playing Brighton’s Great Escape festival and the headline slot on the BBC Introducing stage at Radio 1’s Big Weekend festival.

When we meet a week on from the gig she’s much more approachable than her austere stage presence might suggest. Without the vampish makeup that makes her look sculpted and stern, she has soft, kind features and looks her own age (21), her voice is surprisingly high when compared with her deep singing voice and as opposed to the mournful character you might expect from her lyrics, she’s very chirpy, gushing about everything from being on a photoshoot with a male model to new feminist writers she’s just discovered. Her conversation is peppered with effusive bursts: “Love it!” is almost her catchphrase and her thirst for knowledge is quite startling.

Laura Doggett on stage at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse (Gus Stewart/Redferns via Getty Images)

Every so often she stops to make a note on her phone about new names that crop up in conversation, the list contains everything from articles she’s interested in reading to new musicians she wants to listen to. “My draft messages have everything I need,” she explains, hastily typing a memo to herself. Among the diverse information held there are two books: Lena Dunham’s memoir Not That Kind of Girl and The Madwoman in the Attic, an examination of Victorian literature from a feminist perspective.

“I am super interested in feminism at the moment,” she explains. “That’s why I’ve started noticing that in this industry a lot of heads of companies are men. That’s not something I have a problem with, they are all awesome and I get on with them but it is very rare to meet a woman. I am lucky I have a great girly team.”

There’s something really disarming about her passion for knowledge, which is probably more intense because her friends are at university getting degrees, while she is spending all her time on music.

“Being a musician, I don’t get to be that close to my friends because I give up everything for music. They are at uni… and I can’t just go out all the time. It’s weird because my life is slowly becoming more different from everyone that I know and it’s, like, arrrgh! if I didn’t have my boyfriend I’d be weird. Maybe I could write about that? ‘If I didn’t have you, it would be weird,’” she jokes.

Laura Doggett

She is trying to write a love song at the moment but the usual go-to themes of pain and suffering for love are totally alien to her. At 21, she’s had two big relationships, one that lasted for two years while she was at school and her current relationship with her artist boyfriend, Dillon, whom she lives with in south east London. Fortunately for Doggett, this relationship is a happy one, but it is not so good for her creativity: it’s not the tempestuous love affair that heartbreak ballads are made of.

“Whenever there’s an issue, Dillon and I just sit down and talk about it, and then it’s done isn’t it?” she giggles. “What I want to do is document what growing up is like for my generation, everyone has these life crises. Everyone goes through it and you’d think more people would write about it because it’s probably more universal than ‘baby I want to hold you forever and ever’.”

Doggett grew up in Salisbury, where she found it difficult to fit in because she was “the only vegetarian in the village” and she didn’t want to get into drinking and drugs like her peers. At 15, her music teacher suggested she write a song for a cancer charity. It was her first attempt at song-writing and she loved the catharsis of expressing her darker thoughts. “All my friends in Salisbury were going to gigs and doing crazy things and all I could do was write about it because I was feeling very judgemental which wasn’t good. When I met Matt Johnson, Jamiroquai’s pianist, he listened to my stuff and said I should make observations not judgements and that changed the whole way I wrote.”

At 16, she moved to Bath with her family and was there until the age of 19 when she moved to London with her boyfriend. “Bath is such an open-minded and beautiful place.” She says it will always feel like home to her. “Old Faces”, the Broadchurch theme song, is written about Salisbury and “growing up and feeling like it was wrong to talk about things that mattered”. Even though Doggett’s teenage experience is unremarkable, the way she has expressed it is very powerful. “How does it feel when someone’s stripped you bare?” she sings over minimal piano chords on “Old Faces”.

Doggett is trying to educate herself to a point where she is able to make touching, universal lyrics, like her idol Tracy Chapman. “One day I’d had a bad day at school,” she laughs at herself. “This is all from school! And my dad chucked me the Tracy Chapman CD and I put it on and cried for ages. She was amazing. Whenever I’m stressed he says, ‘Hey, listen to this’. I love Tracy Chapman because she is a strong woman with a social conscience and she talks about real issues. It often seems like in music important things aren’t tackled and I don’t understand why… at the moment I’m really interested in human rights, animal rights and equality and feminism but I don’t know enough about it to really have a voice yet.”

She cocks her head and then adds brightly, “but eventually I will be. My second or third album will be.” As long as she keeps scribbling those notes on her phone, she’ll be well up to the task.

Laura Doggett’s EP, ‘Into the Glass’ is out on 10 May