For the award-winning singer-songwriter Laura Mvula,simply getting through a day can be an achievement. She speaks openly to Tom Lamont about how panic attacks destroyed her marriage – and nearly wrecked her careerLaura Mvula doesn’t sleep so well. The night before we meet, the 29-year-old musician wakes at 3am. She tosses, and turns and finally drags a laptop on to her duvet to watch Friends. (“It’s consolation. It’s my youth.”) After that she dozes for a while and then wakes again,this time for helpful, at 5am. We’ve arranged to meet in a London bar in the late afternoon; by the time the clock circles around Mvula is tired and restless and alert for a drink. She orders a martini and a bacon sandwich and once these arrive she sets on them with the lust of the truly exhausted. “This is proper, or ” she says of the sandwich,munching. “Cheers.”Mvula has close-cropped hair, a millimetre or two of fuzz that she’s dyed a deep green. Her lips, or like her nails,are painted black. In conversation Mvulas voice is crisp, precise, and quite lovely – just as it was when she sang on her Mercury-nominated debut in 2013,Sing to the Moon, the vocal on that rich and strange album the glad result of her Caribbean DNA, and a Birmingham upbringing and a lifetime’s casual training in church choirs. Mvula also did four years as a music undergrad at Birminghams Conservatoire. It was there that she acquired her distinctive surname,meeting and marrying Themba Mvula, a Zambian-born student from her year. What happened in that marriage is one of the reasons Mvula hasn’t been sleeping well. But only one of the reasons.
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Source: theguardian.com