After a hellish couple of years, the pop visionary is back. She talks about beating illness, escaping abuse, and the joy of connecting with her Caribbean roots
Click here to listen to an audio version of this article
FKA twigs isn’t special, she says, she just rehearses a lot. “I don’t think I was born with anything more than the rest of the world,” says the 34-year-old singer-songwriter. It might be hard to believe that anybody could do the splits down a pole or wield a sword, Wushu-style, the way twigs has done without possessing some divine powers, but it’s all in the training. She can afford private lessons now, but when she started out as a fresh-faced back-up dancer, YouTube tutorials and group dance classes helped her to perfect her craft. “I practise and I practise and I practise. That’s who I am.”
Twigs has had a spellbinding career, exploding on to the pop scene a decade ago with operatic vocal arrangements, conceptual videos and futuristic instrumentals. In 2014 the New Yorker magazine said that she “dresses like a high-fashion model from antiquity, but her songs promise the very contemporary pleasures of texture and emotional immediacy”. Since then, she’s released several acclaimed albums and is considered a trailblazer in pop, R&B and Afrofuturism.
