Mabel on fame, anxiety and toxic social media: “I was addicted to people’s validation”
“Sometimes people just need to be told to f**k off,” says pop star Mabel. “I’ve got such a big mouth, I’m too sassy”.
To be clear, she’s talking about her battles with trolls on social media. From 2017 to 2020, the 26-year-old Mabel Alabama-Pearl McVey had an extraordinary run of platinum-selling hits. There was the breakout Finders Keepers, the exquisitely brassy Don’t Call Me Up and the bursting sex pop of Mad Love. But then she hit a wall.
“I would go out there anticipating what people were thinking about me and what was going to come of the performance,” Mabel says. “It was like, ‘Let me not give everything to these people because someone might say something horrible about me.’"
Her second album, About Last Night – set to be released on Friday – was created from these polarising experiences of fame and success. While unapologetically crafted to fill the dancefloor, About Last Night features deep introspection as Mabel wrestles with building herself back up from her mental health lows, the relationships that burned brightly and imploded, and the almost gleeful way society tears apart female self-esteem.
“Nothing can prepare you for this job,” she says from her London home, as she sits having her hair done for one of her first live performances since the Covid-19 pandemic hit. “You literally wake up one morning and you’re standing on these big stages, but it’s a lot of responsibility for a young person. I guess it was too much too soon but I wouldn’t change any of it.” As Mabel was sitting at the top of British pop – the crescendo of which was a show-opening performance at the 2020 Brit Awards – she was smiling on the outside but inside she felt on the verge of an abyss.
Weeks later, as the world was shutting down, she moved back into the home of her parents – pop icon Neneh Cherry and music producer Cameron McVey – and acknowledged that she was not okay. Since Finders Keepers exploded in 2017, she’d been on a constant loop of recording and touring and as it became overwhelming, she stayed away from home. “I knew if I saw my parents, I’d sit at their kitchen table and they’d go, ‘Are you okay’ and they’d know.”
But moving back home helped Mabel find peace. Describing the time as “wholesome”, she relishes recollections of arguing with her sister about doing the washing up and watching her father do the laundry, and cooking family meals with her mum – it made her realise “what life is about”.
The anxiety she felt started to affect everything. The things she loved – singing, writing, performing – were no longer enjoyable and she became addicted to scrolling through trolling comments on social media, her self-esteem crumbling. “Fear is a weapon, it’s so dangerous; the things it does to your voice, what it does to your body, what it does to your thoughts. I was afraid for a long time,” she says.
As well as family, Mabel was able to call on fellow musicians for help, some of the few people who could actually relate to the stress and pressure of fame at a young age. “Harry Styles was lovely,” she says (she toured with him in 2018). “Stormzy was absolutely wonderful to me, he really helped lift me up and made me feel like I wasn’t alone. Leigh-Anne Pinnock from Little Mix too – I can message her anytime and be like, ‘This has happened’, and she gets it. They all understand, they care.”
Mabel is forthright in acknowledging that many of her mental health issues snowballed because of the toxicity of social media: “I was addicted to it; addicted to people’s validation. But I would go looking for bad things when I was feeling negative about myself and if you go looking, you’re going to find something.” She took the rantings of the Twitter trolls to heart and began to believe the criticism, but says she has now “surrendered” to the mayhem of social media and mostly uses it to live tweet about Love Island.
She drew on these experiences for About Last Night, which – while conceptually a story of the highs and lows of a great night on the dancefloor – allows Mabel room to bare her soul in her most personal music yet. “All of the best artists are unapologetically personal and I think if you want to have a legacy and want people to relate to you, that’s what you have to do,” she says. With tales of furious love and re-finding confidence in a cruel world, that’s exactly what she does.
The album has a sweaty pulse throughout, informed by Mabel’s nostalgia for the dancefloor during the isolation of lockdown. It also reflects her greater command over the sounds she’s putting out, embodied in the variety of tunes on offer that span drag-era disco, Nineties R&B and futuristic pop. There’s the Madonna-inspired glam pop of Let Them Know, the synthesiser-imbued Overthinking and the deeply personal piano ballad Take Your Name, which, despite only being 80 seconds long, is the emotional highpoint of the album.
“I’m ready to be vulnerable…,” Mabel says. “I make music for me, but also it’s beautiful when people relate to your tunes. Even if it’s just one person that hears what you’re saying, that means everything to me.”
Following performances at the British Grand Prix and Strawberries and Creem, Mabel will also be headlining a concert at Somerset House on Sunday, where she wants to show fans her evolution as a live performer.
“I can tell you, I put on a fantastic show,” she says fiercely. “I enjoy it. I love it. I’m present. It’s not work.” She says that while the negative comments had forced her to “self-sabotage” some of her live performances but that’s now all past; Mabel refuses to let the “demons define” her. The future is hers.
About Last Night is released on Friday. Mabel is playing Somerset House on July 17; somersethouse.org.uk
