(PMR/EMI)
The retro mood of Ware’s brash pop never feels like a costume, as her tight melodies, killer choruses and dry humour wear vintage details with style
In the wave of glitterball-dazzled pop-dance albums that sparkled a little light into 2020’s gloom, Dua Lipa’s Future Nostalgia was the world-beating monster smash – No 1 in 15 countries, 10bn streams and counting on Spotify. Kylie Minogue’s Disco, meanwhile, was the career-boosting critical and commercial hit, restoring its author to her natural habitat after forays into country and Christmas albums. But Jessie Ware’s What’s Your Pleasure? was the classiest. In contrast to the neon-hued Future Nostalgia and Disco, it painted dancefloor euphoria in coolly muted shades and came wrapped in a sleeve that recalled one of Andy Warhol’s late 70s Polaroid portraits. It tapped a succession of hip names as collaborators – house producers Midland and Morgan Geist and Metronomy’s Joseph Mount among them – and it eschewed the obvious reference points, operating instead under the influence of Italo disco, baroque soul producer Charles Stepney and the kind of chugging 110bpm sound that the late Andrew Weatherall favoured at his A Love from Outer Space nights.
Confident and self-assured, it didn’t sound like a last roll of the dice from an artist at the end of their tether, although that’s precisely what it was. Disheartened by the lukewarm reception afforded her 2017 album, Glasshouse – a lunge for the middle-of-the-road involving a closing track co-authored by Ed Sheeran – and tired, as she recently put it, of being made “to feel like I needed to be the next Adele”, Ware fired her management and considered quitting music entirely to focus on her hugely popular podcast Table Manners. Three years on, the success of What’s Your Pleasure? means That! Feels Good! comes from a different place, and perhaps has different expectations.