For three decades, Louise Redknapp has lived a career marked by tabloid narratives.
She’s been Louise Nurding, member and then former member of the multi-million selling R&B girlband Eternal, and Louise Nurding, FHM’s Sexiest Woman of the Decade. She’s been Louise Redknapp, wife and then former wife of footballer Jamie Redknapp, and Louise Redknapp, who packed in her glitzy music superstardom to become a mother of two children.
She’s weaved an impressive solo career between those periods, without doubt, securing 15 million record sales, nine UK top ten hits (including her first top three, “2 Faced”) and two BRIT Award nominations. Yet, her four previous solo records always felt a little in the shadows of some bigger topic of conversation around her; like 1996’s Naked, her first in the wake of her misery-induced exit from Eternal, or 2020’s Heavy Love, her first album in 20 years, but also her first post-divorce, and thus pawed over for tidbits about the end of her marriage. Louise the pop star has always been second to Louise the tabloid catnip, as far as the media has been concerned.
“Actually, I hadn’t even thought about that, but yeah it’s so true,” Louise the pop star says today over Zoom call, just a few days shy of releasing her brilliantly polished fifth record, Confessions. “I’m not linked to anyone other than myself, as far as an artist, as a story. This album is just about music and about authenticity, really.”
Louise has longed for her career to be just about the music. “I don’t go into the studio and make music for the fame element or the press element,” she says, earnestly. To the contrary, in fact. Over the years, she’s spoken about feeling intensely low on self-esteem while in the public eye during the dizzying heights of her Eternal days, while the public fallout from her 2017 divorce from Redknapp left her feeling the “lowest a person could get”. During her two-decade long break from music, she felt “a million miles away” from her pop star heyday, and as though it was gone forever.
What a thrill then to see Louise, now 50, back in fully-fledged pop star mode, with some of the strongest work in her catalogue and having her main character moment. She says so herself on Confessions’ second single “Love Me More” – “It’s giving main character energy” she purrs over squelchy dance-pop beats, created by producer Jon Shave, one of the numerous masterminds behind Charli XCX’s culture-bending goliath, Brat.
Confessions is peppered with bursts of self affirmation throughout, and plenty of sensual divulgences. “I got a confession, I think about your bedroom,” she coos in featherlight vocals on the album’s fizzy title track, “Confession”. “I planned this all so get falling for me, you’re welcome,” she chirps impishly on nu-disco banger “Manifesting”, a song which would snuggle in nicely on Kylie’s Tension. It’s a sleek and shiny collection of bops that a slew of today’s biggest pop girls – say, Katy Perry or Sophie Ellie-Bextor – would be overjoyed to put their name to.
Speaking of Ellis-Bextor, Louise saw herself reflected in something the 46-year-old musician said in an interview recently, about being an ageing woman in pop music. “She said something along the lines of, you know, music doesn’t have an age cap of when you shouldn’t be singing,” Louise recalls today.
Heading into the studio with Shave and co. then, Louise was resistant to creating something that may be expected of a woman entering her 50s. She didn’t want safe, she didn’t want wishy-washy, and she didn’t want PG. “I wanted to make an album of songs that felt relevant, that felt current. I didn’t want to make songs that were just all nostalgia – not that there’s anything wrong in that, I just didn’t want that for me,” she says. When she first began recording, she wasn’t sure where the album would end up. “All I knew is what I didn’t want.”
She mentions enforcing a “no rules” policy during recording several times, and I get the impression that Louise is someone who has spent her career being endlessly bound by rules and restrictions. “I’ve always been like, ‘I need to make sure that radio will like it’ and ‘I need to make sure that it’s age appropriate and ‘I need to make sure it’s alright if the kids hear it’.” She admits to having been something of a chronic overthinker. “But on this I was like, ‘No more.’”
She released Confessions via her own record label, Lil Lou, and could therefore throw the major label rulebook out the window. “When I made this album, I wasn’t really thinking, ‘Where does this fit in the world of pop industry [or] music? Will it chart? Will radio like it? Will people like it?’” She hopes folk will like it, of course – she’s imagining people whacking it on before their first glass of wine ahead of a night out, or to get them through a down day – but mainly, it’s the album she wanted to make for herself.
If Louise had wanted a safe route back onto the UK’s music stage, she could have proceeded with a reunion with her Eternal bandmates Kéllé Bryan and sisters Easther and Vernie Bennett, which was loosely planned for 2023.
After being scouted in a club by a music manager aged 15, Louise joined the group and together they secured a string of top five smashes, including their classic, 1992 debut, “Stay”. She left in 1995, owing to feeling “lost” and “homesick”. Yet the group’s success and the UK’s eternal yearning for nostalgia could have made for an admirable comeback. Yet when the Bennett sisters told Redknapp and Bryan that they wouldn’t play Pride events – reportedly because they felt Pride had been “hijacked” by trans rights activism – Redknapp and Bryan pulled out.
“I am always just going to be me and it [took] me a long time to have the confidence to just be me,” she begins diplomatically when I broach the subject. “I just come at it from my own perspective and I have been part of this community from day one. I’m very proud to be part of this community… I think Pride will always outweigh anything else. I’m just happy to be where I am and I’m a massive ally and I’m a massive supporter and I always will be.”
She continues: “There’s nothing more to say on it than that’s my stance and that’s where I sit. I respect everybody’s views. Be whatever you want to be, but just allow me to be where I want to be and that’s all I ask.”
She says she’s raised her two children, Charles and Beau, to think the same. “My boys have been brought up to just value people for who they are. End of story, bottom line. They actually don’t think about it,” she says. “They make me very proud. They’re just good kids and they would never judge anyone.”
After Louise pulled out of the reunion, the right-wing press ran with th narrative of her trying to get her Eternal bandmates “cancelled”. It was probably her biggest media storm since splitting from Redknapp, but that experience, during which she had been made out to be “such a villain”, bolstered her.
“I read something negative about myself every day. I could read hundreds of nasty things from all different elements of my life,” she demures. “I think I’m getting to this stage – and I’m not there, because I don’t think reading horrible things is nice for anyone. It doesn’t matter who you are. You’re a human being at the end of the day… – but I am learning that I can’t please everyone and I am learning to switch off from it.”
Those feelings are rolled into “Don’t Kill My Vibe”, the most confessional song on Confessions. “Hit rock bottom. At my lowest, the music, it gave me options, gave me confidence,” Louise reveals over a warbling synth line. “It’s the little things like walkin’ into a restaurant by myself, made me proud of myself.”
She thinks it’s the “rawest and most honest song” she’s ever made. “Sometimes I listen to it and I think, I can’t believe that I was open enough to say those things,” she beams, wide-eyed. It’s the song that transforms Confessions from being a big glob of (expertly crafted) dance-pop into something a little meatier.
“It’s still got a bop element to it though,” she urges, and like the rest of the record, she hopes it will soundtrack someone else finding their strength. She wants to give “people something to grab onto if they need it that day, you know, like, ‘I love [you], but I love me more’ [or] ‘just don’t kill my vibe because I am not here for it. I’ve been through this. I’ve been through that. And look at me now’,” she smiles.
She’s talking from the perspective of the listener, but I’ve got a sneaky feeling she’s talking for herself, too.
Louise’s new album Confessions is out now.
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