When the John Lewis call came, Labrinth answered. In soundtracking its latest festive advert with his re-rub — alongside original vocalist Alison Limerick — of 1990 rave classic Where Love Lives, he was only too happy to join the annual slush-fest. For one thing, the middle-Britain-wowing gig proved something.
“It’s weird. A lot of people thought I just went away!” the 36-year-old from Stoke Newington says with a burst of his ever-ready laughter. Fifteen years ago, he was signed to Simon Cowell’s Syco label and had immediate, Brit and Ivor Novello-winning success when he co-wrote and produced Tinie Tempah’s No 1 hit, Pass Out. Beneath Your Beautiful (2012), a chart-topper under his own name with Emeli Sandé, followed. Since then he’s logged serious studio hours with Beyoncé, Billie Eilish and The Weeknd, scored soundtracks for Disney (The Lion King) and created the music for HBO’s controversy-bait series Euphoria, for which he won an Emmy for All for Us, recorded with Zendaya. Little wonder that these days the Londoner born Timothy McKenzie is resident half the year in LA.
“People didn’t know I was doing all these things,” he continues. “So they ask when I come [to the UK], ‘What you doing?’ I’m like: ‘I’ve had multi-platinum records around the world. It just hasn’t shown here.’ So John Lewis for them is like: ‘Oh, f***ing hell, you are doing stuff now, Lab!’”
“But it’s nice. I’ve been missing home, honestly,” adds a man whose mum is still in Clapton while his wife and three young children are back in LA. “So it felt like a homecoming as well.”
Also, the advert’s message — an ageing raver bonding with his teenage son over a 12-inch record — spoke to Labrinth. “It was literally about my dad,” he says intently of the script. “When my dad passed… weirdest story… I was in the shower. And I heard his voice go in my right ear: ‘Tim: I’m sorry.’ I could feel this energy of: he’s left us, but he wanted to apologise for what he’s been like in my life.”
His dad left the family when Labrinth — the second youngest of eight children — was four (a loss the musician later wrote about in his fan-favourite 2014 track, Jealous). He says his father “was pretty violent and aggressive… Very domineering. But he learned that because he was beat up by his stepdad… That’s the only way he knew how to parent.”
When his dad died “two, three years ago”, father and son hadn’t reconciled. But Labrinth inherited a guitar. “And this guitar brings me closer to him — kinda like the record in the advert. So it’s very aligned in terms of that father-son connection.”
Something else Labrinth inherited has been more problematic — but ultimately inspiring, too. In January he releases his fourth album, Cosmic Opera: Act 1, a 12-song, strings’n’brass’n’choirs, electronic-soul spectacular — everything written, scored and played by Labrinth — that feels like Every Night of the Proms. Which feels appropriate, given where we’re talking, in the bowels of the Royal Albert Hall; in a couple of hours Labrinth is topping the bill at the 10th birthday concert for Choose Love, a charity he holds dear.
When the album was announced, it came with a statement saying: “This record is an attempt specifically from an artist perspective to explore mental illness while navigating a career in the entertainment industry… The paranoia, the confirmation of threats, the desperate and unfulfilling pursuit of success.”
The opening track, Something Like an Opera, has him intoning in spoken word: “They say in order to heal, you got to sit with that internal chaos. Got to suffer your demons. Speak on it. Verbalise it, too. For me, that internal dance is something like an op–”. And before Labrinth can even complete the word “opera”, a choral blast bursts forth.
“Epigenetics is when you carry your parents’ trauma,” he begins. “If your mum was depressed while she was having you, you can carry that depression. Or people-pleasing. Or [any] of those things. As I’ve gotten older and as I’ve had kids, I started to see these patterns of anger, of frustration, of insecurity. All of these things that became much louder to me internally. Some of it was from the past, or my family. Some of it was from my experience in life. So meeting that thing face to face was very intense.”
In its wonderfully kaleidoscopic sonics and deeply bruised lyrics, Cosmic Opera: Act 1 also deals with the difficulties he’s experienced in the music industry in the past few years. Amid the symphonic-jazz turbulence of new single Implosion, he sings, robotically, of “running like a bitch from my zeitgeist”. By which he means that he’s trying to escape the expectations on him. Things reached a peak, or a trough, when he released his last album, 2023’s Ends & Begins, which I suggest didn’t really land. What did that do to his mental health?
“Pissed me the f*** off!” he exclaims, laughing. “My label was going: ‘Lab, we need heat.’ They tried to release my album after Euphoria season one, saying: ‘It’s a great springboard!’ But they ended up postponing because I think [labelmate] Harry Styles was coming out. Then once we got to season two, they were like: ‘This is a great springboard!’ And it didn’t happen again.”
As a result, Labrinth and his then-manager decided he should play California’s twin-weekend Coachella festival in April 2023. More than that: they should boss Coachella. “It literally took me six months to put this show together. I got a mini-orchestra, six brass, 15 choir. I made this crazy-arse stage which cost me 700 grand. The whole show cost me literally millions of pounds.”
He recruited Billie Eilish, who’d sung on the Ends & Begins track Never Felt So Alone, to appear on the festival’s first weekend. On the second he was joined by Zendaya, and Sia, with whom Labrinth has the part-time supergroup LSD (the “D” is Diplo). Yet none of it moved the needle on the album’s success: “It was intense… I used every ounce of energy to make something that I thought was fresh. Even now, when you go online, my Coachella show is mentioned as one the best that’s been there. But it was just deflating.” He split with his management, and “all of that stuff contributed to me getting to this place where it was like: you got to dig deeper.”
Meanwhile, he had been diagnosed with ADHD. “I was always trying to understand: what the f*** is [going on with me]? I had to take medication for it. It was really helpful. I was taking that all up to Coachella, and I cried. I was like: I can actually listen to someone when they’re talking to me. For years, I would literally get zoned out. Same with interviews. I couldn’t communicate. I would just lose track of what I was speaking about. I still do it now, but I’m much more aware of it.” He exhales.
“So when I learned more about what’s mechanically going on internally, I was like: ‘Oh shit. This is why you need silence. This is why you don’t really want to be a pop star — you want to hide all the time.’”
It’s been, then, an awful lot. And yet, having interviewed Labrinth at various points for over a decade, for all the challenges he’s discussed today, I’ve never seen him in a more positive place.
“I feel like I love myself,” he says. “I am about to go — and it’s not about success — and land in this place where I’m gonna make the best music I’ve ever made.” He’s already done that. Then again, this is only Act 1 of Cosmic Opera. What does Act 2 look like?
“I’ve got loads of music for it,” he reveals, beaming, as his dressing-room is suddenly alive with energy: his stylish mum, clearly a warm, positive force, has just arrived. “But I want to piece it together with the right energy. This was the lost, confused [period]. This album was focused on the undoing. The second album is the wake up.”
Implosion is out now. Cosmic Opera: Act 1 is released on January 30
