It’s been quite the week for Hannah Reid: a hospital visit, a trip to Abu Dhabi for a one-off gig with her band London Grammar, and an appearance on Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour that “terrified” her. “I just felt so ill-equipped!” she says, laughing about her appointment at the BBC. “I don’t even know what I said. What did I say?”
Well, quite a lot. About how motherhood (she gave birth to son Josh 18 months ago) had helped cure her crippling stage fright. How she “built a career off vulnerability” in the songs she co-writes for a trio beloved for Reid’s transcendent vocals and their atmospheric, electronic soul. About how she and her bandmates have curated a strong female line-up for their day at next month’s new Lido festival in Victoria Park.
Still, the 35-year-old didn’t tell presenter Nuala McGovern everything.
“Just before we went to Abu Dhabi, I found out that, because of my surgery and endometriosis, I was chronically anaemic,” begins Reid over herbal teas in her Victorian terraced house in Fulham. She’s smiley and comfortable in grey sweats as Phoebe, the family’s French bulldog, flops on the floor. She had been feeling “really weak and really weird”. Cue a hospital appointment for a blood test, with the result that “I had to have an iron drip, which kicked in just in time for Abu Dhabi.”
Backtracking a little: while touring London Grammar’s 2013 debut album If You Wait — shimmering dance music that became ubiquitous (and won the band an Ivor Novello award for the song Strong) — the Acton-raised musician came down with what was eventually diagnosed as fibromyalgia. Reid lived in private with the chronic pain condition for much of the subsequent decade, through the rippling success of the band she’d formed at Nottingham University with fellow Londoner Dan Rothman and Northampton-born Dot Major.
On assignment for the Standard in New York in January 2014, I encountered three tight friends in demand on both sides of the Atlantic, their out-of-the-box UK success mirrored by huge excitement in the US. Jimmy Fallon had just booked them for his chat show, and Anna Wintour’s Vogue had called them in for a shoot while they were in Manhattan.
It was clearly a lot for their painfully shy, painfully retiring frontwoman, 24 at the time. Little did I realise how painful. Reid recalls the onset of a mysterious “ache that would wax and wane, and extreme fatigue”. Doubly confusing because, describing her symptoms to friends and family, they would reply: “But Hannah, you’re working so hard.” Reid couldn’t argue with that. “During that period, the longest stretch of time off was nine days in two years.”
“The mentality was: you make as much money as you possibly can in that time”
Their rise continued, through the release of Truth is a Beautiful Thing (2017) and California Soil (2021), chart-toppers both, and their return last autumn with The Greatest Love. That fourth album, recorded in their own space within Damon Albarn’s Studio 13 complex in Notting Hill, pushed them even higher. London Grammar now enjoy more than three million monthly listeners on Spotify and have reached arena-scale success — on their last tour they sold out the O2. Along the way there were multiple support slots with old friends Coldplay, most recently in summer 2022 when they joined the band on their (still ongoing) Music of the Spheres stadium tour.
Still, those achievements necessitated changes in London Grammar’s business arrangements. As a result of those full-pelt early years, they split from their first manager, who was “incredible at breaking acts across the world … But the mentality was: you make as much money as you possibly can in that time. Some artists can do that. Some really can’t.”
The trio signed with Adele’s team, before switching to north London’s Tap Music, who also look after Lana Del Rey. “It wasn’t easy,” Reid says of another change of management, “but it was the right decision.”
Another right decision: prioritising her baby. Reid takes me into the kitchen and talks me through the family wall-planner, highlighting a summer of UK and European festivals; Josh will be accompanying her on all of them. The arrival of her son, she says, has been a wonderful corrective to her fears. “If I do a shit gig, he doesn’t care. He loves me as long as I’m playing with him. It gives your life a whole new meaning that I just didn’t [expect].” Motherhood, she adds, beaming, “has been really freeing in some ways”.
“Motherhood has been really freeing in some ways”
Speaking to Woman’s Hour two days before our interview, Reid discussed London Grammar’s return to performing after her maternity leave, just in time for a slot at last year’s Glastonbury. “There were moments post-partum where I was a bit like: I’m so vulnerable right now, can I actually physically and mentally do this at all?” she said on-air. “I’m really not sure.”
Not least because Reid was facing further health challenges, with a belated diagnosis of endometriosis. During a visit to a “women’s clinic”, she tells me, it was explained to her that “a lot of women who have endometriosis also have fibromyalgia. I think it’s because of the lesions. Endometriosis is when your womb lining grows outside of your womb, and it can do all kinds of funny things.
“What’s hard with chronic pain conditions is that they are kind of invisible,” she continues. “And it gets dismissed as being — especially when you’re female — in your head, or [because] you’re irrational. So then you start dismissing yourself. I ended up, for quite a few years, pushing myself through a lot. Only to then find out that I have extensive endometriosis.” The result, a couple of months ago, was that surgery she mentioned, “to try and remove as much of it as they could”.
No wonder that Reid looks happy and relaxed on her couch, her medical challenges at least recognised and being addressed. Which includes the sciatica in her legs that she’s also cheerfully weathering, the result of repeatedly picking up Josh.
“He’s so big and heavy, it hurts my back,” she says, lovingly, of the baby she took on tour last year with the support of her partner, Sean O’Connor. He’s the one-time “teenage dream crush” whose job in Formula 1 sponsorship means he has the flexibility to remote-work from European concert arenas. Nonetheless, that three-week run “was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. But also the most amazing thing.”
Inside and outside, health-wise and, yes, wealth-wise, the Hannah Reid sitting opposite me is a changed woman from the one I met a decade ago. Back then, her bandmate Major spoke admiringly of a reluctant frontwoman who was “such a nervous person. She doesn’t realise loads of things about herself, whether it be her talent, the way she holds herself, behaves on stage, the way she looks.”
He recalled his friend getting onstage at Bestival to sing with Disclosure “in front of 12,000 people with a massive egg stain down her front! I saw pictures on Vogue.com the next day saying something like: ‘Hannah Reid seen in 1990s fashion.’ And she just doesn’t give a f***!” he laughed. “She was just wearing this old jumper.”
That shyness, certainly, has gone. Reid talks animatedly of the line-up London Grammar have compiled for their day at Lido, led by Celeste, Róisín Murphy, Pip Millet and The Blessed Madonna. But the reluctance to be a spokesperson remains. Hence her wariness of taking a social media stance on the political and social issues of the day.
“It’s quite easy for celebrities to jump on whatever is the latest thing”
“I don’t feel like I have the right to …” Reid begins. “I sometimes think it’s gross as well. It’s quite easy for celebrities — I mean, I’m not celebrity,” she adds, hastily, grinning, “to jump on whatever is the latest thing. Just to almost make yourself look like you have the moral high ground.”
She exhales, heavily. “Maybe it is the right thing to do. But I’ve never been one to buy into that kind of culture. A lot of frontmen do it more, I would say. It’s ‘rock ’n’ roll’. I’m not that. I am that person who goes on stage wearing a grey, egg-stained jumper.”
She smiles again. “And I always will be.”
