Anoushka Lucas has just released an album. But a few years ago, the 38-year-old singer-songwriter had decided to give up on her dream of a music career for good. After spending most of her twenties chasing a record deal and putting £18,000 towards making her first album, Dark Soul, only for it to earn her a grand total of £83, Lucas felt depressed and heartbroken. “I was 31, I was really tired and really poor... I stopped gigging, I didn’t see my band for three or four years, I was like, I’m an actor now”.
Lucas likes to joke she is the “only person in theatre in it to make money”. But, boy, has she had a good few years. She did a series of odd writing jobs for theatre in her early twenties to pay the bills, then, when she was 27, a casting director encouraged her to give acting a go. “The rest is history... quite consciously I was like, you can’t keep chasing this thing that doesn’t want you when there’s the other thing, acting, that actually does.”
Her early roles included Mary Magdalene in Jesus Christ Superstar at the Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre, a young queer woman in Chiaroscuro at the Bush, and Princess Katherine opposite Kit Harington in the Donmar’s Henry V. But it was her star turn as Laurey in Daniel Fish’s “sexy” Oklahoma!, first at the Young Vic and then in the West End, that really made her name.
Critics showered her with praise and she bagged herself an Olivier nomination. “I went into Oklahoma! with enormous imposter syndrome, it was my first time leading, and I felt so ill-equipped to deliver that, but my old, determined, high-achieving self was like, ‘We’re going to figure this out,’” she says.
This ambition has carried Lucas through life. Growing up in a two-bedroom council flat in Hammersmith, she was a “scholarship kid” at a London lycée before going to Oxford to study Russian and Italian. From the age of seven her piano was a source of comfort and the only way she could get some time alone in a busy house.
“The people-to-room ratio was bad,” Lucas, who has two sisters, says, “but as soon as I started playing the piano, it felt like I had limitless space and time.” She wrote her first song at 14 and started gigging when she turned 17. Even during her Oxford years, she was “always at open mic nights”. “I was really hubristic as a young person. I was like, well, people say I’m good, I love doing it, it will take me two to three years, and then I’ll be on Jools Holland,” she says. But when she took the leap into the music industry after graduating in 2009, things felt “confusing”.
“I remember being in a meeting with a record label and them comparing me to Lianne La Havas. They said, well, she’s already doing what you want to do, so there’s no space for you,” she continues. “They were like, there is already a brown girl who sings about love and is from London.” At gigs, Lucas automatically felt competitive with the other women on the line-up. “I’d think I have to be better than them. It seems so sad to me now.”
“I’d spent 30 years trying not to talk about race and pretending that I was the same as other people”
For years, Lucas tried her best to be the thing people wanted her to be. “In music, that meant I listened to my various managers and industry people... I was told that I was a jazz singer... I can see now that I made myself smaller.” The desire for validation lay underneath it all. “You’re so at the mercy of the powers that be, I wanted to be chosen... I really believed the most important thing about me was my art. I discounted myself as a person.” Although she got close multiple times, she never quite made it. “I was failing. So basically it was miserable. I was really, really miserable.”
All of this inspired Lucas’s semi-autobiographical play Elephant, which premiered at the Bush in 2022. It was commissioned from a short piece she was asked to write in response to the murder of George Floyd in 2020. At first, she thought she’d write a song, but “what came out for me that summer was so much grief over having spent, at that point, 32 years denying the effects of racism on my family and my life, and so much confusion and shame...” The result was part song, part speech – “it sort of poured out of me,” Lucas says. It got 35,000 hits in 24 hours.
Elephant took Lucas two years to write. “I knew I wanted to say something about the intersection between class and race, and I knew I wanted to write about how social mobility operates differently for people of colour,” she explains. It was a hugely personal project, too, with many of the characters based on her own family, and the main character Lylah also being a singer-songwriter in search of a record deal. “[Performing] it was really cathartic but also the scariest thing I’ve ever done.”
The reaction, though, was all that Lucas could have hoped for. “I’d spent 30 years trying not to talk about race and pretending that I was the same as other people, and then, when I did, it made me feel less alone than I’d ever been before,” she says. “There are as many right ways to be black or brown as there are black or brown people.”
Writing Elephant reawakened something else in Lucas too — her love of making music. “By the end of the second run, I was like, I really miss doing it.” Although she’d never stopped writing —songs still fell out of her when times got tough, particularly during the West End run of Oklahoma! when she “wasn’t always at [her] best mentally” despite her public success — she hadn’t stood on a stage and performed as Anoushka the singer for years. “I started to view writing music as a diary-keeping exercise. I’d set myself songwriting tasks to pull myself out of whatever I was in... at a certain point, I was churning one out a day.”
“My sisters have started calling it a funeral album for my heterosexuality”
Some of those have made it onto the new album, Make Believe, which features songs she wrote between 2018 and 2023. “The theme that runs through it is that I made terrible romantic choices for probably a decade of my life,” she says. “I found myself in this repeated pattern where I was only attracted to emotionally unavailable people.” Across the album’s 11 songs, there’s loss, grief and yearning, “but for things that weren’t actually real”. “My sisters have started calling it a funeral album for my heterosexuality,” she laughs.
When she made Dark Soul, Lucas worked with Grammy-nominated producers and dreamed of commercial success. With Make Believe, her main aim has been “to be the boss”. “Now I’m like, the adulation has to come from within, you know?” She hired her old band, and the people she really wanted to work with, and made “every single creative decision” herself. “It has just been an absolute joy from start to finish.”
Of course, she was nervous about people hearing it. “Music is me, it feels personal.” But Lucas is forever buzzing with ideas: she’s in the process of writing a new play about sex, the patriarchy and female bodies and working on the score for a new musical. “My big dream is to write a Disney score, that would be amazing,” she says. “I write fewer songs now than I did when I was 15 because I’m in a lot less angst. But I still need songwriting to process what’s going on”.
Make Believe is out now
Anoushka Lucas’s playlist
Hospital — Madison Cunningham
“I love all her music but this particular trick has such a groovy, sexy, Americanah lilt to it, it makes me happy.”
Cobra — Geese
“My partner was obsessed with this song so I gave it a listen and now I am a proper fan, like all the other hipsters in east London.”
You’re Welcome — from Moana
“I’m sorry but I never skip this song. It is a perfect hype song, and lifts any miserable day. I listen to it on the treadmill and I think I might be singing it out loud in the gym but that’s not my problem.”
