EXCLUSIVE: Jess Glynne - ‘Women Don’t Just Feel Amazing Every Day’
For someone so striking, with her flame red hair and dynamic vocals, I’m caught off guard by how teeny tiny Jess Glynne actually is in the flesh.
She’s sweetly compact. Keen on taking up as little as possible of the space afforded to her by her newfound celeb status, it would seem.
Jess is only 25-years-old and relatively new to the spotlight, her collaborations with Route 94 and Clean Bandit having only propelled her there as recently as 2014.
Coping Mechanisms
With a new solo album release imminent, I wonder how she’s coping with all the usual pressures that young women feel when they’re thrust into the public eye and suddenly have their every movement, outfit, relationship and weight fluctuation documented.
“Yeah we [women] don’t feel like we’re amazing every day,” she admits. “I have so many insecurities. It’s not easy standing in the spotlight and feeling everything is perfect because I don’t feel like I’m perfect at all.”
Very sensibly, though, she’s not without her coping mechanisms.
“There’s not really much you can do to protect yourself against it when you’re in my position, because the minute you turn up to somewhere where people can see you, you’ve got eyes everywhere…”
“But my mate Jolene [Henry] - she’s my best mate – she works with me and she always makes me feel much more comfortable in situations, so she’s usually everywhere I go, as part of my creative team.”
Jess also joins the ranks of many pop stars and celebrities who find routine exercise a great way to de-stress and stay positive and focused.
“I eat well and fitness and being hydrated is really important in what I do – especially as I’ve just been through quite a major [vocal chord] surgery, so drinking two litres of water a day minimum is part of the recovery and it’s so important to do exercise to get my strength back in every possible way.”
She’s taking this health and fitness regime so seriously, in fact, that she’s just teamed up with 1Rebel and Glaceau Smartwater to create her own personally tailored fitness class called the #smartrebel workout.
What Style Means To You
As you might have noticed, Jess isn’t one to pop on a pair of culottes just because they’re the only thing on sale in H&M this summer and every fash blogger from L.A. to Kingdom come is sporting them.
“Style to me is really important especially in what I do,” she muses. “I’ve never followed a trend, I’ve always just chosen what I like. Even at school – if it was the skinny jeans season, I would be wearing flares. I just didn’t care.”
“Now in my career, I still follow the same pattern. If you say, wear that, I’m not going to wear it if I don’t like it,” she explains. “Especially I feel with me when it comes to stage and casual, I think there’s quite a big difference – I would never wear a pair of trainers on stage, it would never feel right. But I love them in my daywear.”
“I’d love to work with someone like Stella McCartney. I love the trim waistcoats and I have this amazing Stella jumpsuit – they way she fits things to a woman’s body is just amazing – and the material she uses. Big dreams… haha.”
And, as a final note, she adds that she never leaves the house without her Yves Saint Laurent Kiss & Blush gloss: “It always makes me feel better!”
Women to Look Up To
We move on to discuss how utterly crucial it is for women to have other strong women to look up to.
“My mum is pretty inspirational,” Jess says. “All the women in my family are really strong characters actually, but my great aunt Ivy, she had a really crazy life. She grew up through the war, she was ill quite a lot in her life and she was such an empowered, strong character.
“She suffered so much as she got older, but you’d never know that she was ill or anything was wrong. She was still just the same old joker she always was.
“She was a massive inspiration to me. I have her name tattooed on my wrist. She always had my back.”
New Album
In case you haven’t seen the many giant pink billboards all over the place, Jess has penned her first solo album – I Cry When I Laugh – out in the next few days.
“I do cry when I laugh, genuinely. I love the fact that I cry when I laugh, as people have always found it really weird.
“I’ve come from the beginning of writing the album from a place of sadness and tears, to a place of happiness. The album for me is about hope.”
Wondering why she was so sad at the album’s outset, I pry enough to understand that she’d been through a distressing break up.
“I really didn’t want to make a heartbreak album. Yeah, there is heartbreak in that album because that’s what I went through, just as I was signing my record deal, but I didn’t want it to be focused on that because that’s not who I am as a person. I’m a really positive person.”
Jess Glynne’s album I Cry When I Laugh is scheduled for release August 21. You can pre-order it here.
You can also sign up for Jess’s #smartrebel workout, powered by Glacéau Smartwater. Sign up from 18th August and sessions begin from 25 august at 1rebel.co.uk or on the Glaceau Smartwater Twitter page: @glaceau_sw
[Image Credits: REX FEATURES / Glaceau Smartwater/1Rebel]
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