The school from which Beatrice Kristi was expelled as a teenager sounds like the stuff of a classically miserable Irish childhood. Sacred Heart High School in Hammersmith, London has stern red-bricked walls and a firm Catholic ethos. And Kristi, who is about to release her phantasmagorical second album as Beabadoobee, hated every minute there. But not for the reasons you might expect.
“We didn’t have any Irish nuns. There were a lot of west London mums,” she says, referring to an upper middle-class demographic with whom she is clearly not enamoured. “I’d rather have Irish nuns than west London mums.”
She skipped class, flunked her exams and stood up to the bullies who singled her out – until, finally, she was shown the door. Getting “kicked out” might have been the best thing that happened to her, she feels. It gave her room to take stock and think about what she wanted in life.
And what she wanted was to make music. However, the songs she was writing were no teenage daydreams. They were dark and complex vehicles for the conflicted feelings she experienced as the daughter of Filipino NHS workers growing up in a well to-do corner of London.
Part of what she was lashing out against was old-fashioned prejudice against someone who looked different. “That was definitely a massive thing,” she says. However, not fitting in was not the entire story. “There were issues with family. And then issues with school. There were a lot of things.”
Beabadoobee announced herself to the world with her 2020 debut, Fake It Flowers. That record felt like a lost night at the best indie disco ever. It was also a celebration of feminine empowerment in rock. Kristi’s role models were such pioneers of female-fronted indie pop as Miki Berenyi from Lush and Justine Frischmann of Elastica – along with The Cranberries’s Dolores O’Riordan whom she adored.
Eighteen months later, she is ready to move on. Kristi’s new album, Beatopia rips things up and starts over. It represents, in particular, a conscious shift away from the 1990s yearning that was a hallmark of her earlier career.
That phase was much beloved of indie dads and it yielded knockout tunes such as I Wish I Was Stephen Malkmus – an ode to the slacker frontman of post-grunge group Pavement.
The new songs are more esoteric and ethereal. There are guitars but they are dreamier this time and less besotted with the 1990s, a decade which Kristi, born in June 2000, obviously did not witness first hand.
It isn’t that she’s gone sour on the glory days of chiming cords and dangling fringes. The point is that she has no wish to be a vessel for other people’s nostalgia. She isn’t the musical equivalent of a season of Stranger Things, spring-loaded with references to an era she herself did not experience.
“It was a bit annoying,” she shrugs of the caricaturing of her as 1990s revivalist. “But also really flattering. People were saying that my music felt nostalgic and made them think back to that time: blah, blah blah. The thing is, I don’t do things consciously. Everyone gets inspired by everything. Nothing is completely original nowadays. Yes, maybe I’m going to have hints of certain records from certain decades. That’s because I try to find inspiration everywhere.”
She was born in Iloilo City in the Philippines and moved to London 2003 when she was three-years-old with her parents. She grew up with their traditional Filipino music, as well as with artists such as Veruca Salt and Tori Amos : strong women who jabbed a finger in the eye of convention.
Her mum and dad were supportive of her songwriting to a point: when she was 17-years-old, Kristi’s father even bought her first guitar. Still, they were not thrilled when she announced she was focusing on music rather than using her two A-levels (acquired post-expulsion) to go to university.
“My dad was the most understanding and supportive,” she says. “I was blessed to have that. At the very beginning when I started playing music, they were a bit like, ‘what the f**k is going on?’ But things improved.”
Kristi is an unusual mix of self-assured and introverted. In one of her early interviews she was likened to a charismatic kid from an American high school movie. Today, en-route to a music festival in eastern Europe, she projects a drop-dead, coolest-in-class confidence.
But she also speaks honestly about growing up an outsider. That is one of the themes of Beatopia, named after an imaginary world she created for self as a child and to where she could flee when real life got too much.
“When I was seven, it was a way of escapism. And deep inside I got embarrassed about it. Now, with this LP, it’s something I’m finally accepting. It’s therapeutic.”
This tangle of emotions gives her new songs a nuance and emotional hinterland that perhaps got slightly lost amidst the indie pop jangling of Fake It Flowers. The Perfect Pair, with its gothic samba beat, is about comparing yourself to others and finding that the flaws you see in them are your own faults reflected back at you.
Just as dark is clattering lead single Talk, one of those rare moments where she plugs the guitars back in and rocks out. With You don’t exist/You’re my imagination, she sings of traumas which have bubbled up from the back of her brain.
The tension between being upfront about your feelings and floundering in negativity is something with which she grappled during lockdown. Having toured non-stop from when she was 17-years-old, she’s had to grow up on her own to an extent – finding her way in the music business as her career took off at the speed of a tour bus hurtling down a motorway to the next gig. It was a blast. And, at times, extremely difficult.
“You are vulnerable. You’re prone to having mental breakdowns and you’re on the road and you’re away,” says Kristi.
The way to get through it, she realised, was to surround herself with collaborators in whom she had complete confidence.
“You have to appreciate the people around you. You love them, They love you too. It’s important to realise that. It’s becoming much better. I can speak for a lot of artists when I say that touring can be really, really dysfunctional and hard for your mental health. It’s about finding ways to cope.”
Then there is the pressure of her devoted fanbase. There is no such thing as a casual Beabadoobee listener. Her fans are hard-core with a vengeance. This was made obvious to Kristi when she invited some fans to appear in the video for Talk and they turned up in their hundreds.
The Beabadoobee nation extends beyond teens and 20-somethings: Taylor Swift once walked up to Kristi told her she loved her music; The 1975 were such admirers they took Kristi on tour before she’d even put a record out.
“I’m emotional. I’m writing emotional music. I’m just like everyone else who listens to emotional music,” she says. “So obviously emotional people are going to listen to my music. At least we’re all in this together. It makes me feel less alone.”
Now 22-years-old, Bea is the quintessential Gen Z pop star. And so it seems reasonable to canvass her about her generation’s Stranger Things-inspired love affair with Kate Bush and Running Up That Hill. Sadie Sink, who plays the Stranger Things character for whom Running Up That Hill serves as lifeline in the show, has admitted to having never previously heard of Bush. Was Kristi similarly a newcomer to the greatest female artist of her era?
“I’ve loved Kate Bush since high school,” she says. “I watched [the] Wuthering Heights video. I saw Kate Bush and I was like, ‘who the f**k is this?’ She’s really, really cool.”
Beatopia was released on Friday, July 15th
