‘I had an epiphany recently,” FKA twigs says. You have to love a conversation that starts like that. “Where I sit in the industry now is where I sat when I was at school. I was a little bit of an outsider then. And I thought, if I did this job, I’d be on the inside. But after 15 years of doing it, I just found myself still on the outside.”
FKA twigs’ appearance is mysterious: the 37-year-old has wise eyes, seemingly as old as a mountain, but the skin of a 14-year-old; her head is shaved at the side, like an ecowarrior, yet she is ridiculously beautiful, like a Disney princess. Her singing voice is otherworldly and she has incredible range. People have always compared her to Björk, but the first song on her new album, Eusexua, gives a bit of texture to that comparison. Yes, they are alike, in the sense that they are both from outer space. But space is quite large.
“Ethereal” is a word often spoken about – and by – FKA twigs, so maybe that is what sets her apart. She considers this and shrugs. “It’s hard to tell when you’re inside yourself why it is.”
We meet in the cafe at the Barbican in London, where later she is going to see Chekhov’s The Seagull. Born and raised in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, and privately educated on a scholarship, Tahliah Debrett Barnett, as she once was, comes across as much more global than spa town, having taken a circuitous but effective route to the centre of everything.
The other phrase people use about FKA twigs is “avant garde”, but what do they mean? Is it something simple, as in her visual style is highly theatrical, not sexy in any regular sense of the word? Is it something more complicated, as in her music defies classification, not because it doesn’t fit neatly into any genre, but because you can’t really do anything – dance, have it on in the background, whistle – except concentrate on it? Is it because she often names her records the way Elon Musk names his children: all letters, no sounds (EP1, in 2012; LP1, in 2014; M3LL155X, in 2015)?
She left Cheltenham to go to the Brit school in Croydon for sixth form, but had been getting professional gigs as a dancer since she was 12. By her early 20s, she was an incredibly successful backup dancer, working with musicians including Kylie Minogue, Jessie J and Ed Sheeran. She would perform her music anywhere and everywhere, sometimes for money, sometimes for the craic; the legend is that she got signed by an A&R guy who spotted her at a bondage club.
The way she describes it, she was much more perfectionist and grafter than party girl: “I had four jobs. In the evening, I would go and perform in pubs; if I was lucky, I’d get 15 quid. The line might be six people; sometimes no one turned up. It didn’t really profit me anything. It’s a choice, isn’t it? Do I want to spend 50 quid going out with my mates and getting pissed at the weekend, or do I want to spend it on a room to rehearse in with my band?”
It wasn’t a bondage club: it was a warehouse party co-sponsored by a tattoo artist and a fetishwear brand. It was there she met Tic, the A&R with whom she co-wrote EP1 and still collaborates. “Now, he’s ethereal,” she says. “Ethereal and ephemeral.” Has he vanished now? “He’s vanished many times and turned up again.”
“I entered my career at the height of Pop Idol,” she says. “It was a new era of finding people off the street and manufacturing them into a pop star. I was never a part of that. I’m shy, you know. I wouldn’t have been good at the interviews.” She is also nothing like malleable enough for a process such as that, with a fierce sense of self that she puts down to the best years of her life.
When were they? “I guess between five and about eight?” Seriously? “My mum was a salsa dancer and she made costumes as well. We didn’t have a lavish lifestyle, but I was really loved. Especially as a young child, in those formative years, my mum had a lot of curiosity in me – discovering who I was and what made me tick. She put a lot of time into that, a lot of attention to detail. It was so magical. Everything was possible, every single day. I wasn’t a princessy kid – I was quite gender neutral – but I was always dancing, figuring out how I could use my body to become a cat, or to say an idea. I grew up feeling like my body could do anything.”
Her early dance training had its limits – ballet, modern, tap. “It was pre-internet and I was from Cheltenham,” she says, laughing. “As I’ve got older, I’ve understood that movement is such a deep well of inspiration.”
In the same way that she could never have been moulded into the mainstream of the 2010s, neither does she fit into this “TikTok era, with kids having one song that will blow up overnight. I’ve not been a part of that, either.” She has a deep suspicion of new media’s impact on creativity: “Everyone has a voice. There’s more opinions and fans can make you or break you. They can decide overnight that you’re this and that; they can comment, they can make videos that give the wrong impression and spread through the whole internet like wildfire.”
When she was in a relationship with the actor Robert Pattinson, in the mid-2010s, she got a load of abusive drivel from his fans, but by her own account her fans are sophisticated people, or they wouldn’t like her in the first place. Does she get a lot of flak? “No, I don’t,” she says. “This doesn’t bother me personally. I think it just makes it hard for genuine artists to stay original.”
You could call FKA twigs’ a portfolio career – singing, dancing, acting, modelling – but she is usually doing all those things simultaneously. If she were a man, I think she would be called a performance artist. “When I did the Valentino show [at Paris fashion week in 2023], Florence Pugh said: ‘It’s amazing to see women’s bodies doing something that’s sensual, but not oversexualised.’ Which isn’t to say that I don’t use my body in a way that’s sexualised sometimes – that is a part of my language – but there’s a whole other spectrum, as a woman, to move in a way that’s dynamic, strong, sensual, awe‑inspiring, but not supposed to be serving. Unless that’s my choice. There’s a pole dance I do in my new show which is both. I decide when I’m serving and I decide when I’m not.”
Ah, the pole dancing. This was a feminist faultline in the 90s, when FKA twigs was just a small child. We were all arguing about the pornification of the mainstream and whether it could ever be ironic enough to get away with it. In the video for Cellophane, the standout single from her 2019 album, Magdalene, she answers that question definitively, without really trying. There is some incredible choreography, with haunting, creepy special effects, in which, yes, she is pole dancing, but, no, she is definitely not serving. Commandingly acrobatic, it is a show of strength with a trace of menace. “With the pole, it’s about finding new ways to play with the ideas your body can say. Sex work is the oldest profession; why are we so outraged by it?”
At the start of last year, this tension – surely you can reclaim and express the sexuality of your own body without having to internalise the objectification projected on to it? – blew up in the hands of the Advertising Standards Authority, which banned a Calvin Klein advert for an “overly sexualised” image that focused on FKA twigs’ body rather than the clothes being advertised, but then lifted the ban two months later, after she said she was proud of the image and had collaborated in its creation. It seems obvious, from any given image, that whatever FKA twigs’ body is saying about sex, or anything else, she is the one who is saying it. But not obvious enough, apparently.
When she plays the song Cellophane live, fans on social media always wonder afterwards whether she is OK. It’s the lyrics, partly – “Didn’t I do it for you? / Why don’t I do it for you? / Why won’t you do it for me? / When all I do is for you?” – but it is mainly the eerily convincing embodiment of anguish. “I’m a performer!” she says, indignantly. “I think it would be more sad to be on stage and smiling. When you’re out there shaking the tail feather and not feeling it, that’s when it hurts. Not when you’re crying.”
The day after our interview, she gave the keynote speech at the Audio and Visual Arts festival at the British Library and distilled this vibe – that she has been in this game a long time, is pushing 40 (her words), is competent in ways that belie the unearthly creature you see: “I know where my keys are.” Keys like keys, or keys like music? Can get back into her house, or knows what’s what? Her meaning is ambiguous, a lot of the time, but only to liven things up; it never seems to connote uncertainty on her part.
There is a song on Eusexua the lyrics of which fans will be poring over. She started writing Keep It, Hold It four years ago, when it was about “keeping abuse a secret – don’t tell anybody anything”. That would have been 2021, when she detailed in an interview with Elle what she described as an abusive relationship with the actor Shia LaBeouf. (LaBeouf denies the claims.) It is a chilling, sad and enraging account of a relationship that began in 2018, on the set of his semi-autobiographical film Honey Boy, in which she played Shy Girl, and ended the following year. In retrospect, even the fact that he would conjure himself a fictional girl and not give her a name gives me the creeps.
Just before that interview with Elle, FKA twigs filed a lawsuit against LaBeouf for sexual battery, assault and the infliction of emotional distress, which she can’t now talk about, as the hearing is this year. I almost don’t want to mention it, because it seems so wrong for her openness to carry such a heavy price, for LaBeouf’s name to be for ever mentioned in conjunction with hers. Yet her courage in describing that publicly is a fundamental part of who she is, as is the fact that she is still, while keeping her terms very general, radically honest about what happened and what came after.
Whatever that song meant originally, the lyrics have evolved, she says: “Four years on, it means something completely different. Now, ‘keep it and hold it’ means look after yourself. That light you hold as a human, always protect it. For me, I’m very ferocious. I used to think: no one will ever blow the candle out. And I still believe that, but it can get dimmed. So now it’s about: no, I’ll always protect my candle.”
While she was doing her keynote at the British Library, in conversation with the DJ and club legend Nadine Noor, she described her experience with the media in a way that was a little chastening. She would show up to a conversation because it was one of her “deliverables”; journalists would ask her how she was, but not really care about the answer, as that was just one of their “deliverables”. “I’m in a place of brutal honesty at the moment,” she said to the audience. “In a gentle and caring way. I don’t have anything to hide.” People cheered, although it wasn’t the end. In an FKA twigs performance, you may never understand exactly what you are hearing or looking at, but you know it’s real.
• FKA twigs’ new album, Eusexua, is out now on Young
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• This article was amended on 27 March 2025 to correct a reference to Tic, the A&R with whom FKA twigs co-wrote EP1. An earlier version confused him with the Ghanaian hip-hop artist TiC.
