Beverley Knight is mid song. Joss Stone’s Super Duper Love is playing in the restaurant we’re meeting in, and I’ve caught her lost in the music. “Yeah, I’m diggin’ on you, now baby? Yeah,” she warbles at low volume, yet with all the same soul, depth and tender warmth that earned her the nickname “Little Aretha” from her noteworthy admirer: David Bowie.
“It’s an automatic response for me to sing,” she says. “I hear a song and I have to join in. It’s the most natural thing in the world for me.”
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That Knight is always ready to sing won’t surprise anyone that has seen a glimpse of her decades-spanning career: be it as the multiple award-winning artist that could once call Prince a mentor and Ice Cube a fan, or as the darling of the West End, having formed a formidable career in musical theatre in recent years. This includes two Olivier nominations for her performances in Memphis (2015) and The Drifter’s Girl (2022), and a win last year for her turn as Emmeline Pankhurst in the Old Vic’s Sylvia – a musical based on the life of lesser-known suffragette, Sylvia Pankhurst.
This month, she is reprising her role in Sister Act as the lead Deloris Van Cartier, where she will be supported by the Gavin & Stacey writer and actor Ruth Jones and the singer Lemar.
But Knight never expected musical theatre to become such a big part of her life. “I was just turning 40, and wondering what I should do next,” she says. “And then the universe, as she often does, said: ‘How about this?’ and in walks The Bodyguard.” The role, playing the singer Rachel Marron, was her entry into musical theatre, in 2013. “It sent me in a different direction, career wise, but actually it was a full circle, bringing me back to what I’d done as a child.”
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Born in Wolverhampton, Knight was raised by Jamaican parents with a strong commitment to their Pentecostal church. It was through the church’s gospel choir that she discovered her talent for singing. “When I was 11, I joined the Wolverhampton youth theatre and spent my summers on stage with them. I never knew all those years ago I’d go back to it.”
These days, she lives in London with her husband. But it’s clear she remains deeply invested in the West Midlands and its fortunes. It’s not often interviewing a successful singer that the conversation has to be pulled back from city planning (at one point, Knight reflects on the traffic around Birmingham’s Bullring), but she’s especially protective of her home town.
“When I was a kid, Wolverhampton was vibrant, multi-ethnic, multicultural, which for me is a strength,” she says. “The Wolverhampton I see now is even more diverse, but it’s declining. Unemployment is high. Local government is struggling, but it’s this lot in central government that are the big problem.”
She catches herself.
“Oh God, look at me, I’m already talking about politics,” she says, and laughs. “I’d just love to see the north rise again.” She names Hull, Liverpool, Manchester and Birmingham as cultural beacons. “I look at the Black Country and think we could do with some of that. The Hippodrome in Dudley (six miles south-east of Wolverhampton) has just closed. Wolverhampton lost the Light House cinema. There’s not much in the way of celebrating arts and culture. And the people need it. Not everybody wants to pack up and come to London.”
Knight was just 22 when she made the move down to the capital, a “little kid in a Citroën AX thinking I was about to conquer the world”. It was around the time of her first album release, The B-Funk, which celebrates its 30th anniversary next year.
She would go on to become one of the UK’s best-known soul singers. She has released nine studio albums, several of which made the Top 10, four of which were gold-selling. She’s had a Mercury prize nomination and two Mobo wins. There have been collaborations with the likes of Jamiroquai and British jazz royalty Courtney Pine, support slots with Prince during his 2007 London residency and performances with Stevie Wonder. Indeed, Knight’s 2008 performance with Wonder at Prince’s Oscars party moved the producer Quincy Jones so much that he gave her a standing ovation. And then there’s the glowing reviews from critics – Billboard proclaimed she was “on her way to becoming an international star” in 1995, Q magazine said her voice “can make you catch your breath in wonderment” in 1998, and the praise has continued steadily since.
But the high esteem is bittersweet. Because while the critics seemed to agree that Knight was a singular talent with major star energy, the commercial success didn’t quite match up. Even in the realm of theatre, scratch beneath the surface and there is a sense that Knight is undervalued and underrated. “This is the third major show in a row … where she’s elevated inferior material,” read the Evening Standard’s review of Sylvia. “She’s an absolute star. Can’t someone write her a role worthy of her talent?”
In recent years, there has been a collective soul-searching about the treatment of pop stars: often young women thrust into the limelight, put up by a male-dominated industry to be picked apart by a misogynist press with little interest in their wellbeing. Their stories tell us something about the problematic ways female artists have been perceived – how we objectified them and diminished them.
Knight recalls that there was also the pressure to sexualise herself earlier in her career, which she resisted. “As a younger woman, I wanted to set out my stall and I didn’t want anything to detract from that.
“I was deadly serious about the craft. I came out at a time where Black female artists were overwhelmingly from the US. In Britain, you had Sade, who was in a world of her own stratospheric genius, then Eternal, Michelle Gayle, Gabrielle. And that was pretty much it. Then you had this onslaught of American artists, all these tough or sexy girls. But I didn’t come from the streets. I just wanted my music to speak.
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“To be fair, I think I was too serious about that, I could have had a bit more fun,” she says. “Now I’ll wear the little booty shorts all day long because I think people have a measure of me and I quite like the idea of being 50 in a tiny skirt saying, ‘I’ll wear what the hell I want.’”
And as a Black woman she has been typecast. “People think they know who I am, musically,” she reflects. “People say, ‘Oh I bet you love soul and R&B’ – and they’d be correct. But I also love Radiohead. I think the Clash are phenomenal.”
Her most recent album, The Fifth Chapter, released last year, ranges in style from Ibiza floor-fillers to disco.
“My tastes are vast and eclectic,” she says. “But when you start pulling out music that kind of doesn’t fit the stereotype, that’s when people are like, ‘Oh, really?’. They expect me to be a massive Motown fan. I like Motown, but some of it was a bit sweet for me. And I have a deep love of rock. Also, on a stage, people might expect me to be standing there looking statuesque, the archetype of a diva. Or if not, to be sassy and have attitude, to be aggressive and dare I say, not too bright upstairs with a limited vocabulary. But I’m nothing like that.”
I say that it’s hard not to read that perception as racist. How else to describe the expectation of performing exactly like other Black female artists, or the pressure to act out a hypersexual or aggressive image?
“That’s what some people expect,” she says, with a hint of resignation.
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“People can have deep-seated feelings, and they are sometimes irrational. I know there is a significant part of the British public who simply cannot bear me … And I am quite opinionated.”
Knight has spoken out several times about race relations in the UK and has played charity gigs in support of Windrush families and in tribute to Stephen Lawrence. Her support for the LGBTQ+ community, too, is particularly notable – in 2016 she won Attitude magazine’s Ally award for her longstanding advocacy, including her work in the 90s with the HIV support charity the Terrence Higgins Trust, back when there was a lot of stigma attached to the virus.
Knight’s best friend from school was gay, though he couldn’t admit it. By the time he did, she says, his parents had died and she laments that he was unable to be truthful with them.
“I lived through the 80s,” she sighs. “I remember the headlines about the ‘gay disease’, the ‘gay cancer’, and the legitimised homophobia. Which in my young mind, I couldn’t understand. It just wasn’t right.
“I was in the minority then, especially in my own community of Jamaican heritage. But I said what I believed to be the absolute truth, which is human beings are born the way they are. The backlash that I received took me by surprise.”
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The backlash? “I was cancelled in a lot of circles. Like the urban community. But the world turns,” she says. She cites singers Raye and Jorja Smith as examples of how women in pop are more able to “do it their own way”. Famously, Raye extricated herself from a major label that would not put out her music under her name – and recently won a record-breaking six Brit awards – while Smith quit the high-pressured and often unpleasant world of London’s music industry to create music from her home town, Walsall, in the West Midlands. Knight is also a huge fan of Lil Nas X. “He performed at Glastonbury with blue hair, no top, covered in glitter, singing and rapping his heart out. The world really does turn. I’m here for it.”
How does she see the current battle for trans rights? “Oh that’s easy,” she says. “Trans women are women. Trans men are men. Human beings are human beings. The end, full stop. I think the moral panic that exists right now is a confection. It is red meat to a particular section of the electorate. They said the same thing years ago about gay people.”
Knight is a Labour party supporter – how does she feel about the party at the moment? “I’d prefer to have them in government any day of the week and twice on Sunday over this one. This current government are the worst that I can ever remember.”
Worse than Thatcher? “Yes! Listen, Thatcher was definitely not my chick. Teachers strikes, Liverpool left to wither on the vine, it all wasn’t for me. But she was a conviction politician. So was Major. They believed what they said. This lot, they’ll go wherever the wind blows. They are grifting for a living. I’d much prefer to see a Labour government.”
Knight says that politics “was always going to be part of the journey” of her life. She recalls the British Nationality Act 1981 – the act which defined who was automatically given British citizenship by birth (anyone, provided one parent was born in Britain or was formally settled) – and how her parents had to rush to naturalise themselves to ensure Knight had the same status as her white friends, despite being born in the same place as them. “My mum and dad raised me to be mindful that we were different, and to know that we were a little way behind everyone at the starting line.
“Music was my antidote to politics in a way,” she says. “And to approach life and people with a smile. If they reject you because you’re Black, because you’re female, because your politics are on the left or because you have an assortment of friends who are all LGBTQIA or whatever, then so be it.
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“Everyone else is welcome at a Beverley Knight concert. My church is a broad one. My arms are wide and my heart is open. That’s me, and how I want my music to speak.”
And so, for now Knight is clear on her path. Definitely singing, whether it be in the theatre, in the studio or in the restaurant. And there may be some acting on the cards (“I can’t say much about it,” she grins). But mostly she’ll be spending time doing her favourite thing: “Challenging people’s perspective of me.” As a woman her age, in this world, she says, “you’ve got to come out swinging. And I’ve got some hard-ass gloves.”
Beverley Knight’s album The Fifth Chapter is out now. She stars in Sister Act: A Divine Musical Comedy at the Dominion theatre in London from 15 March – 8 June sisteractthemusical.co.uk
This article was amended on 11 March 2024. The musical Sylvia was an Old Vic, not National Theatre, production.
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