With Pure Love, her first new album in 13 years, Gabriella Cilmi’s warm, throaty, unmistakably expressive contralto wraps itself around the ‘Rock n Soul’ pop that has always been closest to her heart. It is a triumphant homecoming.

“It’s taken me this long,” says Cilmi, on the 13-year journey to return to where she belongs. “My partner and musical collaborator, David and I were watching a video of me aged ten, performing Jumping Jack Flash at the Festa Della Madonna [Catholic festival], and I was stomping my feet and wailing. He turned to me and said: ‘You just need to do that.’ From that moment, everything just flowed. I’ve been reconnecting with an early version of myself and finally I got to make this album, which was such a beautiful experience.”

Experiences old and new soak into the material. The stunning Carole King-esq piano ballad You Killed Our Song is a song about a song in the style of Roberta Flack’s Killing Me Softly. “It’s about those favourite songs you share with somebody,” she says. “Then the person is no longer in your life and every time that song plays, you think of them.” Too Far Gone lists the things Cilmi was told when she started standing up for herself as a teenager in the pop world — including ‘No one will touch you now you’re done with me,' — while Pure Love is a brassy, soulful mantra on self love and No Apologies is about being accepted for who you are. Then there is Love Me Like Its The End Of The World, a tender, organ-led love song with a surprising inspiration: the apocalypse.

“We were watching a lot of disaster movies during the lockdown,” says Cilmi. “My partner loves them, I really don’t, and from there came the most vulnerable song on this record”.

Cilmi is the Italian-Australian singer who was discovered at ten, signed at 13, had a worldwide hit at 16 with Sweet About Me, and dealt with the inevitable fallout early fame brings. Growing up in Melbourne in the 90s and noughties, she learned early on that she was an old soul, whether that meant loving her uncles’ Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin albums or singing along to blues and soul standards on her mother’s Chess Records compilations.

“I was always delving into the past,” she says. “I remember getting a Britney Spears CD for my birthday and being really disappointed. I connected deeply with Janis Joplin’s Pearl. I loved the way her hair was messy on the cover. From the moment I heard that record I wanted to play with a live band”.

Nonetheless, those early years at the coal face of pop helped Cilmi know the kind of album she wanted to make this time round: a soulful, organic one, on which she could sing from the heart. Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks was a huge influence, alongside Joe Cocker’s Mad Dogs and Englishmen for its favouring of spirit over perfection. Then there was the approach of the legendary Muscle Shoals studio in Alabama, where in the late 60s and early 70s everyone from Aretha Franklin to the Rolling Stones would work with the studio’s in house band the Swampers.

“The Swampers would just pick up the tune and go, and you get an energy when you’re standing in a room with a bunch of musicians that you just don’t get when everyone comes in on different days,” she explains. “I like things that are ramshackle, imperfect, improvised. I like the community you get with a bunch of musicians. It’s the human touch, which I think is missing in so much modern music.”

Cilmi found what she was looking for at Middle Farm in Devon, a studio just off Dartmoor run by producer and musician Peter Miles. “We had pasta on arrival, which is always the way to my heart, and then we made the music together, recorded on tape and captured the moment. Environment plays a big part in making an album and there’s something about Middle Farm that’s magical. There were rolling hills, fresh air, a harvest moon on the night we arrived… and I really felt supported by Pete throughout.”

Perhaps the most personal song of all is No To A King. Cilmi co-wrote the lyrics with Anna Krantz, an artist who had similar experiences of being a square peg in the round hole of pop. “As a young woman in the early noughties we were told things like: You can’t play an instrument, because that’s not what girls do,” she remembers. “ My parents had no idea of what they were getting into, because the message was: ‘Your daughter may be special now, but she won’t be once she’s older.’ I get messages from people’s mothers to this day, saying their daughters want to become pop stars. My advice is: don’t rush. Let them learn to lead the way, rather than other people coming in when their ideas aren’t fully formed.”

Cilmi speaks from experience. After signing to Australia’s Mushroom Records at 13, she was sent over to America and the UK, essentially to bring her voice to the marketplace. “It was really weird. I would play acoustic sets for different labels, singing to three people in a room. It led to a deal with Island Records and being introduced to Brian Higgins of Xenomania, who produced Sugababes and Girls Aloud. I was recording with Brian during my school holidays.”

The problems really started after Sweet About Me was a hit, after which Cilmi found herself subjected to countless opinions on what she should do next. “The more success you have, the more feedback you get. Suddenly it was: ‘Smile.’ ‘Don’t smile.’ I was really sensitive and wanted everyone to like me, but it doesn’t work that way.”

A turning point came when Cilmi was played a song that she was told would be her next single. That was On A Mission, the lead from her electro-disco infused 2010 album, Ten. “I had no say in it, didn’t identify with it, and it came at a time when everyone was really focussed on the way I looked. I did a gig in New York and was told I was a bit chubby.”

All of this has led, in a roundabout way, to Pure Love, with Cilmi now having the confidence and freedom to make exactly the kind of album she wants to make. Which makes you wonder: if she could do it all over again, would Gabriella Cilmi put herself through the pop machine that tried to force her into being someone she wasn’t but also led to her making such a lovable, accomplished, rootsy album as this one?

“I wouldn’t change it,” she concludes. “Those experiences made me who I am. Now I can share my experiences with others — and help them realise that they can speak up too.”

Gabriella Cilmi

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