Sarah Joyce vividly remembers the day her life changed forever. She was with Steve Brown, her first producer, in the back of a cab driving through Shepherd’s Bush. “Suddenly we saw this massive billboard with a huge picture of my face on it,” the star better known as Rumer tells me. “It was an ‘Oh my God’ moment. I couldn’t believe it. I thought I’d made a jazzy record that might have a few reviews, I didn’t even think about it getting into the pop charts.”
That album, 2010’s Seasons Of My Soul, sold more than one million copies in the UK.
Before then, Rumer had been a barmaid in Herne Hill, southeast London. Eighteen months later, she was singing for Barack Obama at the White House; and her fans included Elton John, Richard Carpenter and Burt Bacharach who flew her to California to hear her sing.
Her life has been a rollercoaster of highs, lows, and soap opera worthy twists – like finding out that her real father was a Pakistani cook when she was ten.
Yet Rumer, 45, is still as down to earth as the pubs she used to work in. Critics hailed her warm, velvety, soulful voice as ‘the most beautiful since Karen Carpenter’.
Steve Brown, best known as band leader Glen Ponder on Alan Partridge’s TV show Knowing Me, Knowing You, was her first superfan. “Steve saw me at a pub gig and paid for the album. He had a studio and a few quid and he backed me. I had a full-time job so one day a week, every Friday for three years, I’d go from South London to Turnham Green to record the album. It was a very organic process.”
Her next super-fan was Max Lousada, boss of Atlantic Records UK. “All that promotion, the billboard, the TV appearances, was down to him barking orders from the top of the building. But I was 30 when I was signed up, and I’d lived about 1000 lives. I’d had different jobs, I had friends and relationships, my mother had died… I didn’t easily adapt to being pushed from pillar to post.”
Back then, before social media and online interviews, artists had to go all in.
“For the first two years, my life was: flat to car to airport to hotel to huge show or promo event, and then repeat. It was my rabbit in the head-lights era. I was exhausted and I felt trapped. The travel tires you out and talking about yourself wasn’t natural for me. I was raised very Catholic. You’re taught to put others first, not yourself, so I found it very pressurising.”
“People don’t realise that when you become this thing, it takes complete control of your life. Everything is 1000 miles-per-hour. You’re out of touch with everyone you know, and you replace people who love you with people who want to extract whatever they can from you just for the sales graph.
“If you had any residual trauma or mental health issues it triggers them. And I did. I felt constantly triggered. It’s not just overwork; it’s the loneliness. It’s a bit like it’s your birthday party every day. You lose your mind. That’s why many young artists get ill and get addictions and can’t keep a relationship. It can be tragic. Liam Payne was incredibly lonely. Attention is focused on the addiction, the real problem is the loneliness.”
She suffered panic attacks on stage. “I’d be standing in front of thousands of people, trying not to faint.”
Some of Rumer’s interviews back then emphasised her mental turmoil. “The over emotional stuff,” she laughs, her brown eyes sparkling. “Yeah, it was journalists from North London, you know the type, with little beards. They looked like therapists, so I opened up. At one point my sister texted me saying ‘Stop saying you’re mental!’ Nobody was talking about mental health back then.”
Recording her second album in 2012 Rumer and Brown fell out irreparably. By the time it went Top 3 she had decamped to Los Angeles.
“I was escaping the English press, Prince Harry style,” she chuckles. “Except I hid. I disappeared deliberately.”
Rumer loves at least one British newspaper. “I’m a secret Express reader,” she says. “The Express does the Royal stuff better than anyone else.”
She met future husband, American composer Rob Shirakbari in LA – they have one son – and moved to Arkansas.
“It was like a witness protection programme,” she laughs. Away from the madness, she got a dog, enjoyed nature, and healed.
Sarah was 18 when musician Malcolm Doherty heard her sing during a lock-in at Herne Hill wine bar Bolland’s, just three doors down from the Half Moon pub where she poured pints.
“He asked me to sing in his band, La Honda. I was with them for a year or two in the late 90s doing indie pop. We had a lot of fun. We supported Drugstore, we had a song on a Tic Tac advert.”
They were about to play Southwest Fest when her mother Margaret was diagnosed with breast cancer. As the only sibling without children, she quit the band and decamped to a caravan on the south coast to be near her, getting a job in the village pub.
“In La Honda I was just a singer, but in the caravan, sitting there with a guitar with fairy lights, I wrote my first songs” – many of which ended up on her debut album.
“Mum died in 2003. I felt a bit lost so I went back to London and continued songwriting.”
Her mother’s book collection included author Rumer Godden, who inspired her stage name.
Sarah was born in Pakistan where her British father was Chief Engineer on the Tarbela Dam project. But aged ten, her mother Margaret told her that her real dad was their Pakistani cook.
It explained why she had brown eyes and brown hair unlike her blond, blue-eyed siblings.
“Mum lobbed it into the conversation like a hand grenade and then walked away, never mentioning it again until she was dying” – which was when Margaret asked her to go to the North-West Frontier to meet him. Sadly he’d died two weeks before she arrived, but she did meet her half-brother Saeed and his family.
Growing up, Sarah did impressions of Judy Garland to entertain her family. “I was obsessed with her. I remember taking a video of Judy Garland, Lana Turner and Hedy Lamar to a friend’s party. I put it on and they all walked out.”
Rumer’s career highs include performing at the Palladium with Bacharach, and of course the White House – “a very small room, the audience is two feet away; I can only describe the experience as total fear.”
All her studio albums have gone Top 20 except for 2016’s This Girl’s In Love (Bacharach & David songs) Songbook) which conked out at 27. In 2020 she released Nashville Tears, celebrating the work of Nashville country singer-songwriter Hugh Prestwood.
Now back in southeast London, Rumer has released In Sessions – a selection of her songs re-interpreted with a live band. She tours the UK in October, only now she does things at her own pace.
She loves meeting fans after her shows. After one last November at London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall, she says, “A whole family told me they’d grown up listening to my music – that’s quite something, being part of their growing up.”
Husband Rob thinks her best characteristic is her kindness. “My worst is I’m disorganised and chaotic. I like a rummage around second-hand shops, I like antiques” – which is no way to talk about Crystal Palace FC.
She’s funny, articulate and open. “I am a lairy bird,” she tells me, smiling. “Ironically, the music I love is so peaceful but I’m southeast London for life.”
*Rumer’s full-band 15th anniversary of Seasons Of My Soul tour starts on 13 October. Tickets from ticketline.co.uk and ticketmaster.co.uk
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