Rita Ora and I didn’t get off to a great start. She’s spent six months thinking I’ve ignored her WhatsApp message. We had met in November at last year’s GLAMOUR Women Of The Year Awards where she won her third GLAMOUR Award, this time for Entertainer. She was sitting at my table. I liked her instantly. As a cynical Northerner, I’m not that easily charmed, but she was effusive, warm, cheeky, fun and surprisingly earnest, genuinely thrilled to be winning another GLAMOUR Award, “because GLAMOUR has championed me from day one and I haven’t forgotten that.”
We’d exchanged numbers. She’d apparently WhatsApped me the next day to say “Thanks”, but sent it to the wrong number. “But I saw the tick had gone blue,” she laughed. “I thought you’d ignored me!” As if I would. I giggle to myself at the thought that someone random unknowingly has a WhatsApp message on their phone from Rita Ora. I thought she’d just been polite asking for my number, never to be heard from again.
The fact she’d WhatsApp to thank me personally for an award, reveals a not-often seen show of manners and down-to-earthness from a star of her calibre, but which I’m starting to realise is classic Rita. All alongside an underlying steeliness, determination to succeed and an innate confidence that I’m curious about; I wonder what her parents did right and how can I infuse my young daughters with it?
We meet in her hotel suite and she welcomes me like an old friend. Her fridge is stacked with her own mini health food shop; CBD drops, bone broth packets, mushroom health snacks. At 32, she tells me she’s in the best shape of her life, doing reformer Pilates twice a week and weights once a week. Her hair is waist length and naturally curly, highlighted blonde; her eyes painted with a graphic eye design. She’s wearing a Stella McCartney grey, box-shouldered, long suit jacket, white Stella T-shirt and knee-length black cowboy boots, which she kicks off revealing short grey socks that hide her new ankle tattoo – a heart shape with the letter ‘T’ tucked neatly inside it. Her husband, Taika Waititi, 47, a New Zealand Oscar-winning film-maker tattooed it on her with his own hands, she created a matching one with her initial on him, when a friend came round to theirs with a tattoo gun. But more on this later.
We’re here to discuss her new album You & I, her first in more than four years, it’s almost 11 years since the launch of her first album Ora. Music aside, she hasn’t stopped working, she’s been prolific, punishing at times. She recently co-hosted the MTV Europe Music Awards with Taika, launched tequila brand Próspero, acted in Fifty Shades Of Grey and in the past decade has collaborated with Prince and Ed Sheeran. Having previously left Jay-Z’s Roc Nation because they hadn't put out any of her music in three years, Rita signed with Berlin-based music label BMG in February 2022 and now owns all her own masters. She has also been a judge on The X Factor, The Masked Singer and The Voice in the UK and Australia, travelled around the world, and is currently between London, LA, Australia and New Zealand. Earlier this week she was in Liverpool, performing at the Eurovision Song Contest's semi-finals. Oh, and she acts as a Unicef Ambassador, too, helping refugee children create a new life. It’s impressive.
When not ‘working’ she’s on the red carpet, last week in New York for the Met Gala. And of course, she recently got married. On the night we meet, the second song from her album – Praising You, featuring Fatboy Slim’s ’90s anthem – is about to be released. She’s feeling nervous. She says she’s always anxious before new music drops, “You think it gets easier putting out music, but it doesn’t.”
She was eight years old when the original song Praise You came out. “My parents were good at throwing parties. They’d have friends come over and I remember this song playing. It was just the happiest song ever.
It took Rita about a year to get Norman Cook, aka Fatboy Slim to agree to her remaking the song. She first met him at Glastonbury when she went to hear him play. “I went up to him and said, ‘I love you, I’d love for us to do something together one day.’ It was 2.30am in Shangri-La, the ravers’ corner. I wouldn’t say it was the best place to have a business conversation. I got his number and basically stalked him. He may not say I was that bad, but for me, I was definitely. I was like, ‘Please, if anyone can pull this off, I think it can be me.’ I know he’d been asked for years by other people.” Why does she think he chose her? “We built a genuine connection. I wrote a song with Praise You in mind and sent it to him; he came back and said he loved it.”
Her confidence is striking. I love it. Does she ever suffer from imposter syndrome? “What’s that?” she asks. Now, I love her even more. “Of course I suffer from insecurities, like everyone else,” she adds. “But they drive me to do more.”
Her decisions to diversify her career haven’t been coincidental, more planned and calculated. When she finally got out of her deal with Jay-Z in 2016, after counter lawsuits resulted in them settling out of court (they only released one album together, Ora, in seven years), she sat down with her manager Sarah Stennett and, “We wrote a 20-year business plan.” Which reveals a lot.
Opportunities were coming her way, she tells me, and she thought, “Let’s keep growing this tree. And it was just watering the tree more and more and more. And it just started to really get bigger and bigger, to the point where I didn’t want to close the doors because why wouldn’t I venture out into these things? I felt I could really handle it. There I was without a social life, but it was fine.”
Her determination to succeed has been somewhat underestimated, maybe exactly because she doesn’t just stay in one ‘pop artist’ lane. She refuses to fit into a mould where she’s known as mainly a singer, or a TV judge/presenter or business woman, where a patriarchal world would feel a lot more comfortable in its ability to tick-box and label her. The driving force behind her ambition can be attributed to coming to the UK as a refugee of war from Kosovo when a baby, with her parents and older sister (a brother was born later), and growing up in London, watching her family rebuild their lives from scratch. Her mum, who was a doctor in Kosovo, couldn’t work initially, even having to rely on Rita’s three-year-old sister to translate when they had a doctor’s appointment. Like Rita, she is determined; she’s retrained and is now back working as a psychiatrist, in particular, helping women with postpartum issues. Her dad owns a pub in Kilburn, North London.
Rita’s insatiable drive, she says, comes from a fear of going back to her life, pre-success, and carries the weight of responsibility for her family, although, “My parents never put the pressure on me; my childhood was a happy and amazing one.” The overwhelming need to achieve and protect her family comes from herself, “Some people may not know just how much of a sacrifice I’ve made just to make sure my loved ones are OK.” She concedes, “I always talk about this in my therapy sessions, how insane it is for [refugee] children that we subconsciously take this upon ourselves. We weren’t the richest of the rich, but we weren’t the poorest of the poor. There was a middle ground of confusion – where my parents could take us shopping one day, but we couldn’t pay this for school the next. I’ve always had that pressure of thinking, ‘If I don’t succeed, then will we go back to where we came from?’ I don’t know what that feeling is, because I never actually grew up in Kosovo and life before the war was meant to be good. I grew up in London. So it’s almost like fearing something that isn’t really there.”
Rita says one of the proudest moments of her life is being able to buy her parents a house. “I knew to be able [to do this] and for them not to worry about a mortgage was a job done for life for me.”
As a child growing up in London, she says, “I never fitted in. I was always a very opinionated kid and I think some kids found that uncomfortable. My response to what people were telling me was, ‘I don’t think that’s true.’ I was always asking questions. And people said, ‘Why can’t you just believe what we’re telling you?’ I’ve never wanted to be told what to believe. It’s what gave me the courage to make music and move away from a more traditional path of getting a degree, which my father really wanted me to do. I took a lot of risks because I believed in what I could do with my voice.” Instead, she attended the Sylvia Young Theatre School, whose famous alumni includes Emma Bunton, Amy Winehouse and Billie Piper.
Aged 18, she was scouted by representatives from Jay-Z’s record label, but didn’t go stratospheric until the release of Hot Right Now in 2012, which she released independently.
Rita says she’s “Always craved security”, yet likes to live her life, “As if there are no rules”. But with that free-spirited approach – like other more rebellious female artists, such as Madonna, Cher, JLo before her – she has been made to pay a price for not following an expected path; shamed for her image, her dating life, for being young and having fun, and her ambition and business savvy woefully underestimated. Does she think that going against the grain has been worth the flipside, the constant judgement and almost obsessive tabloid attention for things unrelated to her work?
“Anyone that draws outside the lines is going to get that,” she says. Rita once asked JLo for advice on coping with the constant attention on her private life rather than her work. “She just kept going, ignoring the noise.” But does Rita think women in the public get a rawer deal? “How do I think women are treated differently? Have you got all day? I’ve had it my whole career: having people judge what I wear, saying, ‘Is she too naked?’ Or, ‘Can she say things like that?’ I find it extremely misogynistic.” She always loved Madonna, “Because she knew not everyone was going to agree with her. And she just did it anyway. I’m thanking her for that, because that’s given me the ability to be more outrageous, a bit more outlandish with things: how I dress, things I might say. I’m not perfect, but I think that’s what keeps my fans entertained the most.
I’ve never drawn within the lines. I’d like to think all the mistakes I’ve made, and all the decisions I’ve made, I own up to. I don’t run away from them.” One of which being her lockdown 30th birthday party in November 2020, for which she was criticised and has apologised for. What did her mum, who works for the NHS, think, I wonder? “She was upset with me, that was the worst bit, seeing her working every day and coming home exhausted and knowing what I did, was obviously avoidable.”
Her life has changed almost unrecognisably since then, it seems, partly due to her relationship and secret marriage to her long-time friend Taika. Rita spent a lot of time abroad, recording, and also working alongside Taika who directed the video to her Praising You single – a homage to 70’s and ’80s movies, Flashdance, Fame, Desperately Seeking Susan. “I love him for the things he teaches me. It was exciting for him to experiment with some of his favourite films and just throw them into my music.” There’s a scene in the video where the choreographers are smoking and everyone’s sweating and it’s a beautiful disaster. “Me and Tai were in bed one night and we were like, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool if we did it like this? You can see the face of it, it’s not beautiful, but it’s not ugly; it’s sweaty and uncomfortable. The undertone of the video is you don’t have to be perfect, you just have to be you.”
She says she loved working with her husband because, “There’s never a dull moment. We vibe off each other. I would say how we got on so well in the beginning, before we decided to ruin it all and start dating,” she smiles. “But after five years of friendship we were like, ‘We think we're ready to take it to the next level.’ But we were such good friends, we were worried we would ruin what we had. But it was amazing. I’ve never dated someone before who I was friends with first. It’s different because the stability’s there, the framework; it’s like a construction site – it’s like the whole thing has been built now so… I’ve had my fun; now I’m excited to move into the next stage of my life. I’m happy to discover the next chapter that I haven’t done: I haven’t been married, I haven’t settled down… until now.”
Rita and Taika kept their wedding top secret, only recently confirming the rumours that they’d tied the knot and she intentionally remains elusive about exactly where and when it was, in a bid to keep some of her life private. How did he propose? “Well, honestly, there was no real getting down on one knee. It was more like, ‘I want to marry you. Let’s just do it.’ She said she felt freaked out about the thought of having a massive wedding. “Some women like to feel that real special attention that day. And everyone’s different. And for me – I think with my job, it is all… it’s very attention driven – I wanted to keep it private because my life and my career aren’t.” The wedding was planned “in two to three days, when I was out of cycle, which is what I call it when I’m not in album cycle mode. And his kids [Taika has two daughters from a previous marriage] were there and I really wanted them to be a part of it. It was either then or we had to wait for ages. I didn’t want to do it without my stepkids there. So, we just figured it out and we did it. And it was perfect,” she smiles. “My sister was there, which was amazing for me. And he had his girls there, which was amazing for him. It was a dream. My parents were on Zoom.”
She speaks exclusively with GLAMOUR about her new single.
She wore, in her own words, an “incredible” Tom Ford gown. “I’ve always wanted to have Tom Ford involved in my wedding. He’s one of my favourite designers of all time. And I’ve never forgotten a gown I’d seen from, I think, was his 2018 fashion show. It was a white, lace dress, with a full-length veil that touched the floor. And I swear to you, this is what happened – it was like out of a movie. I went to Tom Ford’s shop to see if they had any wedding dresses. And they had this one wedding dress. So bizarre. I’m not even joking; it was on my mood board. Not that I’m a crazy…” she laughs. “But it was the one dress I wanted and it was there, ready. And it fitted. It was meant to be.”
She told Ford at the time and he was ‘over the moon’ that she’d chosen him. “He’s a great friend of mine. We celebrated New Year’s together, this one just gone.” Did anyone else know you were getting married? “No, I told my friends afterwards. No one knew. No one was surprised. They were like, “I’m so happy for you. And when can we just throw a big rager?” Have you done that yet? “No. Maybe sometime this year. We haven’t even thought about it. But by the time we throw it, it’ll be old news. My friends won’t care any more.”
I’m intrigued, considering their multi-faith heritages – Rita’s father is a non-practising Muslim, her mother a Catholic, Taika describes himself as a Polynesian Jew – whether they brought religion into their wedding ceremony? “No, it was more just a contractual reading, but it was very spiritual. We just loved the fact that we were marrying one another. I was never really raised in a forced religion. My parents were really like, ‘Whatever you gravitate towards.’ And I naturally gravitated towards having a God and there being a Jesus and me following that route. That was just me. But I, again, praise my God in my own way. And so that’s the way I’m giving out my energy with my family. Whatever gets you through the day. And for me it’s nice to have that higher power that I can talk to. I’m definitely a believer in giving, sometimes, the things I can’t control to the higher power, because it really relieves my stress.” Other things that help her relax include, “Sitting at home with my partner, being boring at 9PM and watching TV shows. What’s on her Netflix? “We’re watching Beef at the moment, it’s the best. And Succession.” She’s in a WhatsApp bookclub with her friends – “all young mums”, she says. What’s she reading? “I’ve just finished Klara And The Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro. I’m about to start Tomorrow And Tomorrow And Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin.” She likes eating takeaways – isn’t a good cook, “I leave that to Taika, he makes a great steak” – and hanging out with her best friend she’s known since she was two; she’s coming over tonight, once I leave.
Finally, as our conversation winds up, I ask, has she finally found the stability she’s craved for so long? “I do feel a shift" she concedes. "Not because I feel I’m getting older. I just feel I’m more experienced.” For the first time now, she says she’s “living, not worrying. I had a moment of reality recently, where I realised all the stress and anxiety I had in my twenties – I survived it. Not being swayed or convinced or second guessing myself. It has been a new enlightening moment for me. Knowing that a lot of people may not agree with my decisions, but doing them anyway.” Madonna would be proud.
Rita Ora's 'Praising You' ft. Fatboy Slim is out now. Her album 'You & I' will be released on 14 July and is available to pre-order here.
Photographer: Rachell Smith
Digital Operator: Cameron Smith
1st Photo Assistant: Charlie Walker
2nd Photo Assistant: Kate Whelan
Stylist: Sasa Thomann
Hair: Shon Hyungsun Ju @ The Wall Group
Makeup: Marie Bruce
Nails: Michelle Humphrey @ LMC
Seamstress: Eleanor Williams
Production: Dalia Nassimi
Sound Operator: Michael Panayiotis
