“A big regret”: Jessie Ware’s missed opportunity to support Prince
This may sound strange, but there’s an argument to be made that Jessie Ware is one of the great success stories of our time.
Again, a strong statement considering that there are too many pop stars who can comfortably sell out eight nights at Wembley Stadium working at the moment, but hear me out here. The Clapham native may not be one of the biggest names going, but she doesn’t need to be. Instead, she’s an icon on entirely her own terms who made a genuine comeback at a time when that’s a harder thing to do than ever before.
Ware came to prominence off the back of the ludicrously named ‘sophisti-pop’ movement that also gave the world Katy B and Ellie Goulding. After a few hits like 2012’s ‘Wildest Moments’ and 2014’s platinum certified ‘Say You Love Me’, there was a decent chance that Ware could have fallen behind the pack. Especially after the late 2010s gave rise to a generation of pop artists as daring as they were successful, like FKA Twigs and Charli XCX. However, Ware had two tricks up her sleeve, the first coming from an unlikely source.
First, she started the podcast Table Manners with her mother, Lennie, in 2017. After building up a groundswell of support with her charming show, she unleashed the real main event. Her 2018 album, What’s Your Pleasure, and her pivot from a tasteful pop chanteuse to a full-on disco diva. The record was a sensation, a critical and commercial smash hit that did two remarkable things. First, it secured her status as an icon of British pop, and also put her in the rarified company of Robyn and Hot Chip as pop institutions who didn’t need pop hits to be relevant and respected.
It might sound a little cynical to say, but the way I’d describe both these moves is savvy. Which sounds like a dirty word, but really isn’t. While we’d like to think of pop music as an unabashed art form filled with people making music for the joy and fulfilment of it, it’s not. Being strategic and wise about your moves is all part of the game, and with those two moves, Ware showed just how canny she was. This would all mean precisely nothing if the music wasn’t absolutely magical as well, of course, but it’s always worth bearing in mind.
Jessie Ware’s missed opportunity
Especially the company Jessie Ware kept in her career shows that she was taught how to manoeuvre an industry as dangerous as pop music very well. It’s often mentioned that she was classmates with stars like Florence Welch and Felix White of The Maccabees, yet the one who made the biggest mark on her was Jack Peñate. The shuffling troubador took Ware out on her first tour as one of his backing singers, and she described the experience as “really good training”.
Over the course of her career, she made a note of collaborating with as many people as she could, working with everyone from Sampha and Ed Sheeran to Nicki Minaj. With a networking resume like that, one can only imagine that it would have gone into overdrive at the thought of working with one of the biggest pop stars to have ever lived, but life is full of missed opportunities, and this, unfortunately, had to be one of them. At least it was for a good reason, as she explained to NME in 2023.
When asked about reports that she was meant to open for Prince earlier in her career, Jessie Ware said, “I was supposed to be opening for him at a Birmingham gig. I knew he liked me because he used to do these livestreams as a DJ, and he started playing ‘Wildest Moments’. I was like, ‘Wow, Prince knows who I am!’, it was the greatest compliment in the world.”
She does explain why it fell through, saying, “I never got to meet him because I annoyingly had to go to Greece to do a wedding recce! Look, my husband is semi-worth it, but honestly, it’s a big regret.”
Considering so much of her resurgence comes from work that could have come from ‘His Royal Badness’ himself, it must sting that she never got to meet the diminutive legend himself. However, she’s busy making her own, so fair play to her!
