Leeds Festival headliner Lewis Capaldi: ‘I feel closer to people who listen to my music after Netflix documentary'

At just 26, he’s a Grammy nominee and a Brit Award-winner, has released two popular and acclaimed albums and, in 2020, it was revealed that his track Someone You Loved was not only the bestselling single of 2019, but also the longest-running top 10 UK song of all time by a British artist.

His second studio album, Broken By Desire To Be Heavenly Sent, featuring hit single Forget Me, arrived on May 19 and singles like Wish You The Best are already steadily climbing the charts. But speak to the Glaswegian musician and there is refreshingly not a hint of an ego present.

“It forced me again to address a lot of things within my life and within myself that I’m addressing and I’m still working out,” he says over the phone of the Netflix documentary which charts his career to-date. Even when the documentary came out, I didn’t expect it to be as big of a thing because I thought I’m just a singer. I’m not a (Justin) Bieber or a Coldplay or an Ed Sheeran, I don’t feel like there’s a vested interest in my day to day life... So when people reacted to it the way they did it was incredible.”

The documentary has, he muses, helped him feel closer to his fans. He explains: “I almost feel closer to people that listen to my music now because you’ve shared something with them. It feels like ‘Okay you’ve seen like a side of me that up until that point, I was intentionally keeping away, family and all the rest of it’.”

“The pool of people in the world who are going to make a documentary about their mental health is so small,” he adds. “Don’t look to celebrities for your kinship in your struggles with mental health, it’s the people around you that going to understand what you’re going through more than anything else. That’s what I found, rather selfishly I guess, what was essentially an extremely expensive therapy session in making the documentary. I am not special at all in my suffering and that’s a very comforting thing.”

Broken By Desire To Be Heavenly Sent was, for the most part, written in his parents’ shed during lockdown.

“It was the only thing that I could do really was sit in and write, so that’s why a lot of the stories come from a very similar place. I probably would never have written about my mental health, having not been in that situation where you ruminate for so long and there’s nothing to do. That’s when you start to actually address some things because you’re forced to.”

Broken By Desire To Be Heavenly Sent is out now. The singer is also touring, heading to Australia and New Zealand in July, with August dates in the diary for Reading and Leeds festival back on home soil.