NAIVE, THEN
Born in London and raised in
Manchester by an English father and
Russian mother, Shura first made
waves on the music scene with 2016’s
Nothing’s Real, which she’s described
as an amalgamation of “missed op-
portunities, regret and nostalgia”. The
album, which sampled old recordings
of herself and her family’s voices
throughout, has taken on the guise of
a “time capsule” for Shu.
Three years later, as the highly
anticipated Forevher drops, how does
it feel looking back on her debut?
“Whenever I’m writing, I always have
a full album in mind. That’s how I’ve
always written. [With] Nothing’s Real,
I feel like the intention that I had for
it then still stands. After I finished
Forevher, I did listen back to Noth-
ing’s Real again, just to touch base
with that version of me, and I actually
found it really moving. There’s this
naivety to it, certainly... It was the
first time I’d ever been signed, made a
record or worked with a label.”
It’s in this first record that Shu
sees a version of herself really “trying
their best”. “I’m proud and moved by
‘mini me’,” she smiles. “I can literally
hear the amount of effort and love
that went into that record. It’s almost
like looking back at pictures of your-
self when you’re a kid. It has that kind
of grumpy, teenage vibe. I feel like a
grown up making music now. When I
look back at [Nothing’s Real], that was
a kid making music.”
Has her artistic process changed
as she has, does she think? “It defi-
nitely feels like, musically, it was such
a different approach. I mean, I’m still
a perfectionist now, but in a different
way. Nothing’s Real was very to the
grid and polished and perfect, but
then still a bit shit in that way that I
really wanted it to be... like, it’s some-
one trying to make big pop songs, but
without all of the tools. I wanted it to
have that feel that it absolutely could
have been made in my bedroom and,
of course, a lot of it was.”THE LESBIAN POPE
Sophomore album Forevher is a
different beast altogether. Her so-far
released singles – the smouldering,
sun-soaked BKLYNLDN and upbeat,
tongue-in-cheek bop Religion (U Can
Lay Your Hands On Me), the video to
which sees Shura don her “lesbianPope” garbs – dropped on eager ears
earlier this summer. In both, themes
of lust, love and faith abound.
But from where did the “friendly,
neighbourhood lesbian Pope” alter
ego emerge?“When I’m writing a song, I’m
already thinking of a video to go with
it. It helps me be excited about it!
It happened with Touch [her wildly
successful 2016 single and queer
anthem] and it was the same with
Religion. [The lesbian Pope] happened
for a really ridiculous reason... I’d
been watching The Young Pope with
Jude Law and, basically, he just looked
so fucking cool. I was like, ‘I need to
dress like this all the time’.”
And the video? “Initially the idea
was that I’m a nun, and I’m garden-
ing and having this daydream where
I’m the Pope and there are lots of sexy
nuns and they’re dancing, but they
can’t touch me. I remember speaking
about it with a friend and she looked
at me and said, ‘This idea is great
but... why do you need to dream of
being the Pope? Why don’t you just be
the fucking Pope?’
“It’s an alternate universe with
a female leader surrounded by nuns
who are actually encouraged to love,
rather than it being naughty. By play-
ing around with religious imagery, I’m
having fun with the idea that, gener-
ally speaking, religion has done a lot
to fuck up attitudes towards sex and
women and sexuality. [In Christiani-
ty], the ‘perfect woman’ is a virgin and
a mother, which is just physiologically
impossible – we can’t be both.
“It’s funny that religion has so
fucked up our relationship to sex, and
yet sex for all humans is a driving
force of nature. We need sex – not eve-
ryone, of course – but it is a form of
religion, and love is a form of faith. It
drives us and it drives the way things
are. Love is much like faith, in that we
have this belief in it. We believe that
love exists even though our experi-
ence of life might tell us otherwise. It
doesn’t always work out, maybe it’s
not happily ever after – but we still
believe in it.”WATCH
Religion (U Can Lay Your Hands On Me)
tinyurl.com/DIVAshureligionKEEP THE FAITH
Growing up, Shura – a childhood
nickname that stuck, by the way –
was always interested in religion and,
though she wasn’t raised in a reli-
gious home, her dad would often read
her and her brother stories from the
Bible.“He thought they were impor-
tant. There’s so much good in those
stories, you know? They’re eternal
truths – they’re human. My dad also
made a lot of documentaries about
religion. In fact, he was the first per-
son ever to have a television interview
with a Pope, so it’s very much been a
part of my life.”
Shu tells me she very nearly
studied theology at university. “I only
didn’t because I went to an open day
where I met a lot of people who were
all there studying to become priests
and I was like, ‘Well, as an atheist
and a lesbian... where do I fit into this
space?’” she laughs. “I just felt like if I
was hanging out with a bunch of peo-
ple who wanted to become priests, I’d
be getting into a lot of heated argu-
ments.”
In one song on the album, Flyin’,
she’s overtly playing around with the
idea of love, but also the intersections
between faith and sexuality and the
“idea that some people literally hate
you because you’re gay”. She goes
on: “It’s absurd that someone might
feel that way because they’ve read a
book and interpreted it a certain way,
yet also in this book there’s a woman
who has a baby and is also a virgin –
it’s almost funny.”BOLDER, NOW
Love “as a form of faith” also plays a
huge part in her new music. Listen
to the album and you’ll hear it – the
sound is bolder, freer and more ad-
venturous than her debut. “Actually –
and it’s strange to say this when, with
Nothing’s Real, I literally used record-
ings of me as a baby in it and my dad
and mum’s voices – I somehow feel
as if there’s more of me in this record.
Nothing’s Real was very introspective,
but sometimes the most vulnerable
thing you can say to another human
being is ‘I love you’, isn’t it? Falling in
love leaves you literally standing on
the top of a mountain with a mega-
phone being like, ‘I hope this other
person doesn’t find this incredibly
cheesy’,” she laughs.“Even though
this record’s about falling in love >>>33COVER STORY | SHURA