Tanita Tikaram's new album is linked to her 1988 debut
Singer Tanita Tikaram has announced a sequel to her breakthrough debut album after almost four decades, with songs influenced by Brexit and the murder of George Floyd in the US.
The new album, LIAR (Love Isn't a Right), is a follow-up to her first record, Ancient Heart.
Tikaram released Ancient Heart in 1988 when she was 18. It contained the hit singles Good Tradition and Twist in My Sobriety.
The German-born singer describes the new album as a way to "understand" the world we live in today while also being about love, identity, and trying to find a place in the world as an "older woman".
Speaking to the PA news agency, Tikaram said: "When I recorded Ancient Heart, I was 18 years old, and I had the perspective of a teenager who was slightly at odds with the world around her [and] was still trying to find the place in the world.
"I'm now in a world which (sic) is very changed at the age of 55 and there are maybe political things happening which (sic) are rooted in the events of my adolescence. And I'm trying to understand what's happening, what direction we're going now, and to find a poetic language to really understand quite frightening political developments, and that's how I see the albums linked.
"I felt that this was the right time to make this kind of album and it's still a struggle because I don't naturally have a political voice. I don't think I'm very articulate. I'm not really somebody who's ever had to do that before, but I feel that there are so many things happening that if you don't stand up and say, 'I don't really think this is right, I'm not comfortable with this', who else is going to stand up for you?
"The amount of lying that goes on now and is unchallenged from people in public office... and I felt that [during] the Brexit campaign. I was just horrified by how a media was unable to challenge a lot of untruths and also the way that there's a kind of excitement about terrible things happening but that sort of feeds a news cycle that's 24 hours. But the news doesn't actually analyse very deeply what's behind these political figures.
"It just likes the drama, and that's really worrying to me."
The singer also described a new song on the album that was written after the murder of George Floyd, a black man who was killed in 2020 in Minneapolis by Derek Chauvin, a white police officer who knelt on his neck for more than nine minutes.
George Floyd's death sparked a wave of worldwide protests against police violence and racism.
She said: "One of the songs is called I See a Morning, and I was really horrified by the George Floyd murder, and I think the states' brutality and how deeply racism [is] in America. It's still tearing that country apart.
"I guess that was a song about trying to just see that things don't seem to change fast enough. And how do you keep hopeful when there is so little change?"
The new album, due to be released in October, comes ahead of Tikaram's return to the London stage after eight years to perform new music as well as revisit her back catalogue at the EFG London Jazz Festival in November.
The singer last performed in London in 2017 at the Barbican and took on the acoustic stage at Glastonbury in 2024.
She added: "I see increasingly our complacency is being tested. And I feel that I've been very complacent, that things are happening which (sic) I need to react to in terms of who is allowed to have rights, that there are certain groups of people who are deserving of rights and those who are not deserving of rights.
"All of these questions really haunt me now and I felt that with this album, I needed to find a way to respond to things that I find very, very disturbing in our political discourse."
Tikaram was nominated for the British Female award at the 1989 Brits but lost out to the Scottish singer-songwriter, Annie Lennox.
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