Dua Lipa: The 60 Minutes Interview
Plenty of teenagers want to become pop stars, but few convince their parents to let them pack their bags and move to another country to try and make it big. That's what Dua Lipa did when she was just 15 years old. She'd taken some singing lessons but didn't know anything about the business of making music. Turns out she's a quick study. At 29, she's now one of the top female recording artists in the world.
Take a look at what happened in June when she headlined Britain's biggest music festival, Glastonbury. She was singing one of the first songs she released 9 years ago. Back then, hardly anyone knew who Dua Lipa was, but at Glastonbury, 100,000 people came to see her. They sang along to her every word.
The story will continue in a moment.
“GL as loud as you can! Come on! Oh my God! One more time! L, I love you guys! You're making my dreams come [Music] true! It's unbelievable seeing that many people sing back at you. I couldn't believe that it was happening in that moment. You know, I dreamt about being on that stage my whole life. I thought about it. I'd wished it. I envisioned it so many [Music] times. I had written down, I want to headline Glastonbury on the pyramid stage on the Friday night, being very specific about the Friday night so I could party afterwards.”
“Wait a minute, so even in your dream it was due Friday night so you could stay at Glastonbury Saturday, Sunday and go out dancing and be in the crowds?”
“Absolutely! Absolutely! You know, you got to be specific about your dreams.”
Dua Lipa isn't afraid to admit she enjoys a good [Music] time, and that's what her music is all about. The songs are fun and flirtatious. Come on, let's get this kiss!
She sings of boy breakups and girl power, late nights and dark clubs. It is pure pop. Dua's got no problem with that. “You're always met with some kind of pushback as a female artist if you're not, like, with a guitar or with a piano. Just like, oh, she can't sing. Oh, it's all processed. Oh, it's whatever. I just think there's just like a stigma around pop music. But that was the music which you wanted to do from the beginning?”
“’Cause I loved it! That's the music that makes me get up and dance.”
Don't let the laid-back demeanor fool you; Dua Lipa has worked hard and come a long way to make all this look easy. “Come on, dance with me!”
Dua, whose name means love in Albanian, was born in London. Her parents had moved there from Kosovo after the war in Bosnia broke out in 1992. She started singing lessons at 9, but her family returned to Kosovo when she was 11. Four years later, she decided to go back to Britain and try and become a pop star.
“That was the plan.”
“That was the plan, always. The pitch to your parents was in order to go to a British university, I need to go to, yes, high school."
“Any that was the initial pitch?”
Her father, Dukagjin Lipa, is now her manager. “Did you buy that pitch?”
“Of course you did! But she's underplaying the fact that she was always very mature, even at 15. And yeah, it is a little bit crazy saying like, oh, a 15-year-old persuaded you to let her go, but her maturity and our relationship was… you knew she could handle it.”
“Of course! It sounds like you were a very confident 15-year-old.”
“Yeah, I think more confident than I am now for sure!”
“I’m Dua, I’m 15 years old and I'm gonna be singing 'Super Duper Love' by Jo Stone in London.”
She immediately started recording herself singing covers of her favorite artists and putting the videos on [Applause] [Music] YouTube. This is one of the first ones she made in 2011. She was living with a family friend but was pretty much on her own. She skipped school so often she flunked out.
“Basically, I got expelled and I remember calling my parents and they're like, okay, well you did this. Find yourself a school or you're going to come back to Kosovo.”
She did find another high school and graduated, but decided college could wait. Her cover songs online had gotten some notice. In just three years after leaving Kosovo, 18-year-old Dua Lipa got a record deal with Warner Brothers.
“I walked in with a dream of I want to sing, I want to perform, I want to write, but I had no idea of what comes with it or what other things I have to do or even what goes into the promotion of a [Music] record.”
While working on her first album, she began releasing singles and performing wherever she [Music] could. “We were doing really small shows where the stage was like a step above the floor.”
“So how many people like, for your first performances?”
“About 10.”
“Wow! And how many were like friends and family?”
“Well, none! But they all got offered a drink to come and watch! So that was how we got them to come and watch.”
It's like 'This Is Spinal Tap'.
“That all changed in 2017 when her first album came out, and she made this music video in a hotel in Miami for a song called 'New Rules'. It became her first major hit in America. The album would earn Dua Lipa two Grammys, one of them for Best New Artist.”
When she sang 'New Rules' at the Brit Awards on live TV in 2018, the reviews were positive, but some viewers' comments online weren't. One in particular went viral. “The comment was from somebody that said, I love her lack of energy. Go girl, give us nothing.”
“Yeah, you remember the word?”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah! It just spread like wildfire that I had no stage presence or I couldn't perform. So I was like, all right, well I'm just going to prove to you that I can perform and I can dance and I can do all these things.”
Dua Lipa may have wanted to prove her doubters wrong, but when her second album, called 'Future Nostalgia', was ready to be released, the timing could not have been worse.
“My second album came out in March 2020, at the very beginning of the pandemic. Was there any talk of delaying?”
“Yeah, there was! But because I had spent so long working on it, I was like, this album has to come out!”
With much of the world locked down, it wasn't clear if anyone would want to listen to dance songs or how she could even promote the album. “My whole idea was that this is a record that's supposed to be played in the clubs. I envision myself in the club in the producing of it. The whole thing is like, it's in the club!”
“How are you good?”
“How are you?”
Three days after the album's release, she gamely appeared on 'The Late Late Show with James Corden'. Her home had flooded and she was renting a small studio apartment.
“Start now, oh my God! And I was having really a bad headache! I got the way I want to get the heartache!”
“Everyone coming together in their living rooms and their kitchens to like make this happen. It's [Music] crazy!”
“I love that you were in some random apartment.”
“Yeah! So you can see from there how close I am to like the cupboards above the oven and the like stovetop!”
“This is you kicking off the release globally of your album?”
“Globally of my album, woo!”
The new album was an extraordinary success, commercially and critically. Billboard, Rolling Stone, and others called it one of the best of the year, and Dua Lipa was dubbed the quarantine queen.
“It worked out in a weird way.”
“Yeah, it did! It didn't end up being, you know, the nightclub experience, but it ended up being the kitchen dance parties and the soundtrack to people's workouts at home to kind of keep them sane during that time. It also gave people the fantasy of being out in… out.”
“I hope so!”
In May, she released her third album called 'Radical Optimism' and is now rehearsing for a year-long tour in 28 countries.
“I'm still like getting my timing while I'm rehearsing. Those first beginning notes, the I don't want to, I don't want to… they're really fast, so I just have to like practice to make sure that I don't slow the song down and miss my [Music] timing.”
In just nine years of releasing music, Dua Lipa has reached a level of success even she never [Music] imagined. Her songs have been streamed by fans more than 45 billion times.
“I saw some writers who said that in your songs they don't have a sense of who you are. You're not pouring out your innermost fears and desires and wants.”
“It's something that I just naturally hold back. Some people are just so ruthless with their own private life that they decide to put it all out in a song because they know that it's going to attract people's attention. And for me, it was always important to make music that people really loved, not because I was putting someone out on blast or not because I'm doing it for the clickbait at maybe someone else's expense.”
Dua Lipa's music may not be controversial, but some statements she's made over the past few years about Israel have been. She's called the current war in Gaza genocide, and in 2021 a well-known rabbi took out this full-page ad in the New York Times criticizing her.
“There was a lot of words kind of thrown at me, things that I don't believe represent who I am or what I believe in at all. Like I've always only ever wanted peace. Really! It's devastating what's happening over there. There's bombs happening between both Israel and Palestine, and children are dying and families are being separated. And it's just devastating to sit back and see it happen.”
“Some people saying what you said was anti-Semitic?”
“Yeah, yeah! And it's just not! I think it was very unfairly treated by the Times.”
“Did that experience make you reticent to be outspoken again?”
“Uh, no, because it hasn't stopped me from talking about things that I believe in.”
Whatever Dua Lipa's political or personal opinions may be, for now, you won't find them in her [Applause] music. She wants that to be something that will help lift you up, get you out, and maybe just maybe take a spin on the dance floor. [Music]