 and spending time at home with her husband, the Oscar-winning film director Taika Waititi. On my screen, Ora – dressed in a canary-coloured cap and shirt – is a blur of yellow. While she talks, she moves, flitting around a spacious kitchen, pausing to wash her hands – 'I've been cutting up my onions' – then darting into a huge lounge where she flops on to a sofa scattered with cushions. As introductions go, it's all-action. 'That's just me as a human,' she shrugs. 'I don't stop.' Ora has been on the go for 11 years now, barely out of the public eye since she scored a trio of consecutive UK number ones with her first three singles in 2012. Yet, since her breakthrough, she has released just two albums and 24 singles (racking up 13 UK top 10 hits along the way); she has played a fairly meagre 130 live shows in over a decade. It didn't help that a lawsuit with her former label Roc Nation (owned by Jay-Z) effectively meant she was unable to release music between 2015 and the end of 2016 – but that doesn't entirely explain her relatively sparse musical output. None of this is to say that she hasn't kept busy. Ora is the very definition of a modern pop star – a '360-degree artist', as she calls herself – with her fingers in a lot of pies. As well as The Voice , her TV career has seen her presenting America's Next Top Model, judging on The X Factor and The Masked Singer and voicing a cartoon bear in a Kung Fu Panda spin-off series for Netflix. She has also appeared in 11 films, taki){kind=link}
Ahead of her most intimate album yet, the pop star on fleeing war-torn Kosovo, not being ‘perfect’ and the troubling costs of stardom
“You don’t really know what being famous is until you are famous,” says Rita Ora. “Everyone gets told the stories in the movies: the incredible idolatry, all the money and attention and the beauty and the clothes and the diamonds and the glamour. That’s the dream of fame – but the reality is very different.”
The 32-year-old Kosovan-British star is on a video call from the other side of the world, where she has been filming The Voice Australia (the TV singing show on which she serves as a coach) and spending time at home with her husband, the Oscar-winning film director Taika Waititi. On my screen, Ora – dressed in a canary-coloured cap and shirt – is a blur of yellow. While she talks, she moves, flitting around a spacious kitchen, pausing to wash her hands – “I’ve been cutting up my onions” – then darting into a huge lounge where she flops on to a sofa scattered with cushions. As introductions go, it’s all-action. “That’s just me as a human,” she shrugs. “I don’t stop.”
Ora has been on the go for 11 years now, barely out of the public eye since she scored a trio of consecutive UK number ones with her first three singles in 2012. Yet, since her breakthrough, she has released just two albums and 24 singles (racking up 13 UK top 10 hits along the way); she has played a fairly meagre 130 live shows in over a decade. It didn’t help that a lawsuit with her former label Roc Nation (owned by Jay-Z) effectively meant she was unable to release music between 2015 and the end of 2016 – but that doesn’t entirely explain her relatively sparse musical output.
None of this is to say that she hasn’t kept busy. Ora is the very definition of a modern pop star – a “360-degree artist”, as she calls herself – with her fingers in a lot of pies. As well as The Voice, her TV career has seen her presenting America’s Next Top Model, judging on The X Factor and The Masked Singer and voicing a cartoon bear in a Kung Fu Panda spin-off series for Netflix.