MAIL ON SUNDAY
Date: May 1999
Article by Lester Middlehurst
Gone are the days when singer-songwriter Beverley Craven needed angst and adversity to fuel her lyrics. Now she finds life as a wife and mother of three a far richer source of inspiration, as she tells Lester Middlehurst.
It is no accident that the title of Beverley Craven's new album - her first for six years - is Mixed Emotions. 'I wanted a title that reflected how I felt about my career at the moment,' she says. 'I'm a 35-year-old mother-of-three. I seem to live in two worlds. One is where I am the most important person in my children's lives; and then there's this other side of my life, where I'm writing songs and producing my own album, which I don't want to let go of because I enjoy it too much. 'But there's so much guilt involved. I feel guilty if I spend too much time doing what I want to do, instead of devoting all my time to my three daughters. I've really struggled to get the balance right so that I can live with myself. And that's why the album is called Mixed Emotions.'
Nine years ago, Beverley was a struggling singer-songwriter, living in a squat in north London and on the dole. Then her debut album went platinum and her debut single, Promise Me, reached number three in the charts and she became a household name. At the time she was resolutely single, but a chance meeting with fellow musician Colin Campsie - now her husband - turned her life upside down.
Her record company was hassling her to bring out a second album but then she fell pregnant with her daughter Mollie. 'After Mollie was born, I felt I couldn't handle the career as well. Having a child was the hardest thing I had ever done. I was touring and being sick all the time. When I was voted best newcomer at the 1992 Brit Awards, I was eight-and-a-half-months pregnant and I had to appear on stage wearing my husband's carpet slippers because I'd filled up with water from head to toe. At the time, I really resented being pregnant. Mollie wasn't planned. I didn't intend to start a family until a few years later but, in hindsight, I think it's good that this baby came along and shocked me.'
Immediately after Mollie's birth, Beverley was plunged into recording sessions for her second aIbum, Love Scenes. 'The record company was keen to keep up the momentum of my first hit but I just wasn't ready to bring out another album. I was breast-feeding at the time and my heart wasn't in it.
'I think that's why it didn't do particularly well. And that's why I've left it another six years before bringing out this album. I thought to myself: "I can't even do motherhood properly, so how can I do anything else." I was having to make such huge adjustments in my life that I felt something had to go and that something had to be the music.'
So she devoted herself to being a full-time mother to Mollie, who is now seven, and her siblings - three-and-a-half-year-old Brenna and two-year-old Connie. She continued, haphazardly, writing songs but found herself in a creative gulf. 'I hit a huge dry patch. I felt I had nothing left to say. There I was, married to a wonderful man, with three beautiful daughters and I felt so happy.
'I felt that to be a successful songwriter you had to be unhappy. Where was the angst to fuel the lyrics for new songs? When I wrote the first album, I was struggling and terribly lonely because I'd had several failed relationships. I was worried that if the hunger and desperation weren't there any more and I was too happy, I wouldn't have anything left to write about.
'But recently I've hit a creative spurt and I'm finding a lot more things to write about. I used to write about loneliness and failed relationships but now I can write about evolving relationships and the problems you encounter being a wife and a mother.'
Beverley felt she had enough material for a new album, which she decided to produce herself in the attic of her north London home. The result - Mixed Emotions - will be released on the Epic label on May 31.
'I'm really happy with it, but it's not as important as my first album was. It's not the only thing in my life any more.' But, for many years, having a hit album was all that Beverley dreamed of. She was determined to prove to everyone, particularly her father, that she wasn't throwing her life away on an unrealistic ambition.
The second of four children, she had a conventional, middle-class upbringing. For the first two years of her life she lived in Sri Lanka, where her father worked for Kodak, before the family moved back to England.
Until she was 16 she was a swimmer at national level, with Olympic potential. 'Swimming was the only thing I thought about until I was 16, when boys started to loom on the horizon. I thought to myself, "Why am I going to bed at 9pm and getting up at 4.45am to go training, when all my friends are going to discos and sleeping in?" So I made up for lost time.'
Her second love was music. Encouraged by her mother, who was a classical violinist and pianist before she got married and had children, Beverley studied classical piano from the age of seven. By the time she left home when she was 18, she had decided that she was going to be a singer-songwriter, having been influenced by the likes of Eiton John and Kate Bush. But, unable to make the break as a musician, she had to live off the dole, much to her father's annoyance.
'He certainly didn't approve of me living on the dole. It was terribly degrading, but I quite liked living at the bottom of the heap. When you've gone as low as you can, the only way is up. And it made me even more determined to be successful to prove to people like my father, who wanted me to make something better of myself, that I had made the right decision.'
Beverley's relationship with her father wasn't helped by the fact that he left her mother and his family for another woman. By the time she was 18, her parents were divorced. "Their divorce did affect my attitude towards relationships and marriage. Marriage, to me, meant hurt. So I learned to enjoy my own isolation and to look after number one.'
Then, when she was 27 and her career was taking off, she met Colin Campsie at a backstage party at a Tears For Fears concert. 'Apparently, he had his eye on me the moment he saw me and from that moment he very definitely pursued me. I had apparently been giving him "back off" signs, which just made him more determined. It wasn't intentional on my part, it was just that I'd signed a record and I wasn't interested in getting involved with anybody.'
Soon they were living together. By the time they married, in 1994, Mollie was three-and-a-half and Beverley was nine weeks pregnant with Brenna. 'We probably wouldn't have married if we hadn't got kids but we felt it would be more stable for the children if we were married. I
already felt secure with Colin, so being married to him didn't change the way I felt about him. But I do think married life is good. I've learned a lot about myself, about how I tick and what's required of me as a wife and mother.
'Basically, I'm quite a selfish person and there's the rub: being a mum and being selfish are like oil and water so it's been a hell of a struggle.' Beverley is now preparing for a concert tour which begins next month. Sitting in the kitchen of her home, it is clear that a part of her doesn't want to leave this cosy environment. She continually apologises for not behaving like a pop star and admits she feels a bit of a fraud because she is no longer motivated by angst. But she wouldn't swap places with the ambitious girl in the dole queue for any amount of money.
'If I thought I had to be miserable for the rest of my life in order to write good music, I would regard that as too high a price to pay. I want success but, more importantly, I want to be the right parent for my girls.'
