Anoushka Lucas has released a new album, but a few years ago she had decided to give up on her music career. After spending most of her twenties chasing a record deal and investing £18,000 into her first album Dark Soul, which earned only £83, she felt depressed and heartbroken. "I was 31, I was really tired and really poor... I stopped gigging, I didn't see my band for three or four years, I was like, I'm an actor now."
From Theatre to Stardom
Lucas jokes she is the "only person in theatre in it to make money." After doing odd writing jobs for theatre in her early twenties, a casting director encouraged her to try acting at age 27. "The rest is history... quite consciously I was like, you can't keep chasing this thing that doesn't want you when there's the other thing, acting, that actually does."
Her early roles included Mary Magdalene in Jesus Christ Superstar, a young queer woman in Chiaroscuro, and Princess Katherine opposite Kit Harington in Henry V. Her breakthrough came as Laurey in Daniel Fish's Oklahoma! at the Young Vic and West End, earning her an Olivier nomination. "I went into Oklahoma! with enormous imposter syndrome, it was my first time leading, and I felt so ill-equipped to deliver that, but my old, determined, high-achieving self was like, 'We're going to figure this out,'" she says.
Early Life and Music Beginnings
Growing up in a two-bedroom council flat in Hammersmith, Lucas was a "scholarship kid" at a London lycée before studying Russian and Italian at Oxford. From age seven, the piano was a source of comfort. "The people-to-room ratio was bad," she says, "but as soon as I started playing the piano, it felt like I had limitless space and time." She wrote her first song at 14 and started gigging at 17, even during Oxford years. "I was really hubristic as a young person. I was like, well, people say I'm good, I love doing it, it will take me two to three years, and then I'll be on Jools Holland." After graduating in 2009, the music industry felt "confusing." In a meeting with a record label, they compared her to Lianne La Havas, saying "there is already a brown girl who sings about love and is from London." Lucas felt competitive with other women at gigs. "I'd think I have to be better than them. It seems so sad to me now."
Finding Her Voice Through Elephant
Lucas's semi-autobiographical play Elephant premiered at the Bush in 2022, commissioned from a short piece written in response to the murder of George Floyd. Initially thinking she'd write a song, "what came out for me that summer was so much grief over having spent, at that point, 32 years denying the effects of racism on my family and my life, and so much confusion and shame..." The piece, part song, part speech, got 35,000 hits in 24 hours. Elephant took two years to write. "I knew I wanted to say something about the intersection between class and race, and I knew I wanted to write about how social mobility operates differently for people of colour." The main character Lylah is a singer-songwriter in search of a record deal. "[Performing] it was really cathartic but also the scariest thing I've ever done." The reaction was everything she hoped for. "I'd spent 30 years trying not to talk about race and pretending that I was the same as other people, and then, when I did, it made me feel less alone than I'd ever been before."
The New Album: Make Believe
Writing Elephant reawakened Lucas's love of music. She hadn't performed as Anoushka the singer for years, but continued writing songs, especially during the West End run of Oklahoma! when she "wasn't always at [her] best mentally." "I started to view writing music as a diary-keeping exercise. I'd set myself songwriting tasks to pull myself out of whatever I was in... at a certain point, I was churning one out a day." Some of those songs appear on Make Believe, featuring songs written between 2018 and 2023. "The theme that runs through it is that I made terrible romantic choices for probably a decade of my life... I found myself in this repeated pattern where I was only attracted to emotionally unavailable people." The album's 11 songs explore loss, grief, and yearning "but for things that weren't actually real." "My sisters have started calling it a funeral album for my heterosexuality," she laughs. Unlike Dark Soul, which involved Grammy-nominated producers, with Make Believe her main aim has been "to be the boss." She hired her old band and made every creative decision herself. "It has just been an absolute joy from start to finish."
What's Next
Lucas is writing a new play about sex, the patriarchy, and female bodies, and working on the score for a new musical. "My big dream is to write a Disney score, that would be amazing," she says. "I write fewer songs now than I did when I was 15 because I'm in a lot less angst. But I still need songwriting to process what's going on." Make Believe is out now.
