Luvcat’s dark, twisted Lovebites EP gets the Pete Doherty seal of approval | Music | Entertainment

Down in the intimate basement of the Colony Room Green in central London, the setting feels almost too perfect: mirrors line the walls, picture frames preserve fragments of lives and nights gone by, and a piano sits in the corner waiting to be played. This is where Luvcat, whose real name is Sophie Haworth, has invited us to watch her perform her latest EP, Lovebites – spun out from her debut album, Vicious Delicious. After years in jazz clubs and pubs, it’s in places like these, she says, that she feels perfectly at home.

Dressed in a leopard-print dress and red-bottomed stilettos, her iconic blonde-and-white hair framing her face, she perches casually on top of the piano, a glass of wine resting beside her, as she flicks through a leather-bound notebook recounting the stories behind the four-track EP.

She is undoubtedly one of the UK’s most exciting emerging acts. Her striking aesthetic oozes both glamour and danger, and there is something deliciously theatrical about her world. But as anyone who has caught her on festival stages will know, she is far more than just a portrait of witchy-gothic aesthetic. Her haunting and captivating vocals are the real star of the show, which makes the idea that her breakout came almost accidentally surprising.

One evening while performing in a pub, she played her now-hit track, ‘He’s My Man’. At the time, however, it was not the obvious choice. “Everybody told me not to sing that one,” she says. “They were like, ‘No, sing a different one. It’s not a single.’” By morning, the performance had exploded online, racking up around four million views overnight.

Part of the song’s appeal, she thinks, comes from the fact that it is “secretly evil” and “unhinged”. “It’s from the perspective of her being obsessive, possessive, and murderous,” she explains. On first listen, it might sound romantic, but like many of her songs, under all the romance lies something far more sinister. That balance, of beauty and darkness is a marker of her music, and despite being short Lovebites brings to life those same feverish characters.

It comes as no surprise then, that poetry and literature quietly shaped her song writing. Despite confessing she is a “terrible reader”, her earliest influences included Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventure in Wonderland, and F.Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatby. She has also been drawn to the works of Spike Milligan and Dr. Suess. “I’ll write down any words that resonate with me,” she says. “Then when I sit at the piano, they all kind of fall out of my head.”

An inherent love for literature makes Pete Doherty and John Cooper Clarke the perfect collaborators for Luvcat’s EP. Storytellers in their own right, they fit seamlessly into the strange and wonderful universe she has created.

Speaking about Doherty’s contribution to the final track on the EP, ‘Electric Chair’, Luvcat laughs as she recalls touring France with him earlier this year. “He’s a true troubadour,” she says, describing how the musician would sell magazines for cash before shows and casually join her onstage mid-set. He became particularly attached to the song’s dark humour, though not without offering edits. “He said, instead of ‘just promise me you’ll pay to bury me at Père Lachaise,’ you should say, ‘just promise me you’ll pay the leccy bill’,” she says. She knew she wanted him to sing it on the EP, as he was touring for the rest of the month, he made me a voice note from his bunk on the tourbus.

John Cooper Clarke, meanwhile, appears in suitably gothic fashion. “I wanted him to play my dead husband,” Luvcat says of the punk poet, whom she persuaded onto the project after many landline calls. Appearing on the “Anniversary” track of ‘He’s My Man,’ Clarke arrived at the video shoot clutching a handwritten verse inspired by medical encyclopaedias and the sensations of poisoning, a detail perfectly fitting for the Luvcat universe.

Like many artists, there can only be a brief respite before you have to start thinking about the the next thing, and Luvcat is already preparing for what might be her boldest chapter yet. Having just signed a two-album record deal, she plans to spend the summer flying back and forth to America between festivals, building a sophomore album she describes as “lyrically ambitious”.

After playing more than a hundred shows last year, touring left little room for solitude or songwriting. “I thought, ‘Am I ever going to write a song again?'” she adds, but luckily, this wasn’t the case. Her next album, she reveals, will function as a soft concept record, beginning in London before following the emotional pull of America.

While her first record was full of references to the pubs and streets of her home city of Liverpool, her life has changed dramatically since. “I had a fridge full of champagne because I’d sold out a tour and signed a deal,” she says. “I thought, ‘I have a charmed life, and I want to document this'”.

Originally, the record was supposed to be made in France at a château studio outside Paris. But earlier this year, something changed. “Something in the wind told me to go to Los Angeles,” she says. After spending three weeks in LA in March, she found the producer she wanted to make the album with, and in perhaps the most Luvcat way imaginable, wrote him a letter asking if he would collaborate with her, leaving it behind for him to discover after she was gone.

This drama, this mischievousness – none of it, she reassures me, is an act. “It’s just me,” she says. She admits, if anything, the stories she tells in song are toned down from reality. As part of the process, she is learning where the boundaries lie. And similarly to Joni Mitchell, she believes you should “keep something of yourself”.

For now, though, listeners can expect plenty more of Luvcat’s strange, beautiful world to come – aching trumpets, murderous romance, and all.