FKA Twigs on ‘Feeling Dark’ and Fighting Fame: ‘I’m Not a Pop Star’

One day in September, FKA Twigs looked at her phone to see an infinitely scrolling torrent of vicious tweets. “It was all this crazy, racist abuse out of nowhere,” says the 26-year-old British singer-producer-dancer, who was on set at a former juvenile prison at the time, shooting a music video for her single “Video Girl.” “But if you’re an artist, you have to use everything to your advantage, even the pain.”

Many of the hate messages had to do with Twigs’ relationship with actor Robert Pattinson; others came from garden-variety trolls and bigots. That day at the video shoot, she made a concise statement over Twitter: “I am genuinely shocked and disgusted at the amount of racism that has been infecting my account the past week. Racism is unacceptable in the real world and it’s unacceptable online.” Then she got back to work. “It was amazing,” she says now. “I was so disturbed, and that comes through in the video. It was almost like the world handing me a weird favor: a slap with one hand, then a kiss on the cheek afterwards.”

It’s the morning after Twigs’ national television debut – a must-see Tonight Show performance of “Two Weeks,” from her excellent debut album, LP1 – and she’s having breakfast at a posh downtown New York hotel. The performance involved some tricky choreography with an air sculpture made of silk scarves, all of which could have easily gotten tangled – a risk that she relished. “There were 12 fans blowing in my face, and I had jewelry on, and six-inch stiletto heels,” she says. “But I enjoy challenges. I want people to see what’s inside my head, rather than just looking at me.”

Twigs, whose offstage name is Tahliah Barnett, grew up in rural Gloucestershire, a four-hour drive from London. “It was boring and it was beautiful,” she says. “You’re running in fields, you’re outside, you’re imaginative – but there’s also nothing to do, and when you get to be a teenager, sometimes you kind of lose touch with nature, like I did. You become so trapped in yourself.”

For a few years in her teens, she got her mother to drive her into London for dance classes. At 17, Twigs moved there on her own, working three or four day jobs at a time. “It was like hell, but when you’re young, you can do it somehow,” she says. At night, she’d go out: “I didn’t really have any friends. If I wanted to go to a rave, I’d go by myself. And I wasn’t so street savvy. But I’m an only child – if you want to get something done, you’ve just got to do it.”

All the while, Twigs was working on music – she says she’s written a song every day since age 16 – and trying to find professional work in the arts. By her early twenties, she was appearing as a background dancer in music videos, first for local rappers like Lethal Bizzle, later for major artists including Ed Sheeran and Jessie J. “As more time goes on, I realize how much I hated it,” she says. “If I didn’t connect with it creatively, sometimes it would be a bit like, ‘Ugh, why am I doing this?’ Like a tiny cog in a wheel. But at the time I was very grateful – I’d do a music video and make £200 from it. It would have taken me a week and a half to make that doing four jobs.”