Rita Ora is happy to be a party girl: ‘I never thought it was something to be ashamed of’

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, in between filming The Voice (she serves as a coach on both the UK and Australian versions) and spending time at home with her husband, the Oscar-winning film director Taika Waititi. On 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 says with a shrug. “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 hits with her first three singles in 2012. Yet, since her breakthrough, she has released just two albums and 24 singles; 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 American rapper Jay-Z, effectively meant she was unable to release music between December 2015 and the end of 2016 – but that doesn’t entirely explain her relatively sparse musical output.

“You have Instagram, TikTok, and it’s up to you how much you share. But if you’re not connected, people are like, ‘Who do you think you are?’”

RITA ORA

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, taking a recurring part in the erotic Fifty Shades franchise and starring roles opposite Michael Caine in 2021’s Twist and the late Carrie Fisher in Wonderwell, released this month. (“She was a rock star,” says Ora, when I ask about Fisher. “So cool.”)

Ora has also lent her name to countless commercial brands – striking endorsement deals with Coca-Cola, Calvin Klein, Donna Karan and Marks & Spencer, among others – as well as launching her own ranges of leisurewear, tequila and luxury bedding. Yet, she insists, “music is in everything I do; music is the dream”. The rest, by implication, is just what a girl has to do to stay on top in an era when fans “definitely expect more” of their favourite stars. “If it’s not coming from you, they’ll just get it elsewhere.”

In our age of social media saturation, she says, “the mystery is gone. You don’t see massive groups of people crying when a famous person gets into a car, like back in the days when you would see footage of the Beatles getting off a plane. Now, people can see what you’re doing all the time. You have Instagram, TikTok, and it’s up to you how much you share. But if you’re not connected, people are like, ‘Who do you think you are?’ I choose to be open with my social media, but I miss the idea of mystery.”

Ora’s face has appeared on countless magazine covers and in innumerable paparazzi shots; her name has been a fixture of gossip columns speculating on her romances with Bruno Mars, Drake, Calvin Harris, A$AP Rocky, Chris Brown and other famous exes.

She’s no stranger to controversy, most notably when she was caught breaking the UK’s lockdown rules to throw a 30th birthday bash in London in November 2020. She apologised quickly and apparently sincerely, noting that “people were making huge sacrifices at the time and I let them down. And that hurts.” She sounded particularly ashamed at having disappointed her mother, a psychiatrist. “She was upset with me. That was the worst bit.”

Lockdown is, thankfully, a distant memory and Ora doesn’t want to revisit it now. “I’ve said everything I need to say,” she insists, then adds, with tart humour, “You should ask Boris Johnson about that”. Ora herself has already moved on: five years since her previous album, 2018’s Phoenix, she has finally released a follow-up, You & I. And this time, it’s personal.

The new album covers a vast musical terrain, from the cracked disco of Don’t Think Twice and the dark electro of You Only Love Me, to the uplifting gospel house of Praising You, the galloping country-inflected singalong Shape of Me, epic power ballad Look at Me Now and the acutely vulnerable pop of Girl in the Mirror – each track reflecting a different aspect of Ora’s life. “This has been my most intimate, creative, artistic, self-discovery record,” she says. “The timing was right. I wanted to tell my story.”

Ora credits her marriage to Waititi, a New Zealander 15 years her senior, for giving her the confidence to get more involved in songwriting. “I wanted to tell a story of finding love, but it went deeper than that, because to find love, you have to find who you are, what makes you happy,” she says. “You’re really focusing on your emotions instead of just throwing them under the rug, which is what I usually do.”

The couple married in a small ceremony in London in August last year. The morning after, Ora was back in the studio, with a raging hangover, writing the album’s standout title track. “I had a session booked with a producer, Cirkut, and I didn’t want to cancel,” she says. “I told him, ‘I’m a bit slow as I got married yesterday.’ So we wrote a wedding song. The fact my brain was
a bit foggy worked in my favour. There was no judgment. I was in the moment.”

“My dad was a huge fan of big, anthemic, classic records. Growing up in a pub, you know, that’s what you do: sing along and throw up a pint of beer.”

RITA ORA

The result is a slow-building anthem that nods to a host of classic love songs, including Sweet Caroline, Wonderful World, Everlasting Love, Eternal Flame and Stand by Me. “Basically,” says Ora, “it’s our wedding playlist.”

Her father ran a pub (he now owns three), where Ora says she used to sing these songs as a teenager. “My dad was a huge fan of big, anthemic, classic records. Growing up in a pub, you know, that’s what you do: sing along and throw up a pint of beer. It was embodied in me then to make big, hooky, anthemic songs.”

Ora remains very close to her parents. “It was love and resilience in our household,” she says, “about being kind, respectful and working hard.” And she is proud of her heritage. Born Rita Sahatçiu in Pristina, Yugoslavia (now Kosovo) in 1990, she was brought to the UK as a refugee the following year, living four to a room in cramped council housing in west London.

Her Muslim father was a teacher who reinvented himself as a pub landlord, working double shifts to support his three children, while her mother waitressed and studied to become a psychiatrist, surviving two brushes with breast cancer along the way.

“My mum used to say, ‘You’re one of me, you’ve got my blood in your veins,’ ” recalls Ora. “It’s a very eastern European Albanian mentality: whatever happens, get back up, get on with it. Keep going and keep thriving.”

Ora attended a Catholic school and later the Sylvia Young Theatre School in central London. “Coming from a war-torn country, it was incredible to get this chance to be a singer and have my dreams come true. I was taken in, welcomed, accepted. It was beautiful.”

Long before the lockdown scandal, Ora had, perhaps unfairly, picked up a reputation for being a “party girl” – a label she is reluctant to see as an insult.

“In my mind, a party girl is just somebody you have a good time with. It doesn’t have to be in a club or over drinks; it could be anywhere – a spa, book club, playing board games. I was always that girl in my circle of friends, the one who made sure people were entertained and having a good time. And I enjoyed it. I never thought it was something to be ashamed of.”

One song, That Girl, on her new album addresses the concept head-on. “When I became a pop star, I was in my 20s and living the dream. Now I’m in my 30s and more mature but I don’t want people to think that girl is dead. She’s definitely more controlled. But I like to have fun; I’m still that girl. You just have to pick your moments.”

As anyone who has seen her on TV knows, Ora is an engaging, energetic, upbeat personality, effervescent and spontaneous, perhaps sometimes to her detriment. But she dismisses any suggestion all her career diversions and headline-grabbing antics have been part of a strategy to remain in the public eye.

“Everything I’ve done has definitely not been intentional. I’m honest, which is why my fans have stood by me. I think people find a connection to me, being a middle-class, hard-working individual who grew up in a [new] country and just wanted to be heard. With that come trials, errors, successes, failures. I never said I was perfect.”

Her biggest problem, she suggests, is being a workaholic. And how does she deal with that, I ask, before immediately regretting it. “I work,” she says, looking at me askance, then cackling with laughter. “Literally, that’s what I do.”

You & I (BMG) is out now.

The Telegraph, UK

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