At 16, she was a global pop star – then she disappeared. What happened to Gabriella Cilmi?

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When 18-year-old Gabriella Cilmi saw herself on the cover of FHM – wearing a push-up bra, suspenders and a come-hither look – she burst into tears. The singer-songwriter, who had already turned down an offer to pose for the men’s magazine at 16, had instead dreamt of being interviewed by Rolling Stone.

Hailing from the Melbourne suburb of Dandenong, Cilmi was discovered at 10, signed at 13 and had a worldwide hit at 16 with Sweet About Me. The song topped the charts in Australia, the Netherlands and Norway while cracking the top 10 in 11 other countries, including the UK. This was followed by a platinum-certified album, Lessons to Be Learned, and six ARIA Awards in 2008.

The pressure to repeat this success was immense – and the music industry offered no shortage of advice. Cilmi was discouraged from playing instruments “because that’s not what girls do”. Her parents were told, “Your daughter may be special now, but she won’t be once she’s older.” Some people ordered her to smile more while others criticised her for smiling too much. At a gig in New York, she was called “chubby”.

Not long after, she was informed that her sophomore album, Ten, would be an electro-dance record. (Never mind that she preferred blues, rock and soul, having idolised Janis Joplin, Suzi Quatro and Nina Simone.) This necessitated a makeover, and she was urged to do the FHM pictorial.

“I was told, ‘You’re 18 now, you’re a woman, you’re sexy and you’re confident’,” says Cilmi via Zoom from her home in England, where she lives with her partner and musical collaborator, DM Arthur. “But that couldn’t have been further from the truth. It was a smoke-and-mirrors version of a powerful woman.”

On the cover of Ten, Cilmi is reclining in an orange bra, her hair artfully tousled.

“I initially set out to do something very different,” she explains. “Then all of a sudden, I’m doing choreography even though I’ve got two left feet, and I’m portraying this kind of sexy robot persona, which didn’t feel like me. Although there are some great songs on that record – and I loved how the drag community embraced it – I was really depressed and lost. I was trying to please other people around me; I was afraid that if I didn’t go along with it, I wouldn’t have a career any more.”

In 2013, Cilmi made her first independent album, The Sting. Although she continued creating music, she did not record another album until the soon-to-be-released Pure Love.

“I think I was running away from my name,” says the 34-year-old. “I’d take meetings with people who had preconceived notions of who I am, and they had one box they thought I fit in.”

She had a moment of clarity when she saw a video of herself, aged 12, belting out Jumpin’ Jack Flash at the Festa Della Madonna, a Catholic celebration.

“I was singing my little heart out, stomping my feet, just giving it my all,” she says. It made a big impression on her partner, too. When the video ended, he turned to Cilmi and encouraged her to channel this passion into her new album. “Just do it,” he told her. “You have this in you.”

At that moment, everything fell into place.

“All of a sudden, I had a vision for this record,” Cilmi says. “I was feeling lost and that was a moment where I felt like I was found again. As cheesy as it sounds, it was like I’d gotten to the truth of what my purpose was. It had been so tainted – and it felt like it had been manipulated by other people around me to the point where I didn’t know who I was – and this just brought me back to myself.”

As a young girl, Cilmi spoke her parents’ Italian dialects at home while learning standard Italian at school. She was heavily involved in Italian community events, where singing was central to the festivities. It was a happy childhood but when she was eight, her mother’s cancer diagnosis turned her world upside down.

“I was hyper-aware of life and death because my mum went through chemo,” she says. “Thankfully, she’s been in remission for many years but I think that’s where my OCD [obsessive-compulsive disorder] came from. I believed that if I put all my shoes in a straight line, she would be well. Everything I did was about making sure the people around me didn’t die. It was magical thinking … I think that’s where a lot of my compulsions stem from.”

While still prone to “overthinking and ruminating”, Cilmi has shed some of the unhelpful beliefs that industry executives inculcated in her.

“As young women, we’re taught to be nice and not rock the boat too much,” she says. “A good piece of advice I read was, ‘Work towards being respected, not liked’. That stuck with me.”

Pure Love is not just Cilmi’s best album; it’s one of the best albums of the year. Making the most of her warm, smoky contralto, it blends rock, soul and pop, drawing inspiration from artists such as Aretha Franklin, Carole King and The Rolling Stones.

“I was really inspired by the music of the ’60s and ’70s,” she says. “I watched videos of Joe Cocker with Mad Dogs & Englishmen doing these raw, ramshackle performances. They were perfectly imperfect, with all their blood, sweat and tears.”

Indeed, Cocker’s cover of The Beatles’ With a Little Help From My Friends, at Woodstock in 1969, ranks among her favourite live performances. “That crossroads of the ’60s and ’70s is my favourite era of music, where nothing had gone too disco or kitsch,” she says.

Pure Love, produced by Pete Miles, was recorded entirely on tape.

“I wanted the warmth of the music that was made at the Muscle Shoals studio in Alabama, where everyone from Aretha Franklin to The Rolling Stones made a record,” Cilmi says. “The musicians [on Pure Love] had chord charts and lyrics, but sometimes they didn’t even hear the demos. With my minimal guitar skills, I’d just play them the songs acoustically and the music was built around that in a really spontaneous way. I wanted to get musicians in a room together and just capture the moment.

“I was used to being told, ‘You need to do that again, it has to be perfect’, but this record is the opposite of that. My friend told me it sounds like how crunchy, homemade bread tastes.”

Pure Love is out on October 9. Gabriella Cilmi performs in Melbourne on October 15, Sydney on October 17, Avoca Beach on October 18, Moorabbin on October 22, Lara on October 23 and Werribee on October 24.