After the ‘disappointment’ of his last album, Miguel wants to be the biggest pop star ever. But will he get there by covering Pussy Riot songs?

Miguel: ‘I wasn’t drinking, I wasn’t smoking, I wasn’t having sex. I was a really late bloomer’ Read more

Miguel is currently stripped off, right down to his pants. I’m aware there are people who would pay good money to be in the position I’m in right now, although I should point out that there’s nothing overly sexy about the scene. “Almost there!” calls out the diminutive R&B star when I interrupt what appears to be a frantic wardrobe session. Our photographer has been waiting almost an hour at this point, but getting the outfit right is important business for Miguel. He turned up wearing a baggy white jumper, after all, and so an epic transformation is clearly in the works.

Another 20 minutes pass before Miguel finally emerges, resplendent in ... um, the same baggy white jumper and a pair of brightly coloured Gucci shorts. “OK, ready,” he grins, before wandering off again to have his hair and makeup done. That turns out to be another lengthy process that doesn’t appear to make any perceptible difference to his appearance, although the devil will almost certainly be in the detail. After spending a couple of days with Miguel, I soon realise he’s a guy who thrives on perfectionism.

Earlier in the day, when we met for a morning coffee, Miguel expressed a desire to talk to me about a “taboo” subject. This turned out to be a nagging dissatisfaction with his own career so far. “You’re not supposed to say: ‘I wanted it to be better, or to perform better,’” he said. “But we all want our shit to win. So for artists to pretend they’re OK with their shit not being the best ... I mean, that’s not real.”

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Miguel’s negative appraisal of his success to date might come as a surprise to some, seeing as his last album, Wildheart, a critically acclaimed fusion of pop, soul, funk and rock, went to No 2 on the US chart and earned itself two Grammy nominations. Yet its creator was not content. He had poured everything into Wildheart – and was especially proud of the album’s underlying message about outsiderdom and self-acceptance – but when he went out to tour the album, not enough people knew the songs or connected to the deeper messages he was hoping to convey.

“Apart from in the US,” he points out. “Oh my God, there it was magic. I felt like I was really helping, really contributing. People were telling me how powerful and life-changing it was. But then we came to Europe and … ” He pauses for a moment. “Actually, here in the UK, it was amazing too, I love playing here. But when I got to the non-English speaking countries …”

Hang on, you’re basically saying that you’re disheartened because your Grammy-nominated album wasn’t making a big enough impact in Denmark? He smiles: “I’m pretty tough on myself, I guess.” To be fair on Miguel, Wildheart didn’t sell in the same numbers as his previous breakthrough album, 2012’s Kaleidoscope Dream; it had great songs but lacked a single as killer as his Sexual Healing-esque Adorn. It was this failure, Miguel says, that led to a period of self-doubt that started to worry his friends and family.

“I lost touch with my emotions,” he admits. “It was a down period. I was just … quiet. Real quiet. And also putting up a front, like I was OK with everything when I really wasn’t. I put up a wall so it was hard for my friends and family to help. I was there, but not really present. We just did small talk – yeah, everything’s good – without getting to the meat.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Signs of the times: Miguel unwinds with a missile nose cone. Photograph: Sarah Lee/The Guardian

What he really needed was to talk it through, and eventually he did. “It’s like any player of a sport, they’re like: ‘I don’t know how we just lost!’ You have to go study the tapes and work it out. So that’s what we did, so that when I’d built up the energy to do this again, I didn’t repeat the mistakes.” Miguel changed his management, built a new team around him and resolved to make a more upbeat album that nevertheless spoke to these troubled times. The title of the record, War & Leisure, sums it up: an album of party tunes laced with an unsettling undercurrent.

“You see us on the brink of nuclear war over Twitter,” he says. “Or the rise of the far right in Germany and France. So my whole mindset for the album is: what are we supposed to do caught in the middle of this? We’re at the brink of complete war and complete pleasure, at all times, every day.”

Later that day, over lunch, there’s a pretty perfect example of what Miguel means. He’s wearing the kind of ludicrous fluffy Gucci loafers that only a pop star could consider pulling off, and tucking into a salmon fillet on a bed of aubergine, when an alert on his phone distracts him. “Oh, Donald Trump, why are you such a schmuck?” he says, shaking his head. “There are a million better things to be tweeting about right now than ESPN’s ratings.” He returns to his food, and tries to shake his disquiet away by changing the subject. “I think one day I will write a children’s book about my cats,” he declares, before showing me pictures of two outrageously cute creatures that resemble living, breathing Gizmos: “This one is called Munchie,” he says with fatherly pride, “and this is Vanity.”

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The unwelcome intrusion of brutal reality into people’s previously comfortable lives is a theme that pops up on the album, never more so than on the video to Told You So – previewed for me on his manager’s laptop – where Miguel’s dance routine is rudely interrupted from time to time by ballistic missiles. On first listen the song appears to be your standard amorous R&B track (“I am gonna show you the world and all that you desire”), but Miguel says he loves the fact it has layers of meaning: “It’s really about the times,” he says. You’ve made the world’s first Trump sex jam?He spits out a mouthful of coffee at this: “Now that would be really multi-layered.”

Elsewhere, War & Leisure is dotted with references to darker things: 9/11, Columbine, the building of walls. “It’s a call to action,” he says. “My generation are the adults now. We hold the responsibility to shape the world we’re now living in for our children. It’s crazy but I feel like I’m a fucking parent.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Best foot forward: Miguel performs at the 2016 Wireless Festival in London’s Finsbury Park. Photograph: Ollie Millington/Redferns

Miguel’s Instagram hints at these changing priorities: mixed in with fashion shoots and the occasional scantily clad lady, are political statements that reference the current turbulence in the States: “Fuck yo statue,” reads a sign on one, taken from the events in Charlottesville. Has he been surprised to see just how extreme the racial tensions simmering under the surface in the US were? “You would be stupid to live in the United States and think or believe otherwise,” he says. “It’s just that now there’s ways to prove it.”

Is there a comfort in having everything out in the open? “That’s how I feel,” he nods. “You have to hit the bottom, you have to feel the pain and take it in ... that’s often how we learn. It’s painful to watch police being let off for heinous crimes that would be punished if they were a different race. But we know now that we can’t continue to deal with it in the way that we had been dealing with it. We need to figure out a different route.”

What would he say if he met Donald Trump? “He wouldn’t invite me to meet him,” he says, a little forlornly. “I mean, who am I? A C-list celebrity.” You’re being down on yourself again, I say. “You know what I mean, though. Why would we be in the same room? I don’t have the answers. There’s someone with much better answers than I do.”

Instead, Miguel has been learning to protest in more subtle ways. Wearing a jauntily angled policeman’s hat in the artwork for slinky new single Sky Walker, for instance. “That’s kind of a punk thing, reminds me of some Clash shit,” he says, while admitting it’s also a comment on police racism: “I rarely do anything for no reason.” During a recent appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Miguel wore a shirt with the pro-DACA [Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals] statement “Keep the kids. Deport the racist,” emblazoned on it. He also covered Pussy Riot’s Make America Great Again, a song he says is so simple as to be perfect. “And I just love Nadya. To be an active activist to the point of being incarcerated for two years? That just makes you love her more.”

Refreshing as Miguel’s more outre tastes are, you can’t help but worry if they might ultimately thwart him from reaching the kind of global success he craves. His new songs are undoubtedly great (the Marvin Gaye-stylings of Pineapple Skies, in particular, feels like a conscious attempt to please the Adorn faithful and re-establish Miguel’s reputation as a reliable pop hitmaker) but the slightly wishy-washy political message that comes with them seems caught between two places: potentially alienating a mainstream crowd, yet appearing a bit vague compared to the truly politicised likes of Solange and Kendrick. At a show the following night such conflicts are on full show – especially in some meandering spoken-word sections about needing to come together and love each other.

Miguel’s music, too, seems caught in a bit of an identity crisis: for all his talk of moving on from Wildheart, he seems to have doubled down on that album’s rockier leanings. The result is a show where all the soulful edges of Miguel’s music are bludgeoned to death by cheesy rock backing, right down to the hair-metal guitar solos and thundering drums. While admiring Miguel’s broad tastes, and restless creative urges, you start to wonder if all this is the answer to connecting with that crowd in Denmark. Maybe they don’t want an obscure Pussy Riot cover, I suggest … He nods: “Maybe they don’t.”

The next day, Miguel invites me to Radio 1’s Live Lounge to watch him cover Jorja Smith’s On My Mind. His band are tight and soulful – a much more appealing take on his sound compared to the rock antics of his live show – and Miguel seems relaxed and happy. I wonder where all his self-criticism and competitive instincts come from, and he says it’s his father; he was an athlete who played several sports and instilled a desire to win in his son. What was Miguel’s sport? “Soccer,” he says. “I was really good, had my parents not split up I could have played through school and college.” I get the feeling that wherever Miguel ended up playing, he would have always been on the hunt for a better team. “Right?” he says. Then he changes his mind. “No, no, no … actually I would have wanted to build my own squad wherever I was. And be like, we’re going to win here. I would definitely have wanted to win.”

This streak was on display when I first met Miguel in 2013. He was sparky and good company but frustrated that he hadn’t been nominated for a Grammy yet (something he swiftly fixed by winning one for Adorn). He also cheekily boasted about his breakthrough Kaleidoscope Dream being a better album than Frank Ocean’s lauded Channel Orange (for what it’s worth, I agree). The Ocean rivalry was something Miguel returned to in later interviews but, looking back, he says he’s embarrassed by it. “Egos are a crazy thing,” he says. “The version of myself I was two, three, four years ago, even last week, is different to who I am today. That’s not who I am. And I’m a big fan of his music and his creativity; we need more people out there doing that.”

He says he has no envy of Ocean’s career, because they want different things. I ask him what he wants that’s different and he pauses. “I want it all,” he decides after a while. “I want to reach the world. To be charismatic, to reach a standard of performance where I connect with people on a real level from a big stage. I don’t know how you really do that, but I wanna do it. And I can’t blame myself for being like that; it’s in my programming.”

War & Leisure is out later this year