By her own estimation, Dua Lipa is suffering from a two-day hangover, and a recently sprained finger.

The latter is due to a mishap during the shoot she’s just done at 3 Mills Studios in East London, the result of a flailing arm that flailed into another (“I’ve been told it’s because the bone has grazed the bone, or something like that. It hurts”), the former the result of winning two Brit Awards – British Female Solo Artist and Breakthrough Act – and the subsequent partying that went on until the sun came up.

“Maybe around six?” she guesses at her eventual bedtime.

That was Wednesday, this is Friday, and the hangover remains. She is in black leisurewear beneath the kind of red furry coat that makes her look like a cross between the Honey Monster and a stop sign; her long nails, painted blue, look like they belong in a sci-fi film.

“Is this a time to be healthy?” she ponders, before answering her own question. “Probably not.”

The driver, who had been expecting to take her directly to the airport – next stop, the Australian leg of a tour that’s already lasted two years, via Abu Dhabi – is given instructions for a burger drive-by: “Patty & Bun, please.”

“In Shoreditch?” he asks.

“Yes.”

Route successfully re-routed, she shouts to her father (“Bye, Dad!"), one Dugi Lipa, who by his own estimation is the proudest father in the country right now, before signing off with her trademark kiss, one that’s spelt out as much as spoken: “Mwah.”

And with that, we’re off.

Back to the night before the night before, which really started the night before that. She invited all her friends over for a sleepover, she says, and so naturally got no sleep at all.

“Yup, couldn’t sleep. It was crazy. I was actually having heart palpitations, like from nerves. I can’t remember the last time that happened.”

She’d been nominated for five awards in total, including Best Video, Album and Single, which was the most for any female artist in Brits history and confirmed the 22-year-old as both the hottest act in the country right now – a thrilling cross between the confessional wit of Lily Allen and the dance-floor bangers of Rihanna – and something of her own internet ecosystem.

Just a few days before, she learned that “New Rules” – her breakout mega-hit – had reached one billion hits on YouTube (making her the youngest female solo artist to have achieved the feat) when she was in the car on the way to the Brits rehearsals and noticed that YouTube had been kind enough to advertise the fact on all four sides of Old Street Roundabout.

In December, Spotify announced the most-streamed artists of last year and guess who came in ahead of the likes of Taylor Swift, Beyoncé and Ariana Grande as the most popular female artist of 2017?

Her GQ photoshoot, meanwhile, came the day after appearing on Saturday Night Live – the definition of American acceptance – and she counts the likes Chris Martin and Mark Ronson as both collaborators and fans.

The sky-high expectation, she says, came with its own high-class problem: the spectre of being nominated for five awards then failing to win a single one.

Hence the failure to sleep, the heart palpitations and the afterparty photograph where she’s upending a bottle of Patrón tequila directly into her mouth.

“Oh no...” she says when I inform her of this particular shot. “Yeah...” she adds, remembering. “Actually... Yeah. That was crazy. At one point I had three drinks in my hand. Then I was doing shots with someone on the table next to me.”

She smiles and shrugs. The shrug says, I just won two Brits, and so?

“I didn’t really care who saw me. I was like, it’s my night, you know?”

The next day, she says, was simply spent on the sofa, with Deliveroo and an avalanche of congratulatory texts.

“It was the day to turn your phone off,” she says. Did she actually do that? “Well, no.”

She even got a congratulatory text from someone who was the subject of one of the songs ("An old flame," she says, referring to model and chef Isaac Carew) but not, she adds, from her most recent ex, Paul Klein, who was the subject of another.

“No, not from my last ex-boyfriend, because he’s boring. It was probably best that he didn’t text, to be honest. I don’t want to hear from him anyway.”

Which is why Dua Lipa is such a phenomenon and why every ex of hers should be worried.

Jacket by Christian Benner, £1,433. christianbenner custom.com. Shorts by Cherry Vintage, £135. cherryvintage.com. Shoes by Giuseppe Zanotti, £965. giuseppezanotti.com. Hoop earrings by Diaboli Kill, £414. diabolikill.com. Lock earring by Maria Tash, £726. venusbymariatash.com. Rings, Dua’s own © Mariano Vivanco

Dua Lipa has a grand total of ten tattoos, but each one is small, pencil thin, situated at odds and ends of her body, sentimental reminders and notes rather than elaborate artworks.

The first one, on her elbow, reads “Sunny Hill”, which is the neighbourhood where her parents grew up in Kosovo before they moved to London and also the name of the foundation she has since started there. (“My dad’s also helping start a festival, called the Sunny Hill Festival, which I’m going to perform at.”)

Some are about her family. She first got an ”R” and a “G” for her younger siblings, Rina and Gjin, on her left wrist, then added “mum + dad” on her right elbow. (“So now I have the whole family.”)

Some are budget masterpieces. Both thumbs feature dancing people from the works of graffiti artist Keith Haring. (“My dancing thumbs!” she wrote on Instagram. “I can’t afford an original Keith Haring piece just yet. I may as well just keep it on me!”)

And some, in truth, don’t mean an awful lot. There’s the starburst tattoo, on her right middle finger, that she got to immortalise her friend’s dead cat, Daisy; the word “angel” on her shoulder, because she wanted an angel on her shoulder; and, on her left forearm, an inked message which simply reads, “This means nothing.” (“It means nothing,” she clarifies).

Some are autobiographical. A palm tree on her left elbow, for instance, signifies the first month she spent writing songs in LA; an all-seeing eye on her inside right ankle was done after she moved into her current flat. (“For good luck, so nothing jinxes it.”)

For each one, she says, she’ll wait between six months to a year to get the next and only then if inspiration has struck. The most recent, done two weeks ago, is a delicately drawn piece of barbed wire in the shape of a heart on her left arm. This one, she says, is the most significant.

“I got that because I always wear my heart on my sleeve and I’m not going to change that. I’m never going to change myself, but it’s in barbed wire because I should protect my heart no matter what, I think.”

Lipa’s first genuine hit – before the smash that was the billion-clicked “New Rules” – was “Hotter Than Hell”, released in May 2016, the third single from her self-titled album.

“I went through a tough break-up with someone who made me feel that I wasn’t good enough,” she says. “And I went to the studio so heartbroken about the situation, feeling like, you know, I want to write a sad song. Like, today is the day I want to write a sad song.”

And so, she started, but soon became bored.

“And it was like, I’m done with feeling sorry for myself, so I want to flip the script and make it seem like he can’t get enough of me and that I was hotter than hell, even though I didn’t feel that way.”

The result – a thumpingly infectious floor-filler with Lady Gaga-esque hooks – set the tone. Leave the woe-is-me ballads to Adele and Sam Smith, Lipa had worked out a substrata: the screw-you love song that wasn’t remotely lovesick, music that wore its heart on its sleeve, but with a barbed-wire edge.

“Hotter Than Hell” became an instant hit, peaking at No5 in the UK singles chart.

“Fans came up to me and they would say, ‘My God, this made me feel really empowered.’ And I thought, wow, that is really interesting that something that felt so therapeutic to write is also helping someone else and maybe this is the kind of direction I want to go in.”

Spoiler: it was. Her next single, the club-ready going-out anthem “Blow Your Mind (Mwah)”, honed the formula and featured lyrics such as, “Tell me I’m too crazy / You can’t tame me / You can’t tame me” and “If you don’t like the way I talk, then why am I on your mind? / If you don’t like the way I rock, then finish your glass of wine.”

It’s the lovelorn fuck-you that you could dance to and one of the few songs in pop that tells you to drink up. It became her first song to chart in the US.

She even gave this unusual combo – songs that, quite confusingly, made you feel a bit sad and yet want to dance at the same time – a name. She christened her new genre “dance crying”. Just don’t look it up on Spotify yet.

The ultimate blessing came when her management asked who she’d love to work with. She said Chris Martin, so Martin was duly sent a few of her songs and before she knew it she found herself in his Malibu studio with the Coldplay frontman manically dancing around to her music.

“Yes. During ‘New Rules’ and [latest single] ‘IDGAF’, he would get up and dance. It was so surreal, Chris Martin dancing to my music. I remember saying to him, ‘You’ve written one of my favourite songs ever, the Nelly Furtado song ‘All Good Things (Must Come To An End)’, and he was like, ‘God, I forgot I wrote that.’” They ended up writing the ballad “Homesick”, which Martin also features on.

Her second album, which she’s working on at the moment, will also, she says, be a dance-weeper.

“Yes, it’s very much dance crying. It is a pop album that you’re going to be able to dance to, but a lot of the songs are sad. They’re about heartbreak and they’re about going through some emotional manipulation.” She ponders this. “It kind of sucks that that’s the thing that really triggers my creativity, but happy things don’t seem to do it for me.”

It will also be less scattered, more focused on a single concept: “Now I feel it’s a proper story. It’s all relevant to one idea.”

In all, after several delays, her debut album took two-and-a-half years, as she flatly refused to release it until she’d completely honed her sound.

She even, her manager Ben Mawson tells me, turned down several surefire smashes written by other songwriters as she didn’t feel they suited her style.

“I shouldn’t tell you what the songs were,” says Mawson. “But there were two or three huge songs that ended up being massive No1s [for other female singers]. She was asked to feature on them and she didn’t want to, because she didn’t like the song. It just wasn’t her.”

Which side was he on?

“I was kind of on her side, but it was a dilemma. Certainly some of the people at the label thought she should do it, but she was steadfast. She said, ‘I don’t want to do it. It’s not how I want to be successful.’ And those songs ended up being monster No1s. I think one was one of the biggest songs of the year.”

Ironically, the only song on the album that she didn’t either write or cowrite was “New Rules”. But, unlike the songs she refused, this one – on the off-chance you’re not one of the billion who have clicked on it – is a stomping call to female empowerment via the medium of not accepting your ex’s booty call (sample wisdom: “If you’re under him, you ain’t getting over him”).

It was a perfect match. It was also written by women – Emily Warren and Caroline Ailin – and they only wanted Lipa to sing it. “They said, ‘We’re not playing it to anyone. We’re only playing it to you.’”

Still, Lipa’s insistence on only doing material that’s personal to her has had its downsides, not least the time she wrote “No Goodbyes”, about a doomed relationship, while she was still in said doomed relationship.

“Yeah... That was really hard. Everything was going crazy. I was travelling so much and I kind of felt like I was letting someone down and not really allowing them to live their life, waiting for me. But I also used to share all my music with that person, you know? So when I would write songs, I would play them to him.”

Wait, what? Didn’t he realise that song was about their relationship?

“Well, no. The thing was, when I played him songs and I didn’t want to let him know they were about him, I would say, ‘Well, this song is about this person who is dealing with this crazy thing, so I just decided to base it on their stories and isn’t it interesting?’”

And that actually worked?

“Well, obviously he found out. But he’s totally OK with it.”

Despite Lipa’s work being so confessional, she says the inherent sexism when it comes to female musicians means people assume it’s anything but.

“For a female artist, it takes a lot more to be taken seriously if you’re not sat down at a piano or with a guitar, you know? For a male artist, people instantly assume they write their own music, but for women, they assume it’s all manufactured.”

When I ask her about the #MeToo movement and its effect on the music industry, she says, “Personally, I’m lucky in that I haven’t really had any sexual harassment in any way. But I think [Me Too] is so important. You know, even from school, growing up with kiss chase or whatever, it’s been ingrained in our heads that boys will be boys and it’s harmless fun and no big deal and to brush things off. Like catcalling. To some it might not seem a lot, but it affects your mood, people get embarrassed about the way they dress. For lots of females, be it actresses, singers, models, no matter what it is, it’s not being able to have the right to dress and wear how and what you want and be taken seriously.”

And hence, back to Lipa’s music: “When one person speaks up, it instantly gives another person courage to speak and it’s the same with music. When you do speak about your own experiences, it’s also the domino effect.”

And so, the final tattoo, which sums up the fact it was worth the two-and-a-half year wait for something that was distinctly hers. It got the most prominent spot, there on her right hand, the one you can hardly miss.

“It’s a reminder,” she says, “of what those two-and-a-half years were like, trying to hone everything and making sure you stick to it until everything is perfect.”

The tattoo is one word: Patience.

Jacket, £5,747. Top, £700. Both by Versace, £7,285. versace.com. Boots by Philipp Plein, £5,835. plein.com. Earrings by Diaboli Kill, £414. diabolikill.com © Mariano Vivanco

Rewind three days: Dua Lipa is lying on her back, on stage, in a packed O2 Arena, waiting for her act to start. She is lying on a triangle that is about to lower her down to the stage. She remembers this part vividly as being the most out-of-body, because while she could hear the crowd, she couldn’t actually see them.

So, while listening to Foo Fighters winning Best International Group, she had a little moment, staring at the ceiling, where all this felt both unreal and unrealistic. How did she end up here?

“I was four metres up, lying down on the triangle thing, being like, Oh my God, you’re just about to perform at the Brits. It just felt so crazy.”

Earlier in the day, I’d watched as she went through her dress rehearsal. She hadn’t so much danced across the stage as strode and skipped, the opposite of the aggressively sexual Rihanna or the cutesy provocation of Ariana Grande, who both seemingly put on a show for men. Lipa, in the best possible way, gives every impression of someone dancing around their living room for herself.

Lipa grew up in North West London with a father who had been a rock musician back in Kosovo, and a mother, Anesa, who had liked his music. They had left for London before Lipa was born.

Conversation at the dinner table was always about music and her father would always play his music to Anesa before anyone else. Lipa would also play her music to Anesa and, later, for her boyfriends. “[Her mother] would always be honest,” Lipa remembers.

Lipa was six, she says, when she wrote her first song, a tribute to her mother, and she still remembers the words:

When I grow up, can I wear your shoes? When I grow up, can I use your lipstick? When I grow up, can I be as pretty as you?

When I later speak to her father on the phone, he says he remembers the song well – they all laugh about it and sing it to Lipa at family gatherings – but is adamant she was even younger.

“Yes, but she was tiny. I don’t want to exaggerate this, but I actually think she was three or four. She was really tiny.”

If the cliché of young singers thrust into the spotlight is the pushy parents shoving them there as a result of their own stunted ambition, then Lipa’s story – like so much about her – subverts expectations.

When she was eleven, due to a job offer for her father “to do what I love in a place I love”, the family moved back to Kosovo. She doesn’t remember this as traumatic, but she found settling in hard – “I can speak the language, but I didn’t understand the slang” – and struggled with the education system.

Yet it was there that she discovered new music. While she loved the likes of Nelly Furtado, Pink and Destiny’s Child in London, everyone in Kosovo listened to hip hop.

She remembers going to concerts for Method Man and 50 Cent.

“That’s another reason the first album took so long. I had all these different influences.”

Before moving away from Britain, she’d already taken weekend classes at the famed Sylvia Young Theatre School and so, at 15, made a modest proposal to her parents: she would move back to London on her own, complete her GCSEs and A-Levels, attend Sylvia Young again and become a singer. Remarkably, they agreed.

Isn’t that... a bit nuts?

"Yeah. It was kind of crazy, but I’ve always been quite confident, I think.” Did her parents take much convincing? “Um, surprisingly not.”

Wasn’t there, I later ask her father, any concern?

“Well, she had all of her friends [in London] and she would stay up late at night just talking to them and what not. Kosovo wasn’t really the place for her to be. But she hasn’t just developed this self-assurance now. She was a very self-assured young lady.”

Also, he adds laughing, “She doesn’t give you many options.”

And so, Lipa moved to London and lived with a family friend who was doing her master’s and was almost never at home.

Lipa cooked – simple things such as pasta and grilled salmon – and, eventually, cleaned.

“I was pretty OK until it came to the point where I was like, ahh, I’ve got to, like, tidy up after myself. I’ve got to, like, clean. I’ve got to, like, wash my clothes. And I was 15.”

She also, improbably, had a run-in with the law, after throwing bath foam out of her window and having it land on a passing constable.

“I nearly got arrested! It’s assaulting a police officer, apparently. I was just like, Oh God, how am I going to tell them I live on my own? My mum is going to have the biggest freak-out. This is what happens when you leave your kids alone!”

Thankfully, the officer in question didn’t press charges.

Mostly, she either invited friends for sleepovers or FaceTimed her parents, who visited often. She also started doing cover versions (of Christina Aguilera, Joss Stone and others) and releasing them on YouTube, highlighting what was, even then, a distinctive, husky voice.

The very thing that had once denied her entry to the school choir (“I was heartbroken. I cried that day” – she was eight) was now her selling point.

Several years, part-time jobs, a Sylvia Young graduation and vastly increased social-media following later, she eventually found her way to the offices of Mawson at the age of 17.

Lipa’s now-manager, who also looks after Lana Del Rey, was initially impressed with her “presence, personality and beautiful voice”, but most of all her drive.

“That’s really what stood out for me. I want to look in their eyes and see they really want it. Apart from her talents, one of her defining factors is ambition.”

Specifically, he recalls the artist Lipa said she wanted to be like: “I remember Madonna came up. She didn’t quite say directly, ‘I want to be as big as Madonna’, but Madonna was the reference point. That was a joy to our ears.”

Jacket by Christian Benner, £1,433. christianbennercustom.com. Earrings by Diaboli Kill, £414. diabolikill.com. Earring by Maria Tash, £726. venusbymariatash.com. Rings, Dua’s own © Mariano Vivanco

Talk to anyone in Lipa’s circle – managers, publicists, producers – and they will all say one thing: she tours relentlessly.

Her current tour will see her, by August, perform 92 times in venues spanning the world, and which itself follows two smaller tours last year and the year before that. Partly, this is the reality of a streaming-dominated industry where the big money no longer comes from record sales, but it’s also the result of her relentless ambition.

“I am literally on tour for the rest of my life,” she says, smiling. “I’ve been on tour for two years and I’ve got another year to go. But I love it so much. Nothing beats it.”

She is the only celebrity I’ve ever met who claims to even enjoy doing promo. She refused, she says, to ever have a Plan B because she didn’t want the safety of something to fall back on.

Mawson says he does worry. “My concern is around her getting too exhausted, because she doesn’t know how to say no to work.”

In this, it helps she’s a relentless planner. When I first meet her in New York after the GQ shoot, she spells out her next day, which she’s already written down and time-allocated: lie in until 10am, workout, breakfast, shower, face mask, warm-ups, voice ready at 2pm...

On her days off, back home, free time is similarly bent to her will: “Like allocating time for a food shop. Or if I do it online, what time will I expect the delivery? How long I would then spend at home?”

Friends, she says, get two-hour slots: “Two hours on one, two on another...”

When she lived on her own at 15, she would even diarise times for cooking and cleaning. “It’s not something that’s developed because of my career!” she says. “I’ve always been like this.”

Back in the car, as we wind our way through East London towards the airport for Lipa’s day-long journey to Australia, she considers what her long-haul flight has in store. It is, as you might imagine, tightly scheduled.

As soon as she’s on the plane, she will change her watch to the destination time and, rather than eat when she is given food, will eat in sync with where she’s going to and “force myself to sleep” in sync with it too, forever focusing on what’s next.

Finally, there is one question I’ve been holding back, because it seems so stupid and obviously answerable. But our time is running out, so I ask it anyway.

What is it like being Dua Lipa right now? The person in the middle of the whirlwind?

“Amazing,” she says without missing a beat. “It feels crazy and it’s exciting and it’s amazing, everything that’s happening. Sometimes I do need to stop and pinch myself and be like, OK, this is happening and now I’m popping on a flight. It is crazy, but I love it and I’m riding a wave. It’s everything I ever dreamed of and sometimes, when I feel tired and I want an extra hour in bed, I’m like, this is everything I ever wanted. And so I get up.”

Head to the GQ Vero channel to see more photos of Dua Lipa from this shoot and to find out more about our cover star, including exclusive, unseen quotes covering everything from where her favourite place in the world is and what one of her first jobs in a London restaurant was like, to the TV show she's currently watching and her biggest inspirations. Follow us on Vero for exclusive music content and commentary, all the latest music lifestyle news and insider access into the GQ world, from behind-the-scenes insight to recommendations from our Editors and high-profile talent.

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