In a perfect world, nobody would ever hear a Griff song. “I hate the idea of playing music to people,” says the 23-year-old, curled up in pink patterned socks on a banquette in a west London members club, diamante-festooned crocs abandoned under the table. “I’ve never been in love with the idea of writing songs for other people to hear.”
Unfortunately, we don’t live in a perfect world, which is why one Saturday in June, Griff – AKA the Hertfordshire-born Sarah Griffiths – found herself supporting Taylor Swift at Wembley stadium, playing to a crowd of 89,000. “Horrendously nervous” for even her own smaller headline gigs, she employed the coping mechanism of “trying not to think about it too much” – a strategy hobbled by her phone. “I almost felt like I was getting married. The amount of people that were texting me going: ‘Are you OK?’ and ‘Good luck for your big day!’ I’m like: all these texts are making me more nervous!”
It was worth it in the end, of course, not least because Swift paused her own set to pay tribute to Griff’s brilliance. “This girl, she is so creative on every single level,” said the superstar, like a teacher rhapsodising about her best student to the rest of the class. (On TikTok, Griff has split-screened the footage with her own teary reaction.) It was surreal, but no surprise. Not merely because Griff is clearly exceptionally talented – a Frankenstein’s monster of zeitgeisty pop, she fuses Swift’s ruthless hooks with Billie Eilish’s edgy production, Olivia Rodrigo’s doll-faced drollness, Lorde’s thoughtful lyricism and Grimes’ DIY self-sufficiency – but also because Swift has been singing Griff’s praises for years on Instagram. She “loved” last year’s coolly minimalist, cleverly earwormy Vertigo and called her prismatic 2021 single Shade of Yellow “excellent”. The pair met backstage at that year’s Brit awards, where Griff was named rising star; owing to the pandemic, her flawless performance at the ceremony was only her second-ever gig.
The fledgling pop star can trace her entire career back to the 34-year-old Swift’s influence. Although her dad got her into soul and R&B as a child, it was listening to Swift’s second album Fearless that made songwriting feel accessible. “It’s a lot easier to play Love Story than it is to play Sir Duke by Stevie Wonder,” she says.
Just as Griff’s aversion to performing live somehow resulted in her playing the biggest tour in musical history, her entirely private approach to songwriting ended up landing her a record deal during her A-levels. If this dichotomy is starting to sound slightly disingenuous, the fact that Griff – who in person is both soft-spoken and soothingly self-assured – kept schtum about this development at least proves she’s no attention seeker. The whole thing was “very much sign the record deal, get back in to write an economics essay”, she says; she never explained to her teachers why she hadn’t written her university application. She “thinks” she informed her best friend Rose, but only in purely incidental terms. “I was just like: ‘I’m not coming in this afternoon because I’m signing a deal’, but we never spoke about it; it was just like: by the way.”
At this point, Griff was used to leading a double life. Born to Christian parents – her Chinese mother came to the UK as a refugee, her dad was the son of Windrush-generation parents (her moniker comes from her mum’s nickname for him) – Griff began attending youth nights at a London church as a teenager, partly because she was so desperate to escape her bucolic village of Kings Langley. (“It’s just pubs, old people and grass,” she says.) The church was Hillsong – an Australian megachurch known for its contemporary worship music, and more recently a string of sexual misconduct scandals in its US chapter. She met a producer through friends of the church who became her manager (he still is). On weekends, Griff would visit contacts she’d made: “I’d jump on the train and go sit in a [different] producer’s living room.” Looking back, does she realise how vulnerable she was? “Yes, a little bit in hindsight, but …” She pauses: “I mean, yeah, you’re right.”
Thankfully she has never felt exploited by the music industry. Especially not financially, by the sounds of it; she recently bought a house round the corner from our meeting place despite having not yet released an album (although her 2021 mixtape One Foot in Front of the Other did reach No 4 in the charts). Griff went into her major-label deal with Warner “knowing of the horror stories from the 90s when record labels were super-controlling. I don’t think they’re like that any more.”
She certainly seems to have been given carte blanche to do what she likes: she writes and produces her own material, and even sews her own incredibly beautiful stage clothes (she made one for her Swift support slot, themed on Swift’s track But Daddy I Love Him). The downside is that this self-reliance can extend to every aspect of a young pop star’s career. “The responsibility falls more on the artist than ever before,” she says. That includes promotion. The sway of TikTok – plus the breakdown of mass media-driven monoculture – means that labels’ attitude to PR is: “Well, make some more TikToks and hopefully that’s what’s gonna do it! It’s still all on me to churn out content.”
As her 506,000 followers would attest, Griff clearly has a knack for TikTok. (“That’s so embarrassing,” she says. “I don’t feel like I do.”) One particularly rich seam has been her mum, whose unenthusiastic response to her daughter’s success has had fans agog. (Recently, she asked her mother if she’d like to watch her Swift support slot. “Do I have to?” she grimaces.) Griff seems unbothered. “The love language of an Asian mother is not words of affirmation or creating a lot of noise about achievements; it would be more like cutting you a bowl of fruit. It’s very different parenting. People are like: ‘Oh my God, your mum’s brutal.’ I’m like: ‘It’s fine – she loves me.’”
Listen to Griff’s songs and you’ll soon realise her mum isn’t the problem where love is concerned. Her debut album Vertigo – which she wrote in a series of Airbnbs in the British countryside – is clearly a first heartbreak record. Both the title track and the pleasingly spiky ballad Astronaut, featuring Chris Martin on piano (she has supported Coldplay on tour), revolve around a frustratingly noncommittal paramour (“You said that you needed space – go on then, astronaut”). Is this based on direct experience? “I guess so. I think a lot of relationships can feel like that – especially as a young girl, you’re there to give your heart and soul, and sometimes it’s not reciprocated.”
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Griff’s vagueness is understandable: although she describes Vertigo as “all very autobiographical”, she does not subscribe to the uber-literal, specifics-heavy approach that is gripping the zeitgeist (see: Swift, Charli xcx, Sabrina Carpenter). “Now there’s a real trend with pop where you’re literally describing every single detail of the person; I like writing more open. I haven’t painted in the story so much that people can’t hear their own thing.” She likes the fact that 2020’s Good Stuff – a touching ode to the children her parents fostered – was interpreted by many as a “heartbreak song”.
Making her music as accessible as possible is a wise move: Griff is now on the brink of proper stardom. As you might imagine, Taylor-level success is not top of her wishlist – “It’s almost too much to comprehend” – yet she does dream of a certain ubiquity. Yes, she’s aware of the irony, but the paradoxical push-pull of a wallflower wanting to connect via their creativity is not a novel phenomenon.
“I’m contradicting myself here because I don’t write songs for people to listen to, but I do hope my songs fall on the ears of the masses. I love it when classic songs come on and they completely change the feeling in a room and bring such joy or sadness. If I was able to do that in my own way it would be really cool.”
Vertigo is out now.