Laura Marling: DIY’s March 2015 cover star revealed!

Hippies, hummus and countless cigarettes cram into DIY’s March 2015 issue - we’ve got the brilliant Laura Marling on the cover.

March’s cover feature looks at the journey of a star who had to re-evaluate everything before pursuing with her new album, ‘Short Movie’.

Aged just 16, Laura put pen to paper, signing a five-album contract with major label Virgin Records. Music quite literally became her life. Over the next eight years she travelled and played huge iconic venues across the world in several drawn-out stints of touring, and released four albums; three of which were nominated for the prestigious Mercury Prize. A staple artist on the folk scene by the time she turned 20, she seemed to have everything. Everything, that is, except roots.

“I was so exhausted and out of touch with the pace of normal life,” Laura says, sitting crossed-legged, surveying her Bethnal Green living room. She’s watched back by a quizzical-looking stuffed owl on a table across the room. “I was dealing with a lot of shit, and feeling like I wasn’t part of the planet in any way. I was like, what the fuck am I doing with my life? I had to think, am I interesting? If I took the music away, and the travel away, and I had to sit down and actually chat to somebody, would I be able to do it? The conclusion that I came to is that I would. But I don’t need to. It makes me really grateful that I do what I do. It fits me pretty perfectly.”

She might be gladly back in London now, but Laura’s vague wandering search for belonging took her to a peculiar destination; the thronging, neon-lit dreamland of Los Angeles. While she was there she took up “a fairly odd, specific kind of transcendental yoga,” and she adopts a theatrical faux-whisper for a second, “marijuana. Psychedelics and stuff. But that was only very occasional,” she hastens to add. “I was pretty close to joining a cult,” she says casually, as an aside. “If you aren’t attached to anything, you can dangerously teeter on the edge of becoming a professional vagrant. It feels a huge relief to be back. I found LA liberating, and actually too much, in the end.”

Read the full cover feature from Friday 27th February, online and in print.