Lucy Spraggan is a tour de force.
The star has always been headstrong in her music – endearing tales of the heart that had CelebMix noting that ‘artists like Lucy Spraggan don’t come around very often’ when reviewing 2019 record Today Was A Good Day.
When spending time with that album four years ago, the site picked up on one line in particular. The first line of that story reads: “‘I wanna believe in the words I write’, Lucy Spraggan declares on ‘Don’t Play This on the Radio’.”
That mantra has been at the centre of Spraggan’s rise over the past decade. An independent artist conquering the charts, selling out huge venues and building a passionate fan base off her own back, that success was fuelled by the authenticity that came with the Canterbury-born star always holding her own pen.
Now, Spraggan moves that strikingly candid writing from the songbook to an autobiography in Process: Finding My Way Through. The 32-year-old’s tale is a stark slap across the face, genuinely gripping and, ultimately, vital reading.
A quick search of the songwriter’s name in Google over the week and a half since the book’s release will bring up pages of articles on the biography’s most jaw-dropping revelation. While on The X Factor in 2012, Spraggan was raped by a hotel porter. The emotional and physical aftermath of that heinous crime resulted in her pulling out of the show – at the time announced by ITV as ‘illness’.
Midway through the book, Spraggan addresses those who have come from the headlines ‘just for the previous chapter’. She writes: “Please remember I am real, that it has taken great strength and years of rebuilding to be able to share this with you.”
That part of the singer’s life has its chapter in Process, but it is not the whole story being told in The Sunday Times number two best-seller. Far from it.
Spraggan takes the reader through an inspiring underdog story from pokey flats above pubs where a future record-making songwriter’s brain began to bloom to the breakdown of a marriage with her career at an all-time high.
There are heart-warming tales of friendship in the life story, whether that be a vital bond with The X Factor kindred spirit Rylan, ambitious local radio presenters providing a leg-up into the industry or sober acquaintances who helped with the artist’s desire to kick alcohol from her life.
Elsewhere, the star opens up on her formative years living as a boy in a compelling exposition of what it feels like to live in the wrong body as a child. In a climate where transphobia is rife, Spraggan breathes life into ‘Max’ on paper with compassion and clarity, urging those with closed minds to be open to learning through a brilliant Ferrero Rocher metaphor. To make it crystal clear, she adds: “I have no doubt that is what I was, by the way. A trans kid.”
From first to last page, Process is a triumph. To think an artist who has always appeared an open book had so much more to tell is astounding – the singer has lived enough lives to fill a hundred others.
One thing is for sure, artists like Lucy Spraggan don’t come around very often.
Have you enjoyed reading Process? Looking forward to new Lucy Spraggan music? Let us know @CelebMix on Twitter.
Process by Lucy Spraggan is available to buy now, from Blink Publishing