Rapper Che Lingo opens up about anxiety and eating disorder in new album Coming Up For Air
* Warning – this article contains an account of disordered eating
“I’m super exhaustingly deep,” says Che Lingo, smiling. “But I’m learning to know when to just go with it.” The south London rapper has been talking for almost an hour and could probably keep going for a while. This is a man who has a lot to get off his chest.
Having risen to prominence with the release of debut album The Worst Generation through Idris Elba‘s record label in 2020, his lyrics dealt with themes of anxiety and loss, masculinity, the treatment of black people in society, and the impact growing up on one of the capital’s deprived estates has had on his life.
My Block, a song written about his friend Julian Cole, who was left paralysed and brain damaged at 19 after being arrested following a “scuffle” with officers and door staff outside a nightclub in 2013, became part of the soundtrack to the Black Lives Matter movement.
Now, he is back with Coming Up For Air, which is just as personal, exploring a period during the pandemic in which he battled grief, injury and bulimia. It is rare for a man in the public eye to discuss a problem like this, even more so in the world of rap. He says he understands it is a subject that could draw “ridicule and criticism – even hate”, but it’s an issue he wants to be open about.
Lingo, who keeps his real name private, tells Sky News his looks and weight have always been a subject of inner turmoil; at school, he was bullied for being chubby so as a teenager he threw himself into boxing and working out, becoming “super disciplined” to change the reflection he hated in the mirror.
Stuck indoors when the pandemic hit, he put on weight. And then, playing basketball one day after lockdown lifted, he ruptured his Achilles tendon and was left wearing an orthopaedic boot for six months.
“I was far from obese but a lot bigger than I wanted and I was very uncomfortable in my skin,” he says. “It affected me badly… I didn’t know if was going to be able to use my leg in the same way again, ever, because it’s such a volatile injury. Everywhere I went I was sweating because the boot was so heavy. It was really mentally exhausting as well as physically exhausting.
‘I won’t ever shy away from talking about it’
“I was eating and eating and eating. I was eating and feeling super guilty. That’s the process: you eat, you feel guilty, then you purge, and feel guilty for purging. [I was] hurting my insides. It can kill you if you abuse it too much. I knew it was a problem when I realised nobody could stop me from doing it when I felt the urge.”
Eventually, Lingo told some family members and close friends. “And I put it on the album,” he says, smiling. “From then it was like, okay, this feels better now. And I won’t ever shy away from talking about things in real life that I’ve put on my projects.”
According to eating disorder charities, about 25% of those who suffer are male. Lingo hopes he can help others, particularly men who might be suffering in silence.
“You still struggle with it, every now and again,” he says. “Certain things never go away. At the same time you learn how to manage… it’s something I’m now more prepared to deal with. In the same way, I want the album to make people feel like, yeah, you will sink again at some point, but you might be more prepared to deal with it after you listen to me talk about it.”
The call from Idris Elba
Idris Elba on stage at Glastonbury in 2015. Pic: Guy Bell/Shutterstock
Lingo was raised by his grandmother on his mother’s side. Having written songs since primary school – “I always knew I was good, from the reactions I’d get in the playground” – he started performing in youth clubs as a teenager, graduating to talent shows, building a fanbase online. “I just wanted to be heard,” he says. “I found something I felt was valuable and I wanted to share it with people.”
Getting signed by Elba, who founded the 7Wallace label, was a huge moment. “I was never really one to be starstruck,” he says. “I’ve got family in the early So Solid [Crew] era, so I was always around them.” But he admired Elba’s talent and work ethic, and being able to earn a living through his music – and help support his family – was empowering.
“It’s also a massive responsibility. You almost feel obligated to continue to seek stimulation and live life and figure out ways to say things that are important. If you’re that type of artist, which I believe I am. But yeah, it was a big moment.”
Rather than offer advice, Elba told Lingo to keep doing exactly what he was doing. His son was a fan, he told the rapper, and he had been listening himself for months. “Before we got working on the first album, we had a phone call and he was like, ‘I think you’re a genius, I think what you do is amazing, and I’m just happy you’ve trusted us with the next leg of your career’.”
Releasing The Worst Generation felt almost trivial, he says, as people were dying during the pandemic. But he realised many related to his lyrics, that this wasn’t just his story. The album is a telling of his environment, “growing up as a young black youth in south London and how that affected me; not going down the route of being a product of said environment, which is the majority of people”.
He is tired of stereotypes. The majority of black people living on estates such as the one he grew up on aren’t involved in crime, or “things based on survival that people would consider negative”, he says. “Most are regular people wanting to get on with their day. I wanted to make sure that not only did I get to tell my story, but I got to tell the story of millions and millions of young black youths that come out of south and southwest London”.
‘He was 19, a semi-pro footballer, a sports science student’
Julian Cole. Pic: Cole family
Taking down police brutality in My Block allowed Lingo to vent his anger about what happened to his friend Julian, whose broken neck was only discovered after he had been taken to a police station, rather than a hospital.
Three police officers falsely claimed he had been able to walk to the police van – but CCTV and witnesses proved otherwise. The officers were not accused of causing the injuries, police said, but were later found guilty of gross misconduct and sacked. Following the hearing in 2018, Bedfordshire Police said the officers were in no way to blame for Mr Cole’s “catastrophic” injuries but apologised for their conduct following the incident, saying honesty and integrity were “vital” in policing.
“He was 19, a semi-pro footballer, a sports science student,” Lingo says now. “By the time he reached the police station, his neck was broken and he was paralysed. And three policemen lied about their involvement. Why is nobody in jail? Why is nobody being convicted? Why is the government not paying compensation for his potential, the stress that’s come to his family, and the fact his life will be changed forever?”
The song became part of the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020. While it was written before the death of George Floyd, the rapper says he realised what it meant to people at that time. “There’s a lot of focus on my community and the people that come from it and I felt it was important to try and be a voice for that, or at least get my frustrations off about what I was observing.”
‘I’m still unpacking lots of issues’
Lingo is intensely passionate and deeply thoughtful, slipping into rapping lyrics several times to illustrate a point (sometimes so fluently it’s not always obvious), and fastidiously explaining the meaning behind his songs. He sees his music as therapy. “People don’t really get an opportunity to process what happens in their environment as much as maybe an artist might do. Because you have to sit down and write songs about the things that happen to you, whereas other people might have to pay to talk about them.”
However, he admits he struggles with some of the side-effects of success. “I’m still unpacking all the reasons why I need this attention. I’m still unpacking how I felt like I got lost and then I found myself. I’m still unpacking the idea of when the bulimia decided to rear its head. I’m still unpacking, like, why I feel I need to be at the forefront of this kind of cycle of media and attention and all of the toxic parts of it?”
Ultimately, he says he can’t not do it. In Heart Race, he raps about anxiety, and caring too much. “‘How do we start addressing the trauma the world taught us/ whilst maintaining this sh*t that we need to bring to the table?’ Because it’s all happening at one time. You’ve seen the wars and you’ve done what you can, everybody scrambles to support what they can when they can, and that’s a beautiful thing. But what’s going on in your life as well? What wars are you fighting by yourself?”
Lingo has received several messages from fans, he says, telling him his music has helped them. “I’ve read these things deeply and respectfully… [they’re saying] ‘I felt suicidal at this point of my life and this song really brought me out of that’. Or, ‘this song helped me finish my dissertation and I’ve put you in the credits’. That’s one of the most positive effects you can have on somebody, you’ve made them want to keep living. I’m forever grateful to them for being that vulnerable with me.”
‘Che Lingo-ing’ Freddie Mercury and Queen
Lingo with Queen’s Roger Taylor (front), along with producer Manon Dave and musicians Oliver Hutch and Josh Hawkins outside Abbey Road Studios
The final song on Coming Up For Air is My Radio, a track which samples Freddie Mercury‘s vocals from Queen‘s Radio Gaga. Lingo was picked by drummer Roger Taylor to reinterpret the band’s classic hit and he transformed the track into a song about his grandmother on his father’s side, who died towards the start of the pandemic.
“I was like, I don’t want it to sound anything like the original track. I want to ‘Che Lingo’ this song,” he says. “I started overthinking it, but then was like, this isn’t why they picked me. They picked me to do what I do, and I did that. My grandma would’ve loved it.”
Che Lingo’s Coming Up For Air is out now
Standard Glastonbury Festival tickets for 2025 sold out in less than 40 minutes after organisers adopted a new booking system.
The new system saw Glastonbury hopefuls get “randomly assigned a place in a queue” instead of having to refresh the holding page once they went live.
Organisers said: “Thanks to everyone who bought one and sorry to those who missed out, on a morning when demand was much higher than supply. There will be a resale of any cancelled or returned tickets in spring 2025.”
Earlier in the week coach tickets sold out within half an hour for the famous festival in Somerset, which is set to take place between 25 and 29 June next year.
Tickets for the annual event at Worthy Farm sold quicker this year than last year when it took around an hour for all of them to go.
They cost £373.50 plus a £5 booking fee this year, up £18.50 from the price last year, and were sold exclusively through the See Tickets website.
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Ticket sale methods and prices for events have been a controversial topic this year, particularly due to Oasis fans’ experience trying to get tickets to their reunion shows in August.
Fans were left outraged after spending hours queueing for tickets only to find some had more than doubled in price from around £148 to £355.
The band’s long-awaited reunion has led to much speculation that Noel and Liam Gallagher will headline Glastonbury, but they denied this while their tickets were up for sale.
“Despite media speculation, Oasis will not be playing Glastonbury 2025 or any other festivals next year,” they said in a statement. “The only way to see the band perform will be on their Oasis Live ’25 World Tour.”
The headliners this summer on the iconic Pyramid Stage were Dua Lipa, SZA and Coldplay, who made history as the first act to headline the festival five times.
The crowd at Coldplay’s headline set at Glastonbury Festival. Pic: PA
2026 is likely to be a year off for Glastonbury, with the festival traditionally taking place four out of every five years, and the fifth year reserved for rehabilitation of the land.
Entertainment
Pulp’s fan club president dished out Jarvis Cocker’s trouser scraps – and his car – to fans. Then he joined the band
Mark Webber’s role as Pulp’s fan club manager started simply enough, writing newsletters and posting out small bits of memorabilia such as postcards, stickers and badges. But, just like the band he loved, he wanted to do things a little differently.
A balloon launch to drum up publicity in their hometown of Sheffield didn’t attract too many people, he recalls, but one did make it all the way to Slovenia. The following year, he cut up a pair of Jarvis Cocker‘s trousers into 500 pieces, “all put in individually numbered envelopes and sent out to fans”.
It was 1993, a decade on from the release of Pulp‘s debut album, but still two years before they were to achieve huge mainstream success. A few years later, they decided to offer Cocker’s old Hillman Imp car, no longer roadworthy, as a competition prize. “It was crushed, compacted into a cube, someone won it, and we delivered it in a truck to their garden.”
It was genius silliness, indicative of the time. Nowadays, if you’re a young fan who loves a band or an artist, you assemble on social media – but back in the 1990s, it was all about signing up to the official fan club.
Some 500 Pulp fans were once treated to scraps of Cocker’s trousers in the post. Pic: Mark Webber
For Webber, who started out as a Pulp fan himself, it was a dream job which eventually led to him becoming the band’s tour manager – and then, just before they hit the height of their fame, joining as guitarist.
Following the group’s second and long hoped-for reunion in 2023, he is now telling his story – from super fan to joining the band – in I’m With Pulp, Are You?.
It’s not an autobiography as such, but a scrapbook of moments told mainly through ephemera collected over the last five decades, from photographs and flyers to set lists and press clippings, as well as other notes and scribblings kept through the years.
Webber went through his hoard during the pandemic lockdown. “It was in disarray at the time,” he says. “I hadn’t looked at it for so long I was finding things I couldn’t even remember what they were.”
‘We were in a bubble – suddenly the world caught up’
Jarvis Cocker on stage in Wolverhampton in 1992. Pic: Mark Webber
His story with Pulp starts in 1985, when he was an “obsessive” teenage music fan hanging out at a small independent record store in Chesterfield “where all the weird kids would go”. Back then, the band’s fan base was small, he says, and they were “amused” by the “daft, psychedelic kids” who followed them. They got to know them.
Webber eventually started helping out with stages sets before taking on the fan club duties. Then his role morphed again as he was called on to play guitar and keyboards at live shows, and began to contribute to songwriting.
He became an official member in 1995 – just before they became one of the biggest bands in the UK with their fifth album, Different Class, thanks to songs such as Disco 2000, Sorted For E’s and Whizz, and signature track Common People.
In the days before social media, Pulp People kept fans up to date. Pic: Mark Webber
“Do you think it’s a coincidence that happened just as I joined?” Webber asks, laughing. “There was this trajectory. There was such a momentum building that it just became clear that, like, every next thing the group did was going to be more successful.”
It was a strange feeling, he says. “Because we were in the bubble at the time, just doing our thing, and suddenly the world had caught up and kind of realised how great Pulp was.”
I’m With Pulp documents some of the milestone moments in the band’s history, such as the 1995 Glastonbury headline set, before the release of Different Class, which came about at short notice after The Stone Roses were forced to pull out. Webber recalls how the band spent the night camping backstage.
“That was horrible because I hate camping,” he says. “And the concert, at the time it didn’t feel like such a great show. But everyone seemed to love it.”
Headlining Glastonbury – but camping in tents
Pulp played a secret set at Glastonbury when they first reunited in 2011 – but didn’t camp that time. Pic: AP/ Mark Allan
Looking back at the roster of recent Glastonbury headliners – Elton John, Paul McCartney, Adele, Dua Lipa, The Killers – it’s hard to imagine any of them pitching a tent in the mud before performing to 100,000 people.
“Well, I’ve never spent the night in a tent since then,” says Webber. “So it changed my life.”
A more infamous incident in Pulp’s history was Cocker rushing the stage during Michael Jackson’s performance of Earth Song at the Brits the following year.
At the time, it didn’t feel as significant a moment as it has become in popular culture, Webber says. “There was disbelief in the moment, that he actually dared to do it. And that it was so easy to do. That’s the thing none of us could really understand, that there was no security or anything stopping anyone getting on the stage that easily.”
Cocker invaded the stage during Michael Jackson’s performance of Earth Song at the Brit Awards in 1996. Pic: Reuters
The aftermath was more concerning. “Like, ‘is Jarvis going to go to prison?’ Because we were starting a tour the next day.”
Ultimately, says Webber, most awards ceremonies and industry events are “boring – you have to do something to amuse yourself”.
After splitting in 2002, Pulp reunited for the first time in 2011, and then again for shows last year.
The response was “kind of amazing”, Webber says. It’s “quite likely we will play in England before we disappear again”, he hints. “There’s nothing confirmed yet but we expect there’ll be more concerts next year.”
‘I probably should have enjoyed it more’
Webber says his tour manager briefcase is one of his favourite items from his early days. Pic: Mark Webber
The book documents Webber’s story. The item he was most happy to rediscover, he says, was the briefcase he used during his time as tour manager, adorned with a vintage ‘I’m With Pulp, Are You?’ sticker, which provided inspiration for the title.
“I knew I had it somewhere, but what I didn’t expect when I opened it up was that it still contained some contracts, to do lists, itineraries, a Bic biro, a packet of Setlers, and the business cards of various guest houses,” he says. “I used to carry this around everywhere, and in the days before we all had mobile phones, it had to contain everything we’d need for a concert or tour.”
After taking the time to look back, is there anything he would change?
“Well, I mean, I probably should have enjoyed it more.” Webber laughs. “I’m always like the slightly glass half-full, grass is always greener type outlook… I did maintain quite a normal life, I didn’t have an address book full of celebrities that I’d go and hang out with – not that that’s something to aspire to, but, you know, maybe I should have been a bit more wild at the time when I had the chance.”
I’m With Pulp, Are You, published by Hat & Beard, is out now, with a launch night at the ICA in London on 27 November
Paul Mescal praised fellow Irish star and friend Saoirse Ronan for speaking out about women’s safety in a TV talk show clip that went viral.
The two Oscar nominees appeared on The Graham Norton Show, where Eddie Redmayne was talking about how he trained for his role as a lone assassin in Sky Atlantic series The Day Of The Jackal, where he was taught how to use a mobile phone if attacked.
In response, Mescal, 28, joked: “Who is going to think about that though?”
He continued:: “If someone attacks me I’m not going to go [reaches into pocket] phone.”
But Ronan chimed in and said: “That’s what girls have to think about all the time. Am I right ladies?”
The clip quickly went viral on social media, with Ronan praised for holding the men to account.
Mescal was asked on Irish broadcaster RTE’s The Late Late Show if they were surprised by the reaction the clip had.
“I’m not surprised that the message received as much attention that it got, because it’s massively important and I’m sure you’ve had Saoirse on the show, like, she’s… quite often, more often than not, the most intelligent person in the room,” he replied.
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He said she was “spot on” and “hit the nail on the head”, adding it was good “messages like that are kind of gaining traction – that’s a conversation that we should absolutely be having on a daily basis”.
Ronan previously called the reaction to her comments “wild”.
Saoirse Ronan was appearing on the show to promote her latest movie, The Outrun
She told The Ryan Tubridy Show on Virgin Radio UK: “It’s definitely not something that I had expected, and I didn’t necessarily set out to sort of make a splash.”
But she said men and women from around the world had reached out to her following the moment.
She said the men on the show “weren’t sort of like debunking anything that I was saying”, and explained Mescal “completely gets” the issue as they have talked about it before.
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