Seal on homelessness, hits and love: 'My father gave me one beating too many and I was out the door'

On his 60th birthday earlier this year, Seal thought he had died. Opening the door to a friend’s house, the singer was confronted by 200 people from every aspect of his life – his old manager Rob Cavallo, who he hadn’t seen for 18 years, his sister, children, housekeeper and even the tennis coaches he had hired to lead a boot camp years previously. “They say that when you die you will see all the people who love you,” he says, “and for a split second, that’s where I thought I was.”

He came to from the shock and swiftly had another realisation. “There was only one reason they were all at this party, these people that I was really fond of and people I thought I was more fond of than they were of me; it’s because they love me and they cared enough to make the effort. It was a rare moment where I faced the reality that I am worthy of being loved. And that was just too much – it was really overwhelming.” He spent much of the rest of that night crying.

Read the profile in the Guardian.

[This piece was published on 05/09/23]