Stand Up Queen

What it's about

She sets the room. She takes the calls. She makes sure the kids are well kept. She gives love to the world. The whole record is built out of the things nobody claps for, because that is where the work actually is.

Third in the queue at nine in the morning. The woman on the phone who calls her mum instead of her name. Four of them in a meeting room talking about her kid like the mum is not in the chair. She said put that in writing, and funny how they stopped saying no.

I do it on my own now. Two girls, no handover. So I know exactly what it takes, and I have noticed I get called amazing for doing half of what she does before the school run. Same job, same day, same tired. One of us gets a round of applause.

The video

A stadium show where the halftime act is mothers. Nigerian mothers walking in procession under the spotlights. A woman pushing a buggy across the stage like a headline act. Somebody doing her daughter's hair on a stool in front of eighty thousand people.

Women from everywhere, doing the same work. A sari, a gele, a hijab, a nurse uniform, a supermarket tabard, a judge in full robes. And behind the stage the screens are playing her ordinary morning at forty feet tall.

It ends with all of them stood in a circle with their arms linked, and him alone in the middle of it.

Out 16 October

Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon, YouTube Music, Tidal, Deezer and everywhere else. The video is here first.