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Dua Lipa · S1 E7
TaP In
Lana Del Rey's managers take a meeting, and Warner Bros. signs a teenager with zero released songs
West London, 2014. Ben Mawson, the man who manages Lana Del Rey, clicks play on a YouTube video of a teenager he's never heard of singing a cover in her bedroom. He picks up the phone.
"Last Dance" (Dua Lipa, 2015). Her third single, released just four months after her debut. Dark, urgent, and completely unlike anything else on British radio at the time. This is the last song of Season 1, and the last moment before everything changes.
The Email That Changed Everything
Ben Mawson and Ed Millett ran TaP Management out of an office in west London. Their biggest client was Lana Del Rey. They'd built a reputation for spotting artists who didn't fit neatly into any category, singers with voices and visions that the mainstream hadn't caught up to yet. When Dua's YouTube covers landed on their radar, they heard the same thing: someone who didn't sound like anyone else.
Sources
Savage, Mark. "Dua Lipa: The pop star who refused to be pigeonholed." BBC News, 2018.
Beaumont-Thomas, Ben. "Dua Lipa: the wholesale reinvention of a pop megastar." The Guardian, 2020.
“She definitely has that special something. With Dua, one in five or one in four songs is a banger. That ratio is unusually high.”
— Ben Mawson, TaP Management, interview with Music Business Worldwide, 2018
TAP TO REVEAL: How did Dua end up at Warner Bros. with zero released music?
Last Dance, Dua Lipa (2015)
"Last Dance" is darker and more urgent than anything Dua released before or immediately after. The production layers throbbing bass beneath her vocal, creating something that lives between heartbreak and the dancefloor at closing time. The chorus hits like a final plea, desperate but never fragile. For a song released just weeks after "Be The One," it showed a completely different side of Dua: not the pop optimist, but the late-night realist who knows exactly how the story ends.
Sources
Beaumont-Thomas, Ben. "Dua Lipa: the wholesale reinvention of a pop megastar." The Guardian, 2020.
Warner Music UK
The Kensington offices where Dua Lipa signed her first major label deal in early 2015. She walked in as an unsigned teenager with a handful of demos and walked out as a Warner Bros. recording artist.
Zero to Signed
Garden, Dua Lipa (2017)
"Garden" is one of the quietest tracks on the debut album, built on gentle guitar and a vocal that Dua keeps deliberately low. The metaphor is growth: planting something, waiting, trusting it will bloom. For an episode about a teenager who planted seeds for years through YouTube covers, nightclub shifts, and modeling gigs, this is the song that says it was all worth it. The garden finally grew.
Garden, Dua Lipa (2017)
"Come into my garden, I've got so much to show you." It's an invitation, but also a declaration: I built this, and it's mine. The lyrics are intimate without being dramatic, offering instead of demanding. After six episodes of watching Dua fight, hustle, and survive, this is the first time she sounds like someone who's arrived. She's not begging anymore. She's welcoming you in.
Which artist was the biggest client of TaP Management when they signed Dua Lipa?
She has a manager, a label, and a studio booked. Now she needs a song. Next season: the debut single, a European breakout, and the two years of writing sessions that will turn a teenager from Kosovo into a global pop star.
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To be continued
Season 2: Self-Titled
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