Born and raised in Highams Park, north-east London, Dean knew she wanted to be a singer from an early age.
From a distance, she’d watched her cousin – So Solid Crew rapper and actor Ashley Walters – top the charts; but it was another Londoner who really inspired her.
“People always try and say something cool when they talk about their first record – but I remember my Granny taking me to Woolworths to buy Leona Lewis’s A Moment Like This on CD single,” she told BBC News two years ago.
Her debut album, Messy, was nominated for the Mercury Music Prize; but it was last year’s The Art Of Loving that really put her on the map.
An intimate portrait of matters of the heart, it reached number one in the UK album charts and earned her three concurrent Top 10 singles.
The entire album was composed and recorded in a rented house in East London, where Dean shunned A-list writers and asked her closest collaborators to spend two weeks, mixing sessions with late night conversations over good food and “lots of red wine.”
That easy-going, free-flowing approach is all over the record – whose stories of love and loss are conveyed with an easy informality, like your best friend spilling their secrets.
Man I Need became her breakout single in the US, reaching number two in the Billboard charts. Speaking to the podcast…And The Writer Is, she said it had been inspired by Michael Jackson’s 1987 single The Way You Make Me Feel and Haribo’s insanely fizzy Tangfastic sweets.
“I came in that day and there was a lot of energy in the room,” she recalled. “And I was like, ‘Guys, let’s make something really fun. I want to make something I can dance to. I want to make something that when I perform live, it’s just gonna be like a Tangfastic.
“We started with the drum beat and I was like, ‘Yeah, I want to do something kind of like Michael [Jackson]’s The Way You Make Me Feel-esque’
“And I sat at the Wurly [a Wurlitzer electric piano] and we kind of just, like, wrote it.”