Dua Lipa – Be The One

Dua Lipa didn’t want to record “Be the One.” It became her first UK top 10.

Lucy Taylor wrote Be the One about a relationship she was actually in. She wrote it with Jack Tarrant and Nick Gale, the producer who works as Digital Farm Animals, and when the three of them finished it they handed the song to a young English singer who had released exactly one single. Dua Lipa did not want it. Her hesitation was not about the melody or the production. It was about the credits: the song was not hers, and she was reluctant to put her name to something she had not written.

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She recorded it anyway. Her label released Be the One on October 30, 2015, and Britain almost entirely ignored it. The record runs 3:22 and sits somewhere between dream pop and synth-pop, built on a soft pulse rather than a drop, which in late 2015 made it sound slightly out of step with what British radio was playing. Nicole Nodland directed the first video, a loose sequence of scenes around London. It did not chart. For most of a year, the song simply existed.

Germany heard it before Britain did

German radio programmers picked it up and kept playing it, and through 2016 the song turned into a sleeper hit across the continent while its home country stayed quiet. That success forced a decision. The label re-released Be the One on December 6, 2016, this time with a proper UK and US push and a second video, directed by Daniel Kaufman and starring Ansel Elgort. Britain finally moved. The song reached No. 9 on the UK singles chart, Lipa’s first solo top 10, and it went all the way to No. 1 in the Flanders region of Belgium. It reached the top ten in nine territories and the BPI has since certified it double platinum.

The timing produced an odd shape in her catalog. Warner Bros. released the debut album Dua Lipa on June 2, 2017, more than eighteen months after Be the One first appeared, which means the song that established her predates the record it lives on by well over a year. By the time the album arrived she had already written or co-written most of what surrounded it, including New Rules. The one track she had not written was the one that opened the door.

The same song, the same room, eight years apart

In early 2016, while the single was still going nowhere in Britain, Lipa performed Be the One in the BBC Radio 1 Live Lounge for Clara Amfo. She was an artist with a single that had not charted, playing a song written by other people, in a room at Maida Vale Studios that has been recording British popular music since the 1930s.

She came back to the same room in 2024. The BBC filmed a half-hour Live Lounge Special at Maida Vale with Clara Amfo hosting again, broadcast on BBC One on May 6, 2024 and on Radio 1 the following evening. Lipa had released Radical Optimism three days earlier and was weeks away from headlining Glastonbury. She played Illusion, Training Season and Happy For You, covered Cleo Sol’s Sunshine, and then played Be the One in a reworked arrangement that leans on a live band rather than the 2015 production. She described being back in the room as “a full circle moment.”

That phrase is doing more work than it looks like. The song she almost refused is the one she keeps returning to, and the objection she raised in 2015 has quietly become the least interesting fact about it. A song written by three people about one of their own relationships, ignored at home, rescued by German radio, and sung a second time in the same BBC studio by someone who by then could fill Glastonbury’s Pyramid Stage. Lucy Taylor’s relationship ended up outliving almost everything else on the record it came from.