She was the unassuming girl from the West Country who, aged 17, became a pop sensation – the youngest British female singer to top the UK albums chart. Feted by royalty, Joss Stone’s soulful voice, infamous barefoot performances and fashionable boho style made her a noughties icon.
But few could have predicted what came next. In June 2011, Joss was the victim of a terrifying kidnap plot, with two men – Kevin Liverpool and Junior Bradshaw – convicted of planning to murder the star at her rural east Devon home.
For much of the next decade, the double Brit and Grammy award winner – who also turned her hand to acting in films and TV shows – led a nomadic existence, her professional ambition belying a deeper desire for motherhood.
That was until 2020, when she settled in Nashville, Tennessee, with American Cody DaLuz, a former US marine who didn’t balk when she told him she wanted ‘seven kids’.
The couple married in secret last year, Joss wearing a £70 dress from ASOS, bringing up their daughter Violet, three, and son, Shackleton, two, some 4,000 miles from the home where criminals planned to snatch her and where, she said recently, ‘I feel so much safer’.
Last week she introduced their newest addition – baby son, Bear, adopted, as his father Cody had been.
‘We are in love big time,’ she wrote on Instagram. ‘The reason why Cody even exists is because his bio mum loved him enough to make an adoption plan for him and the same goes for Bear.’
Despite – or indeed, because of – her newfound domestic happiness Joss, now 37, recently announced she plans to return to Devon in time for Violet, who will be four next month, to start school.
‘I want my kids to have the kind of upbringing I did — riding horses, climbing trees and being near my family,’ she said.
Joss Stone, pictured in 2004 at the Band Aid recording session in London, was the unassuming girl from the West Country who, aged 17, became a pop sensation
Now, she talks openly about motherhood – and everything it involves
Last week Joss opened up about adopting baby son Bear
So what bittersweet emotions must returning home evoke for the singer? And has Joss finally laid the drama of her past to rest?
Discovered at 12 by music executive Steve Greenberg after spotting her singing on BBC Television talent show Star for a Night in London, Joss signed to her first record label at 15 and, just a year later, recorded her first hit single, Fell in Love with a Boy. The hardest part of her success at such a young age, she said, ‘was having to be the boss of all these adults as I was paying other people. It made me very uncomfortable and was super confusing’.
Nonetheless, she wowed stars such as Tom Cruise, who listened to her music in the car, and in 2005 befriended Prince Harry, after they met at a Prince’s Trust fundraiser. And while, over time, public appetite for her music might have waned – her third album didn’t acquire the triple-platinum status of her first two – the royals’ affection for her didn’t. In April 2011 she was a guest at William and Kate’s wedding, which, she recalled, ‘was brilliant’.
Yet just one month later, Liverpool and Bradshaw drove from the bed-sit they shared in Manchester towards Joss’ home, their battered Fiat Punto loaded with weapons including a samurai sword, knives, hammers, a large metal spike, balaclavas, a hosepipe and plastic bags.
They also had handwritten notes outlining their plot to steal £1m from the singer and dump her body in a river.
Local residents became suspicious of the men’s behaviour just seven miles from her house – she was home at the time with the doors unlocked – and called the police.
Liverpool and Bradshaw even showed a postman a picture of the singer and asked if he knew where she lived.
In April 2013 they were found guilty of planning to rob and murder Joss at Exeter Crown Court.
On Monday Joss opened up about her newborn – who is too vulnerable to go outside due to his premature lungs
Joss married American Cody DaLuz, a former US marine, last year (pictured in November 2023)
The couple married secretly – with wearing a £70 dress from ASOS
In 2013, Kevin Liverpool (L) and Junior Bradshaw (R) were found guilty of conspiracy to rob and murder Joss
On searching the men’s flat, police discovered ‘garbled’ notes which referred to decapitating the singer and questioned her links to the royals, suggesting her links to William and Harry might have been a motive.
Bradshaw was sentenced to 18 years and Liverpool sentenced to life. The following May, however, Bradshaw’s sentence was cut to ten years and Liverpool’s minimum sentence reduced to six and a half years – meaning both men could now be out of prison.
Joss publicly refused to be cowed, insisting it hadn’t put her off living in Devon: ‘I can go shopping and nobody bothers me.’
Two years later, however, she admitted her long-standing fear of the dark had become more difficult. ‘I’ve always been a nervous person at night,’ said Joss, then 28. ‘I could rationalise it and say, “don’t be so stupid, there’s no one under the bed, there’s no one behind the door”. But now I can’t really say that because, actually, it might be true.’
Although ‘in and out of America’ since her teenage years, with stints living in New York and Los Angeles, Joss always kept a place in her heart for her home county. Visits back to Devon involved ‘wine, fag smoke filled the kitchen and I’d make a lasagne’.
She said it was her single status and lack of children that made her decide to move Stateside more permanently around 2016.
‘When I was growing up, I wanted loads of kids but I couldn’t find the right man so I got to 30, living in Devon, and said to Mum: “I’m moving to America and I’m not coming back until I have a husband and a child.” I had to change something, so I did,’ she said.
She met Cody at an airport in Belize in 2020, when she was on her way back from a gig in Antarctica. When Joss tried her standard conversation opener with dates on him – ‘nice to meet you… I want seven kids’ – he responded that he wanted an adoptive Beagle and an adoptive baby.
Joss had in the past revealed her want for seven children – pictured here in October 2022 annoucing the birth of baby Shackleton
The mum asked her followers to ‘welcome our gorgeous baby boy to this wonderful world’
She said this week baby Bear and her had to stay in the car as she couldn’t take him outside just yet
‘I was like, “My God, I love you.” I knew he was the one,’ she later recalled.
Although ‘manic’ working – she was planning to tour every country in the world at the time – she had been ‘writing songs to my unborn children way before I met him’. She described Cody, 34, a logistics manager for Amazon, as ‘a gentleman’ who nurtures her ‘fairytale need’.
At seven months pregnant with Violet, the couple moved to Nashville on the advice of producer and former Eurythmics member Dave Stewart, with whom she was recording an album and who lived half an hour away, ‘so we could write more songs together’.
During her second pregnancy Joss’s priorities shifted. ‘It’s harder this time,’ she said when expecting Shackleton, born in October 2022. ‘I’m trying to do that “I am woman, hear me roar” thing, but all I want to do is lie down and eat cake.’
Last November Joss told a reporter at a West End performance of The Time Traveller’s Wife, for which she had co-written the music, that she had taken almost catching a bouquet thrown into the audience as an ‘omen’ – and gone home to Nashville to get married.
Despite her wealth, her gown was an old white summer dress from ASOS: ‘It literally cost me £70 and it came in the post and was tagged “bridal”,’ she said.
Her attitude towards the attempt on her life seems to have shifted with motherhood.
‘What happened to me in 2011 has made me lock my doors and have an alarm system, whereas I didn’t before,’ she said recently. ‘Cody’s so mellow — he says, “Oh, we don’t need to worry about that,” and I’m, like, “Well, you know, people do sometimes try to kill you.”’
Both her new location and husband are a blessing, she added, because ‘out in Nashville I know those men are not here, so I feel so much safer. Cody worked in security, so he’s the best person to have around’.
Her pace of life is ‘slower’ now, touring done by bus so the children can sleep. Diva antics are conspicuous only in their absence: ‘We certainly don’t throw TVs out of the window — the kids would not be happy.’
Last year, she revealed she and Cody had begun the adoption process in the States. And, that has now happened, with Joss paying credit to baby Bear’s biological mother on Instagram: ‘She’s such a lovely girl and she loves him too.’
Before Bear, she described her life in the Tennessee ‘sticks’ as making her feel at home. She enjoyed walking their dog Maggie around a local lake and trips to an adventure playground: ‘Up the road, there are horses and cows… Where I’m from in England has a very country vibe, with cows, pigs, and sheep.’
Which, of course, she’ll soon be experiencing for real again. Joss bought the house in the Devon village where she grew up, complete with church, village hall and a pub, after her parents split, once saying: ‘I guess you love wherever your home happens to be, but for me it is the countryside where I grew up, where there is a forest just up the road and the smell is so clean and fresh.’
It is thought she still owns the five-bedroom home, which she reportedly rented out for £1,325 a week and where she filmed herself cooking for a social media post three years ago. The wooden beams, sunflowers and rustic stools in the shoot certainly suggest rural contentment, but her beaming smile perhaps revealed the most. Here was a woman who had travelled the world and was finally ready to return to her roots.