She’s one of Britain’s most effervescent pop stars. But there’s a lot more to Anne-Marie than her amazing voice. The
Singer talks about her battles with anxiety and body image – and the unexpected pleasures of lockdown after years on the road
The pop star Anne-Marie has squirrelled herself away in an alcove, in a corner of a café in south
London. It is the middle of February, and she has been working in a studio around the corner, on her second album, and now she’s picking at a veggie breakfast, though it’s three in the afternoon. Her formerly blonde, newly pale-pink hair lights her up like a beacon, but I have arrived a little early, and she looks so quiet and self-contained, so tucked into herself and thoughtful, that I have a strong urge to turn around and leave her to it. I had heard she was a talker, expected the gregarious character that is larger-than-life in her videos, but my first impressions are that perhaps she won’t be much of a talker at all.
Within two minutes of sitting down, I know this about the woman born Anne-Marie Rose Nicholson: the name of her nephew, where she lives, where she grew up, why she’s baffled that her Wikipedia says her dad is
Irish (he’s from east London), the results of a DNA test she did to find out her ancestry and the fact that she wrote a whole album that she decided to scrap, because she realised that what she’d come up with was too “ratchet”. The idea was, she explains, that it would be a reversal of the wronged woman situation she had picked apart on her debut album, Speak Your Mind. She started writing about being the cheater, rather than the cheated-on. “I feel like in the first album, I had struggles, and I was trying to get through that by writing them down, and then when I came to write the second album, I was like, yeah, I feel fucking great. I feel great in myself, I feel confident, so the whole album was really…” She starts laughing. “It was too much! It was so horrible. I was like, I don’t care, I want to be different now, and then it wasn’t until I did a show somewhere and this dad came over to me and said, ‘I just want to say, I’m so happy that my daughter listens to you because you’re a really great [role model],’ and I was like…” She clicks her fingers and grins. “I’m not releasing that album!”