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Jade, Perrie, and Leigh-Anne couldn’t wait to get back to work and I was dreading it.ĭid you feel like you were obliged to be there? When we were in lockdown, I had time to myself and it was the happiest I’d ever been. I didn’t have the choice of waking up and saying, “You know what? I don’t want to do that today.” I had three other people to think about. As much as we had a say in the music and what we wanted to wear - I didn’t get to choose what to do if I wasn’t feeling good. For the first time in ten years, I’m in control of my life. I feel like a weight’s been lifted off my shoulders now. But that’s what was making me so depressed. I wouldn’t have had time to realize that being by myself and doing things that make me happy was what I genuinely wanted to do. It’s the music I’ve always wanted to make, so it feels quite liberating.Īt this point, do you think if the pandemic hadn’t happened, you’d still be a part of Little Mix? My passion is R&B and hip-hop from the ’90s and early 2000s. But unless you’re my friends and family, you don’t properly know me. Don’t get me wrong, I obviously loved being in the girl group, it was amazing. A decade later, Nelson wants and is finally getting a do-over.ĭoes preparing for the release of your first solo single feel like a new sort of wish fulfillment, something you were working toward before Little Mix even existed? Still, she says she enjoyed the years they spent together - up until she didn’t anymore. Nelson spent nearly a decade with these young women (who have continued on as a trio) wearing corsets and stilettos, touring with Ariana Grande, singing music incongruous to her tastes. 1 singles earlier this year, they made history as the first girl group to win the Brit Award for British Group, to the Spice Girls’ delight. Little Mix’s DNA, released in 2012, remains the highest-charting debut album by a British girl group on the Billboard 200 they have, so far, secured 11 U.K. It marked the start of a transition for Nelson, from a teenager obsessed with R&B and hip-hop, and the way the stars of those genres dressed, to becoming part of a British pop behemoth. Eventually, she was matched with the spunky Northerner Jade Thirlwall star-in-the-making pop vocalist Perrie Edwards and Buckinghamshire-born Leigh-Anne Pinnock, who sang Rihanna’s “Only Girl (in the World)” for her audition, together forming the group eventually known as Little Mix.Īs a new foursome, they plowed through to the show’s finals, finding friendship as bandmates in the process, before eventually becoming the first group to win it. “If I was ever gonna be in a group, that’s the group I would have imagined being in.” Fate - or more like Simon Cowell, who executive-produced all of the show’s 15 seasons - had different plans for Nelson. “I was with a load of boys, and I was meant to be the ‘Fergie,’” she recalls. There was one group that felt the most natural to her, though, where her role was clear.
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“I was always in and out, in and out,” she says. )īackstage, producers tried piecing her together with other rejected soloists to form a group. (The shedload of axed contestants were rarely told why. She got through with the seal of approval from three of the judges (the fourth, Gary Barlow, called her audition “generic”), but didn’t make the cut at boot camp as a solo artist. The following summer, she auditioned for the show - which had launched the careers of One Direction and Leona Lewis - with her version of “Bust Your Windows” by Jazmine Sullivan, wearing a baggy T-shirt, cargo pants, and basketball sneakers. For fuck sake, Nelson remembers thinking, this girl is what I want to be like. It was 2010 and she was watching Cher Lloyd successfully audition for The X Factor with a jolty, half-sung Keri Hilson version of Soulja Boy’s “Turn My Swag On,” her top lip curling and hand waving away her haters.
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When Nelson was 19 years old, a year before reality television made her one of the most visible stars in Britain, she was bartending one Saturday night in Dagenham, about a ten-minute drive south from her East London hometown of Romford. Before she was in Little Mix - the wildly popular band Nelson left at the end of 2020, citing the “constant pressure of being in a girl group” - she was dressing like this, listening to music that sounds similar to the material that she, now a solo artist, is making. She’s sitting on a leather sofa in an East London photo studio, leaning back in a camouflage jacket and cargo pants, dark hair waved, lips overpainted in coral, living her new life. This is what Jesy Nelson has always wanted.