Charli XCX Was Seven Years Old When She Had Her First Cataclysmic Pop Epiphany
Charli XCX was seven years old when she had her first cataclysmic pop epiphany. ‘I think it was on the BBC news it was such a big thing at the time,’ she explains, about the kerpow moment of conceptual pop that blew her little mind as she watched Britney Spears strut through High School to the strains of Baby, One More Time. ‘I wasn’t sat there thinking, I want to be a pop star or, I want to be famous. I just wanted to be like Britney Spears, which I suppose was both of those things.’ Maybe it was neither. Times change. People change with them. At 26, Charli has framed a career for herself as one of the most respected, connected and commercially bankable songwriters in pop’s rainbow spectrum. She flits effortlessly between roles as irresistible front-woman, storied backroom girl and, on several acutely memorable occasions, the wizard behind the curtain of Oz pulling the puppet strings on stone cold/red hot millennial bangers, ‘I Love It’, ‘Boom Clap’, ‘Fancy, ‘After The Afterparty’ and ‘Boys’. Her intricate and intuitive musical awareness led her to head up a biweekly show for Beats 1. Her sociological frankness meant the BBC asked her to front a documentary on Feminism. Between the side-lines and moonlighting gigs, a pop star of unique distinction has percolated at her own pace, on her own terms. ‘As I got into the music industry,’ she says now, ‘I realised that I wanted to be more than a pretty face singing a nice song. I wanted to really have my hands all over the industry, my fingerprints everywhere in terms of not just the songs I release but the ones I write for other people, the music videos I put myself in, or direct for others.
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