‘I have a daily battle with myself not to go on Ozempic’: Jade Thirlwall on anorexia, protest in pop and life after Little Mix | Little Mix
Published: 2025-08-16 06:18:08 | Views: 9
It’s customary for former girlband members to shun their manufactured roots the second they go solo. But now that Jade Thirlwall is no longer a member of Little Mix, she’s become their biggest fan. “I look back and I’m gagged at us!” she tells me, eyes wide with delight. “I still watch our music videos or performances and wonder how we weren’t even bigger, because we were fucking amazing.
“Before I released my first solo song, I listened to Little Mix’s entire discography and cried. I was this young lass from South Shields who just wanted to make it as a singer, and I went on to be in the best, coolest girlband ever.” And now? “Now I get to have a bonus round, doing my own songs,” she beams.
We meet in an east London photo studio as the 32-year-old prepares to release her much-trumpeted debut solo album. Thirlwall is relaxed, funny company, in a patchwork denim jacket and oversized cargo shorts, slightly incongruous against the bouncing Diana Ross curls and frosting of bright pink freckles applied for our shoot. She’s softly spoken, her voice retaining its geordie dialect and rising in pitch whenever she’s relaying an astonishing anecdote – which is often.
Little Mix formed during the eighth series of The X Factor in 2011 and went on to sell 75m records, become the third-biggest girlband of all time (behind the Spice Girls and the Supremes, ahead of Destiny’s Child) and the first to spend more than 100 weeks inside the UK top 10. In 2021, they were the first girlband to win the Brit award for best British group. When Noel Gallagher claimed that they were “not in the same league as Oasis”, who had won in 1996, Thirlwall retorted that it was “a shame, really. Because we are definitely the most successful girl group in the country, but he’s not even the most successful performer in his family.”
This wit and swagger has been expertly parlayed into a solo career that promises to make Thirlwall Britain’s next homegrown superstar. She tells me that some of her earliest artistic influences were the drag queens of Benidorm and – in the best possible way – it shows. Her solo music and visuals are delightfully melodramatic, embracing a more-is-more approach that implies if the kitchen sink is missing, it’s only because she decided to throw in a bathtub instead.
Four singles in, she’s flying. Her debut, Angel of My Dreams (a maximalist treatise on the agonies and ecstasies of pop fame that packs more genres than the average person’s Spotify Wrapped into three minutes and 17 seconds), was nominated for an Ivor Novello award. When she performed it at the Brit awards – dropping through a double-height trapdoor and embarking on a dizzying succession of costume changes and dance breaks before taking flight in a pair of giant angel wings – this publication described her as having stolen the show.
“I think you should be ambitious as a pop star,” she says today. “You shouldn’t give yourself a ceiling.” In an era of reduced budgets and tightened belts, was it easy to convince her record company to let her stage an episodic performance told in five acts? “They understand that if they want me to be the next big pop girlie, then they have to put their hand in their pocket.” She adopts a mock scandalised tone: “I’m not a low‑budget artist! Give me what I need!” Their investment was rewarded when Thirlwall won best pop act.
Another headline-generating performance followed, this time at Glastonbury festival, where Thirlwall led the Woodsies stage in a chant of “Fuck you” to, among other things, Reform, welfare cuts, silencing protest and selling arms. Was she surprised at the heated online reaction? “I was ready for a backlash from the right kind of people,” she says. “I saw a lot of people saying ‘Your Glastonbury set was really good until you got political’ or ‘I used to be a fan of yours until you got political’. But, hun, you were never a fan, because I’ve always piped up.”
Memorably, back in 2015, Thirlwall hijacked the official Little Mix Twitter account to tweet that she was “truly saddened and ashamed” by parliament voting to bomb Isil targets in Syria. “I got in a bit of trouble for that,” she concedes cheerfully. “But I felt very passionate about it. I’m no expert in politics but I’ve always taken an interest. Around 9/11 I saw first‑hand the Islamophobia that my grandad experienced, and as someone of Arab heritage I’ve seen people turning a blind eye to the Middle Eastern tragedy. What’s quite funny is that we didn’t have individual Twitter accounts, and we each had to sign off tweets from the Little Mix account with our name. So I did my tweet about Syria and ended it with ‘xxJadexx’”.
A stalwart defender of LGBTQ+ rights and a vocal advocate for a free Palestine, she is disparaging of artists who opt out of politics. “I don’t think you can be a pop artist and cover your eyes. I saw Matty Healy say that he doesn’t want to be political, which I found disappointing. It’s very easy for someone who’s white and straight and very privileged to say that. Good for you, hun!”
Before Thirlwall began making weapons-grade bangers, she was a student of pop music. Born in South Shields, she was obsessed with Madonna, Kylie and Janet Jackson, papering her wardrobe doors with moodboards of their most iconic looks. Her mum, Norma, a primary school business manager of Yemeni and Egyptian descent, had the look of Jade’s ultimate idol Diana Ross – and for a time young Jade believed her mum to be living a double life. Norma encouraged the fantasy, claiming that she was going to play concerts when, in fact, she was off down the bingo hall.
Thirlwall was always close to her mum; Norma’s at the studio with us today, and there’s a song on the forthcoming album about her mum’s ill health, which includes lupus (“She was really poorly in hospital and I thought: how can I write a really sad song that we’re all going to want to shake our tits to?”). Still, as a teenager Thirlwall felt frustrated that they rarely had deep conversations, and race wasn’t discussed. “I think my mam had suppressed that part of herself because she didn’t want to confront the trauma of her experiences of racism,” she says.
During the Black Lives Matter protests, they began sharing stories and “everything clicked into place for me and I had a new understanding and empathy for what she’d been through. Where we’re from there were so many microaggressions, people calling us the P-word, that we were used to it. And in that moment we had to be like, actually it’s not OK for people to call us those things. My mam had to confront people she’d known most of her life. The right people apologise and better themselves, and you get rid of the wrong people. It was a big change for us.”
Despite her dreams of stardom, as a child Thirlwall was shy and tomboyish. She was a victim of racist bullying at her overwhelmingly white secondary school. Coupled with the death of her beloved maternal grandfather when she was 13, this provided the catalyst, she says, for a years-long fight with anorexia. When she successfully auditioned for The X Factor aged 18 in 2011, it was just a few months after having been discharged from hospital, with doctors allowing her to compete on the proviso that she maintained a healthy weight. Wasn’t throwing herself at the mercy of Simon Cowell’s notoriously brutal juggernaut a risky strategy for someone so vulnerable?
“In retrospect, if the show had done a proper mental health assessment, then they wouldn’t have let me on,” she says. Was there not a psych test? “It was very surface. Judging by some of the people in that X Factor house, it wasn’t done properly. Bless them, through no fault of their own, some of those people were mentally unwell. All of the female contestants slept in the same bedroom, and one of them would get up, put all her wigs out and start doing a Britney Spears performance at three in the morning. Or you’d be woken up by the sound of her using her vibrator in the middle of the night. We’d have a meeting with lawyers and someone who was obviously not in the best headspace would be picking their feet and eating it in front of everyone. It was like, ‘Is this the music industry?’”
It wasn’t only the contestants enacting surreal stunts. “At one point I got led to a room in the house to get my foof waxed, which I’d never had before.” Hang on, I interrupt, why would a teenager need a bikini wax to appear on The X Factor? “I don’t know! I just remember lying with my legs akimbo, looking up at the window, thinking, ‘I hope there’s not a pap there.’”
For a show powered by tragic backstories, I’m surprised that Thirlwall’s anorexia wasn’t made part of her onscreen “journey”. “I made sure it wasn’t,” she says. “They’d always try to fish for a sob story, but I didn’t want that to be my identity. I was starting afresh. I thought, OK, this is a huge opportunity for me, it’s a chance to change my life.” She wanted a future bigger than her eating disorder? “Exactly. I wanted to do music more than anything, and if the only way to achieve that was to be healthy, that’s what I had to do. It was the ultimate motivation.”
These days, Thirlwall says that most of the negative comments she receives online are about her putting on weight. That must be incredibly difficult for a recovering anorexic? “I have a daily battle with myself not to go on Ozempic,” she says. “I don’t judge people that do, but because I have a history of eating disorders, I don’t know where taking something like that would end for me.”
She believes that the trolling is a depressing byproduct of reaching a broader audience. “Little Mix fans were all about empowerment and celebrating your body however you look. Now I’m in my 30s and the healthiest I’ve ever been, but every time I post a picture, there are comments saying, ‘She must be pregnant.’ The sad thing is that it’s usually women. But people are used to seeing me in a group environment five or 10 years ago when I was stick-thin because I was in my early 20s with an eating disorder.”
Did she relapse while she was in the band? “I didn’t think it at the time, but when I look back at photos of periods when I was quite unhappy, I think, wow, girlie, you were very, very thin. The pattern was there. Historically, if I’ve ever felt that something is out of my control, then restricting food has been a means of controlling my life in a very toxic way.”
Can she recall a time when she felt particularly out of control? “In summer 2017 I was living in a flat in east London and having really bad night terrors. I’d have such disturbing nightmares – things that are too horrific to say, dreams where I’d be harming myself – that I’d force myself to stay awake by drinking coffee and playing loud music. I’d be going to perform at outdoor concerts having not slept for days.”
Eventually her mum drove down from South Shields and took her home to the family doctor, who prescribed antidepressants. “I felt so sad, and so horrendously guilty for feeling sad. I had the fear that something awful would happen with my mam’s lupus and I wouldn’t be there. I missed family funerals and things like that, and wondered if it was all worth it.”
She executes a hard blink, as if resetting her thoughts, or perhaps banishing a troubling one. “That’s when my mam decided that her and her best mate would come on the road with us – it was so cute. The pair of them like Ab Fab, driving me to each venue, making sure I was fed and watered.” Did she ever consider taking a break from the group? “If you stop working in this business, then everybody wants to know why, and I couldn’t be arsed for everything that came with that. So I kept it moving.”
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Thirlwall is keen to stress that she loved her time in Little Mix – loved performing, loved her bandmates. But being in a precision-engineered pop group for 10 years is not for the delicate. The band’s launch coincided with the advent of Twitter and online fandoms, meaning that the girls found themselves acting as guinea pigs in a strange new land that was yet to be mapped. At the same time, the paparazzi were still a hostile force, not yet rendered obsolete by Instagram. “We were 18 or 19 and the paps would be trying to get pictures up our skirts when we were getting into cars,” she says. “Once we were in the car, they’d try and get in with us to carry on taking pictures, which would be invasive for anyone, but especially young girls.”
Did she ever feel scared? “Oh yeah, I was always scared,” she says with a casual air that suggests she long ago resigned herself to daily terror being the natural order of things.
Over time, Thirlwall and fellow member Leigh-Anne Pinnock “understood that as women of colour we had to work a bit harder to be noticed”. At signings, young fans would skip past Pinnock, the darkest-skinned member of the group. “Then there was a track on our third album where the label suggested that me and Leigh-Anne not be on a song – at all. No backing vocals, nothing. Obviously when you’re a young woman and you’re told that, you’re going to feel like utter shit. We’re working just as hard, we know we can sing – what do you mean you don’t want us on the track?”
Their bandmates Perrie Edwards and Jesy Nelson refused to appear without them. “By halfway through our career, everyone knew not to try and separate us because we were so headstrong about always being equal. I do believe that’s the main reason we lasted so long.”
The band released five platinum albums in six years, a relentless pace when accompanied by the requisite tours and promotional duties. Then, in 2020, the machine ground to a halt when the UK went into lockdown. “When Covid happened it shifted everyone’s perspective on what they wanted. We already knew that our next tour would be the last for a while, but Covid was a bit of a catalyst – it was the beginning of the end in terms of the obvious dynamic shift.”
She’s referring to the departure of Nelson, who left the band in December 2020, saying, “I find the constant pressure of being in a girl group and living up to expectations very hard.” Nelson had been relentlessly trolled for her appearance since the advent of the group, and was hospitalised after taking an overdose in 2013. In 2019 she made a documentary called Odd One Out about these struggles. In the film, Thirlwall is shown saying, “We just had to watch this amazing, funny person become like a broken doll. It was horrible.” She later revealed that she had created a burner account on MailOnline to fire back at Nelson’s trolls.
In October 2020 restrictions were eased enough to allow Little Mix to film their Sweet Melody music video. By Nelson’s account, the shoot triggered a panic attack and she ended up back in hospital. “Then the girls spoke to Mum and said, ‘We think Jesy should come out of this now. She has to look after herself,’” Nelson told the Guardian in 2021. Does that fit Thirlwall’s own recollection? “Some of it, yeah. Partly.”
It’s obviously not a topic that she wants to dwell on, but I’m keen to understand what happened. Thirlwall has said elsewhere that the contact was “abruptly cut off”. Why so, if it was a mutual decision, with Nelson wanting to leave and the rest of the group supporting her decision? “I can’t answer that question because we weren’t the ones that did it.” Were there any attempts made to get in touch with Nelson after she’d left? “Yeah, there were, and then … yeah.”
For the first time our conversation stalls. Was it painful to realise that their friendship couldn’t survive Nelson leaving the group? “It was incredibly painful. For all of us that was the worst part, and it’s taken a lot of understanding and therapy and all those things to work out how that can happen when you’ve devoted so much time and love to someone. My biggest wish for that whole period is that it was handled differently. I just would’ve loved us to all sit and chat about it.
“We absolutely adored Jesy like family – it wasn’t just work,” she continues. “We all wanted to protect her, because we understood that trauma there and what she’d been through. I think we handled it as best as we could. All of a sudden we were a member short in the middle of album promo, with everyone asking what was going on. Obviously we don’t speak any more, and things happened that I don’t think should have, but I still do feel an element of protection towards Jesy. Nobody fully understands how complex the whole thing was – it wasn’t just a case of someone wanting to leave. Numerous things built up in the last year and in the back of my mind I knew it was going to happen. I’d just like for it to have happened in a … better way.”
One positive to come from Nelson’s departure was the remaining members’ determination to resolve any lingering conflicts. The band had been in group therapy at the start of their career, and re-entered as a trio. “We’d seen what happened when we didn’t air things out and so there were apologies between the three of us. We all knew that we really wanted to end things on a high, still adoring each other, so we’d do whatever we had to do to achieve that.”
Thirlwall says that the group’s final – for now – tour was the most fun she’d ever had. “Anything we’d wanted to say had been said by that point and we loved each other more for it, and had more of an understanding of each other. At the end of the tour we were like, ‘Do we really want this to be the last one?’ It’s definitely not a closed door. Even now if one of us is having a bad day as a solo artist, we’re like, ‘Hello, knock, knock, is it time?!’ Not yet, but it will happen.”
For now, Thirlwall is laser-focused on her solo career. While Little Mix worked to a rough template – empowering songs about loving your mates and forgetting useless boyfriends – she has enjoyed exploring more nuanced themes on her album. Singles Angel of My Dreams and It Girl are inspired by her experiences in the music industry. (The former includes the lyric “Selling my soul to a psycho”, seemingly a reference to Cowell’s record label, Syco, which Little Mix were signed to until 2018. It Girl includes the lyrics “I’m not your baby doll … This bitch can’t be controlled”.) “I wanted to be tongue-in-cheek and admit that I love the game and I hate it at the same time,” she says. “It was a way to give an honest account of my experiences without being ‘woe is me’.”
Several of the tracks are about her relationship with Rizzle Kicks singer Jordan Stephens. “When you’re a successful woman it’s really hard to find someone who isn’t intimidated by you or jealous of that,” she says. “When I met Jordan I wasn’t looking for anyone. Me and my best friend, Holly, were in lockdown together, and we promised ourselves a humongous dick hunt when it was over.” After being introduced to Stephens by a mutual friend, and bored of doing Zoom interviews, Thirlwall suggested they liven things up by dressing in business suits and asking each other job interview questions for their first online date. (“One of mine was, ‘Do you clap when the plane lands?’ because that’s a big ick for me.”) After their first in-person meetup, in Greenwich park, “I came home to Holly and was like, I’m so sorry, the dick hunt is over. She was fuming.”
Stephens recently published a memoir detailing his experiences of ADHD, and Thirlwall says dating someone with the disorder has been a learning curve. “When I met him I was like, why is he so messy and why is he never on time?” she says. “We had a few clashes, but it was up to me to do my research and understand his brain. Once I did that it was a turning point in our relationship because he felt loved and supported. I follow a lot of TikTok accounts for people with ADHD partners and they really have been helpful because I have a lot more patience and understanding.”
Now the trio live together in Thirlwall’s six-bedroom house in south-east London. What’s a typical evening for the pop star, her boyfriend and her best friend since secondary school? “Whoever gets in first makes dinner. I’m not a big TV watcher, but them two love Love Island. Me and Holly are like grandmas, so we’ll sit and do a jigsaw – anything to stop me going on my phone. At the moment I’m making a Lego castle. Then there’s always a point in the evening where Jordan knows to take himself to bed because we’re going to watch Lady Gaga music videos.”
The Jade Thirlwall of today is galaxies away from the anxious teenager who auditioned for The X Factor – she’s firmly in control of her own story, with a record deal stipulating that she has final say on all creative decisions. Still, she’s conscious never to lose touch with the inner fangirl who dreamed of emulating her idols. “A lot of making this record has been about pleasing my younger self and tapping into that love of pop that I’ve always had,” she says. “When I’m nervous before going on stage, I picture her in the front row, reminding me not to forget that part of myself.” Young Jade was there at the Brits, on Later … With Jools Holland and at Glastonbury. “I close my eyes and imagine her telling me, ‘You’re going to kill it!’”
And then? “And then I do.”
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