‘I won’t sugarcoat it’: JADE on Little Mix, going solo, and her candid new single ‘IT Girl’

As one quarter of Little Mix, Jade Thirlwall breathed fresh life into British pop. Now, newly solo with a debut electro-pop hit to her name, she speaks to Annabel Nugent about the other side of fame, why she loves to ‘poke the bear a bit’ – and the joy of embracing her Arab heritage after a decade hiding it

JADE: ‘I don’t mind piping up and clapping back’ (Conor Cunningham)

Before Jade Thirlwall was Jade from Little Mix, she was Jade from South Shields, contestant number 159420 on The X Factor. It was on that show in 2011 that Thirlwall, baby-faced at 18, joined hands with three other teen hopefuls to form Little Mix, setting off a chain reaction of events that would see them become Britain’s biggest, best-selling, Brit-winning girl group since the Spice Girls.

It’s been three years since Little Mix announced their hiatus in 2022 – an eternity in music – but within minutes of meeting Thirlwall, who is now 32, I’m reminded of the iron grip their slick, snappy bubblegum pop had on the nation. The chorus of “Shout Out to My Ex” – one of several No 1s; a true bop unmatched in its stinging takedown of a bad boyfriend – comes to mind instantly, as easily recalled as the name of my first pet or my mum’s birthday.

Thirlwall enters the restaurant in megastar mode, which is to say incognito. The brim of her fluffy leopard-print hat flops over her eyes as she hurriedly sits down at our table upstairs undetected by the craning necks below. She’s wearing a baggy jumper and red tartan sweatpants. On anyone else, it might look like pyjamas.

There is, of course, something missing from this picture. Or three somethings: the friendly faces of her Little Mix bandmates, who have for so long existed cheek-to-cheek with Thirlwall. Today, it’s just her. Interviews are different “because I don’t have my girls egging me on”, she says, recalling one of their first ever sit-downs as a band. “We got asked what love smelt like, and we said ‘C**k!’”

Thirlwall is plenty of fun on her own. Which is a good thing too, given that she is now making a go of it solo. As JADE, she released her debut hit “Angel of My Dreams” last July, following it up with “Fantasy” and “Midnight Cowboy”. Next up is “IT Girl”, a dance-pop track that she likes to describe – she tells me with a delighted grin – as “‘Angel of My Dreams’s c**ty little sister”. Both are bass-heavy, synth-driven, lashing judgements of the industry that made her.

Set for release on 10 January, “IT Girl” is a hard and fast electro-pop bop about being poked and prodded, papped and penalised as a woman in the spotlight. That said, Thirlwall is hardly whingeing. Instead, there’s a wink of a threat in her vocals: “I’m not your thing/ I’m not your baby doll/ Not your puppet on a string”. You can almost hear the smirk as she declares, with a schoolyard taunt: “You’ll never own me/ Na-na-na-na-na”.

Like all her solo outings so far, “IT Girl” is boisterous and elastic, testing the limits of pop music as well as any expectations we might’ve had. “There’s still so much that people don’t know about me, so I was eager to surprise people, poke the bear a bit,” she says. “I did feel anxious about pissing people off or any sort of backlash, but I have to write about what my experiences are – I’m not going to sugarcoat it. It is, you know, my reality.”

If the Jade of Little Mix was born that fateful day on The X Factor, this Jade – the one in front of me, currently steering her avant-pop solo career – was born years earlier at her local Italian restaurant in the seaside town of South Shields, where as a tween, she’d belt out Britney Spears songs for pensioners as though she were headlining her own Las Vegas residency. “I’d be singing ‘If You Seek Amy’ while middle-aged people were trying to enjoy their lasagne,” she says. “I guess I always knew I wanted to be a pop star.”

Fallen angel: Jade Thirlwall takes aim at the music industry in her solo material (Press)

Thirlwall is a student of pop, studying at the feet of giants: Britney, Madonna, Gaga, Beyoncé. “With Little Mix it was breakup songs and female empowerment music, which I love, but I’m doing it in my own way now. Now it’s a lot more personal to me,” she says. “It’s for the gays and the gals.”

That last part has quickly become a running joke among fans. It’s not intentional, Thirlwall says: “It just naturally happens. I’ve been heavily influenced by that culture, whether it’s the club scene or my family and friends around me in London.” She is wary of ever coming off as performative. “Like ‘yas queen’ and all that s***,” Thirlwall cringes. “It’s a tricky tightrope to navigate, because I think, as an ally, you don’t want to do too much.”

It helps that Thirlwall has spent much of her career championing the LGBT+ community: in 2021, she won the Allyship award from Gay Times. And when she has got it wrong, she’s the first to admit it. When Little Mix were called out for their “Confetti” music video, in which the bandmates dressed up in drag but failed to platform any actual drag artists, Thirlwall took it on the chin. “We are in a scary time now, what with cancel culture – which obviously some people are more deserving of,” she says. “But when you’re just trying to exist as a human, you’re going to slip up, and sometimes the key is to say, ‘Yeah, that’s f***ed up and that’s my fault. I’m sorry.’”

Dream come true: Little Mix pictured winning ‘The X Factor’ alongside coach Tulisa in 2011 (Rex Features)

Her fans are pretty much the only reason she returns to Twitter despite routinely deleting her account. “It’s a cesspool of hatred but at the same time, I do genuinely love it when fans are giving genuine critique about something in the campaign,” she says, citing “IT Girl” as an example. Originally, that song was titled “That’s Showbiz, Baby” until fans suggested otherwise. “You have to listen, right?” she smiles.

That is, except for the times when people are hurling abuse from behind a screen. Thirlwall is surprised the trolls still get to her. “I’ve been doing this for so long and I’ve had a lot of negative comments over the years, which has given me a thick skin,” she says. “But I guess we were a bit protected in that we had each other, and now I’m really on my own. People have to find something to criticise; if it’s not the music, it’s how I look, that I’ve put on weight, the campaign, or whatever. It’s literally always something.

“It’s still such a bizarre concept to me,” she adds. “You wouldn’t walk down the street and have someone walk past you and say, ‘You look really s*** today.’”

JADE: ‘People have to find something to criticise; if it’s not the music, it’s how I look, that I’ve put on weight, the campaign, or whatever’ (Conor Cunningham)

This is a woman brave enough to present herself for judgement not once but three times on The X Factor before making it through. Looking back now, she says there were several things about the show that were “pretty f***ed up”. For one thing, all female contestants, no matter their age, shared bunk beds in a big dorm room. “Even at 18, I knew there were people who weren’t mentally well in there, keeping everyone up at night,” she recalls. “I don’t know if there was even security outside the house. It’s scary to think about now, but I was too young to realise that at the time.” Liam Payne comes to mind. The One Direction star auditioned during the same series as Thirlwall; both were aged 14 when they took the stage. He died tragically in an accident involving drugs in October. Today, though, I’m asked not to bring up his death.

When The X Factor aired its final episode in 2018, Thirlwall welcomed its conclusion. “I think it had to end,” she says soberly. “I don’t think that kind of show can exist any more. We’re in a different place now.” In what way? “We wouldn’t put someone that’s mentally unwell on a TV screen and laugh at them while they sing terribly. The concept of a joke act on a show is just cruel. It’s all very Roman empire.” Thirlwall pauses. “But then at the same time, was it not the best training ever for me to enter the music industry?”

Thirlwall’s feelings toward The X Factor are much like her feelings toward the industry as a whole: bittersweet. “I don’t know anyone that’s come off that show and not had some sort of mental health issue on the back of it,” she says, “but also, even now, personally I’m conflicted criticising [it], because it changed my life. I was from a very normal working-class family up north, I had tried sending demos in to labels, I’d gigged all over, I was doing everything I could to make it, and I needed a show like that to give me a chance.”

I don’t know anyone that’s come off ‘The X Factor’ and not had some sort of mental health issue on the back of it

Thirlwall was one of the lucky ones. “I’d say five per cent of the people that went on there have come out of it not unscathed, but having survived; the other 95 per cent have suffered in silence,” she says. “How do you go from being on that show to back to your nine-to-five? How do you get signed to the label, think you’ve made it, and then once your song doesn’t hit the Top 10, you’re just dropped? It’s so savage, this machine that we’re a part of. Even back then, we knew how lucky we were every day that we were still signed.”

To the cynic, Little Mix's origin story might come off a little soulless: a commercial music machine piecing together bits of a financially viable puzzle. Thirlwall herself had apprehensions, her nose scrunching up when X Factor judge Kelly Rowland floated the idea of putting her in a group. “I had flashes of The Pussycat Dolls,” she says now. “I’d just turned 18 and was panicking about being oversexualised, because I don’t think there was anything remotely sexy about me.”

Thirlwall, knowing herself to be “introverted and shy with quirky tastes”, also feared the conflict she thought would be inevitable in a girl group. “I thought about lead singers and bitches, because the press was always going on about girl bands feuding... I was like, ‘Oh God, how is this going to work?’”

Little Mix became the UK’s biggest girl group since the Spice Girls (Getty)

Happily, it did. “The stars aligned,” she says. “I don’t know if you believe in this stuff, but when we were put on stage together for the first time and the judges asked if we could make it work, I just looked at them and I did literally picture us being huge. I had that weird belly feeling – and they were all dressed as dorky as me. And we were all the same height.”

That’s not to say there weren’t challenges. Competition was drummed up between them; at the beginning, the idea of a lead singer was pushed time and time again. “We said no. We all wanted to be equal, and we were very adamant about that,” says Thirlwall. “I think that’s one of the reasons we lasted as long as we did: nobody was seen as the main one or the best one.”

What Thirlwall found in Little Mix wasn’t the diva scrimmage she had feared, but a sisterhood that proved invaluable when the full scale of what they had won revealed itself. In 2018, Little Mix released “Strip”, inspired by a tabloid story attacking Perrie Edwards’s and Thirlwall’s looks. It was accompanied by a naked photoshoot, in which they branded themselves with the various insults they’d received in black paint. Right on cue, Piers Morgan jumped in: “What is empowering about this? It’s using sex to sell records.” Months later, they clipped the moment on Good Morning Britain for their tour.

JADE and RAYE: Both artists, who worked together on new single ‘Midnight Cowboy’, have been outspoken about their treatment in the music industry (Getty for Fendi)

“It ruffled all the right feathers,” says Thirlwall. “The minute you do a chess move like that, you’re letting the world know you’ve seen it all and you don’t care any more.” She has never been the type to cower. When Noel Gallagher slated Little Mix after they won the Brit award for Best British Group in 2021, falsely claiming that they didn’t write their own music, Thirlwall appeared on Never Mind the Buzzcocks with a brilliant retort: “It’s a shame really, because we are definitely the most successful girl group in the country, and he’s not even the most successful performer in his family.”

“I don’t mind piping up or clapping back at people,” she tells me now, “especially with that – it’s like, ‘Pipe down!’ Just so yawn!” To be fair, she adds, “part of me is proud of it. It’s a sign you’re doing well when the Gallaghers pick a fight.”

It’s been 14 years since Little Mix formed. “It did feel like us against the world,” says Thirlwall. “Even from a womanhood sense, we all had our periods at the same time. We were together 24/7 so our bodies were literally aligned.” They’d arrive at the studio all wearing the same colour or outfit. “We hated splitting up to do interviews and going to events on our own. It was a little co-dependent,” she admits. “I think that’s why, when we did go on hiatus, it was almost like a breakup.”

From an early age, I realised that people don’t like the Arab part of my heritage

When they each set about writing their solo music, was there a sense of sisterly competition? “That is sort of thrust upon you by the public or by the fans, so we didn’t want to play a part in that.”

Thirlwall has only a few regrets about that time in her life. “Maybe I would have taken more time out for myself,” she ponders. “When things would get a bit tough for me mentally, to have the strength to say ‘No, I need a break.’” But nobody wants to be the one to hit pause. “It’s a conveyor-belt music machine, you’re churning out music, then you’re on tour, and then you get two weeks off for Christmas before you’re back in the game,” she says, exhausted even recounting it. “It was like we were on this wheel, and it got faster and faster until the wheels just came off.”

JADE: ‘I’m doing it for the gays and the gals’ (Getty)

Her other regret is a biggie: the fact she did not speak up about her Arab heritage sooner. (Thirlwall is a quarter Yemeni and a quarter Egyptian.) There was a big Yemeni community in South Shields, she says, and Thirlwall grew up right next to the mosque. But things turned in 2001. “When 9/11 happened, I really saw the narrative change,” she recalls. “I saw people being mean to my grandad or hurling abuse outside the mosque. From an early age, I realised that people don’t like that part of my heritage.”

Those fears were confirmed when she entered secondary school, where she was bullied for having an Arabic background. “When I got put in the band and moved to London, all of a sudden everyone was asking where I was from,” she says. “No one had really asked me that before, because people in my hometown just knew, so the idea of being racially ambiguous or white-passing was new to me. I thought, maybe it’s better this way, with me entering the industry... All I had seen was negative press about Muslim people, Arab people. I was scared to promote that.”

Staying silent is perhaps the biggest regret of her life. “It makes me sad now, because I’m so proud of my heritage now, but I think I have to forgive my younger self for that,” she says. “I don’t think it’s ever too late to embrace who you are.”

JADE’s new track ‘IT Girl’ is out on Friday 10 January