Olivia Devine had to sell her car to become a pop star. Or thatâs part of her story anyway. Two years ago, while working a bog-standard cafe job in her hometown of Whitley Bay â a blustery seaside town not far from Newcastle â she realised she wasnât going to be getting anywhere if she stuck around. âAs you probably know, the Northâs not really got the biggest pop music scene,â she jokes, clocking my regional Scottish accent as we slouch into a sofa in an east London rehearsal space. âThere was no place for me there. Itâs all indie bands who play their guitars halfway up their necks!â The 21-year-old was doing everything she could, playing to modest crowds at open mic nights while brash lads playing mediocre rock lapped up the limelight.
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But the Northâs cynicism wound up being a gift: it inspired her to move from Tyneside to London. With little more than the cash from selling that car and a grant from a local music charity, she signed a year-long lease for a room in a flat above a Sainsbury's and set her sights on breaking her own pop career. âI donât know how I planned to get away with that,â she says, laughing. A few weeks after her arrival, plagued by the panic any artist gets during a dry spell, she contemplated slinking downstairs to the supermarket to hand in her CV. Broke and living with the fear of having to move back home, Olivia was, as she puts it âkind of shitting myselfâ.Her patience paid off, though. Soon, as she tells it, industry people started to catch wind of the Geordie girl whose pop demos took a snapshot of adolescence and womanhood through a frank lens: they were doing the rounds on Soundcloud and winning her the approval of major label bosses. After moving here only hoping to become a songwriter on a publishing contract, just two months after Oliviaâs arrival, she signed a record deal with Warner Music and became the pop star, L Devine (an adult film performerâs already using the name âOlivia Devineâ) instead. But this isnât the story of a young woman Moving to the Big City, adopting a stage name and becoming an overnight superstar. Not yet, anyway. A year after she dropped her first EP Growing Pains to pop blogs and âtastemakerâ praise, L Devine is still waiting for that breakout moment.
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Sheâs teased fans with effervescent and relatable pop (paired with arresting short films by Dua Lipa and Rihanna collaborator, Emil Nava). The sugar-rush sounds of this yearâs âLike You Like Thatâ and her latest single, âNervousâ exemplify what anxious young fans pining for love want to hear. And yet a year later â with her Peer Pressure mixtape out on Friday 16 November â it still feels like L Devine hasnât yet pulled in a mass audience for her deservedly chart-ready tracks.But this is part of a broader trend in British pop, and one sheâs aware of. âNow, everyone knows that youâve got to watch someone grow, and that there needs to be a lot more music before you get to the big stuff â unless youâre a viral sensation.â She shrugs. Her own trajectory, I say, reminds me of Dua Lipaâs: steady at first, and emblematic of how much harder it is to break British pop stars now. âPreviously, you could burn through two singles quite quickly and there was also a big physical story to tell,â said Hannah Neaves, director of marketing and artist development at management company Tap, speaking to the Guardian about the new challenges in pushing UK acts to super-stardom. âYou have to be prepared to spend three years getting to a position that previously would have taken you nine months.â And so it makes sense that Liv smiles while saying âFor me, itâs been a nice upwards crawl so far â nothing too fast.â
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Itâs the kind of patience that women in pop were barely afforded a decade ago, as major labels swept up promising young talents, threw them out into world billed as âthe next big thingâ, failing to give them a chance to establish an identity before dropping them. As chart columnist James Masterton put it to the Guardian late last year: âItâs a potential consequence of ever-tighter margins. Managers are on less of a hair-trigger to write off an investment, which is to everyoneâs benefit.â So for someone like Liv, that means Warner (also Dua Lipaâs label, by the way) are willing to wait it out while she bubbles on the relative underground. For Warner then, it seems, Liv is a long-term pop investment.That may come down to the content of her music, which marries both a message and radio-friendly structure. Itâs a model that worked beautifully for Dua, propelling her to fame with the feminism-lite of âNew Rules,â several years after she was signed. Lead single âPeer Pressure" is a Heathers-sampling ode to teen anxiety, pingers and the arm-twisting so-called mates who try make us follow the crowd. âThe partyâs in an hour but Iâm crying in a towel,â Liv sings in the first verse, ââCause this fucking picture doesnât even look like me now.â There it is: the blend of a relatable premise â âdonât we all wish we could pull away from going along with things, and do what feels right?â â with a bouncing, finger-clicking beat that you wouldnât expect to find under a verse that includes the words âexistential thinking.â
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It says a lot about Livâs knack for songwriting that âPeer Pressureâ was almost recorded by an artist who famously writes all her own hits. A few days after Liv worked on it, the songâs producer Justin Raisen was in the studio with Charli XCX. She wanted to hear what heâd been working on; after hearing the âPeer Pressureâ demo, "She asked Justin if she could [record] it,â Liv gushes. âIf a producer had cut your song without asking youâd usually be pissed, but because it was Charli, I was like âI need to hear it right now!ââ In the end, Liv decided to keep the song for herself, though you can still hear the Pop 2 starâs Auto-Tuned harmonies running through the final cut. The 21-year-old raises her eyebrows knowingly, smirking: âWin/win, cause now Iâve got a secret Charli XCX version of 'Peer Pressure' that only I get to hear.ââAfter writing that song, I felt like I should have a strong message in every song I write,â Liv says, staring past me to gather her thoughts. After all, pop has never had to tackle anything, really. Driven by melody, lyrics can usually feel like an afterthought, but L Devine considers herself an artist pushing back against that. âNow, itâs harder to get away with saying nothing. Especially because of theâŠâ â she pulls out air quotes â ââpolitical climateâ weâre living in. Thereâs a social commentary in pop now, because thatâs what peopleâs lives revolve around. Whether thatâs social media or things like #MeToo, itâs all become such a huge part of our lives.âLivâs tweaked and reworked her songs about young womanhood in rooms full of men much older than her, but insists that â despite what others think â sheâs always the one in control. âIâm usually pretty ballsy and I wonât take any shit,â Liv laughs. âIf a guy producer is telling me what to do, then Iâll be like, âWell youâre not gonna get a cut on the EP then!ââ. She remembers the moment, not that long ago, when a male producer wandered into one of her writing sessions and picked apart her work. She rolls her eyes a little, imitating him: ââIâm just not really sure a young girl would say that!ââ he âSo I said, âWell guess what? A young girl just wrote it.ââThe more we speak, the more I find myself hoping that L Devine's ascent to fame will be propelled by her blissful ignorance about the pop machine â and the expectations it holds for young women. She tells me she didn't know what BRIT School was until she struck up conversations with songwriters when she moved to the capital. And as for the fact that she doesnât sing in her own accent? She admits, with a chuckle and a demonstration (âPee-yah presh-sha!â), that that was her own call: âI donât think anyoneâs sang in Geordie before!â Based on her sound alone, Liv has the making of loads of top 40 hits in her. But for now sheâs focusing on that long game. And sheâll be doing it without worrying about the indie boys, the people who doubt her songwriting â or, for now, having to drive that car back up to Whitley Bay.You can find Douglas on Twitter.