Charlotte OC: pop's new sensation

Rather than being scarred by such an incident, however, she stood her ground then wrote a song about it. It’s apparent that Charlotte O’Connor, 26, whose album Careless People is one of 2017’s most intriguing releases, is not the sort of person who likes being told what to do. She was, she tells me as we sit sipping black coffee in a Hackney café, nearly thrown out of the private all-girls school that her Malawi-Indian hairdresser mother and Irish salesman father had worked ‘super hard’ to get her in to. At 15, she was also fired from her mother’s salon in Blackburn after just a week, for being rude to customers. And when her father — a music obsessive who was briefly in Liverpool band The Merseybeats in the 1960s — wanted to get her to give guitar-playing a go, the only way he could do it was by telling his daughter they were going for a drive ‘to get chewing gum’, then dropping her off outside the house of a guitar teacher.

Initially, she ‘didn’t want to, because I thought it was a boy’s instrument’. But an hour later, she says, ‘It just made sense. And as soon as I started getting a little bit better at playing, I started playing melodies over the top, then lyrics. And it was just like this massive explosion.’ Within a year, she was mixing records and uploading them to Myspace, and before long, still just 16 years old, she ‘got all these followers. I started gaining this… status.’ Soon snapped up by a major label, she was put to work on an album. But the label made the mistake of telling her what sort of singer she should be. ‘An image was pushed upon me that just wasn’t me,’ she says. ‘At that age, when you’re told to do something your reaction is automatically, “I don’t want to do it!” Making music became a chore.’ After two years of work, she took a call from her manager, who informed her that her record company ‘don’t know what to do with you’.

Rather than this being game over, to O’Connor it felt like very good news indeed. ‘I felt like I’d taken my bra off,’ she smiles. ‘The relief! I wanted to be going out with my mates, getting drunk. To be 18, not on a plane with this big weight on my shoulders.’ Insisting she was upset ‘for about a day’, she went back home to Blackburn and, after a stint helping her mum out at the salon, went off to Berlin to party for a week. Quickly, she found inspiration in the city’s eclectic, electric nightlife. ‘Berlin felt like home,’ she says — and she means that literally. ‘That industrial thing they have going on is like Blackburn, like Manchester. Everything feels effortless there.’

Back in London and staying in friends’ flats, she began writing new music. A friend sent it to a management company in the States; within a few weeks, she found herself on a plane to LA to work with the legendary Tim Anderson, a man who has also assisted with the in-it-for-the-long-haul careers of Solange and Sia. They gelled instantly. ‘I had this whole aesthetic in my head about darkness and magic and religion, something otherworldly and ethereal. And when I told Tim that, he just played this chord and it became ‘Colour My Heart’.’

Released as a low-key single in 2013, this was to be the song that showed O’Connor where she needed to go. After the disappointment of her first crack at the music world, she was understandably loath to rush her new work — ‘after the first couple of EPs came out, I got a bit pressured by the buzz, it felt a bit intense’ — and so it was over two years of painstaking care (alongside a lot of LA partying) that Careless People was produced, with the help of the much-more-sympathetic label who signed Lana Del Rey. Described by critics as ‘jaw-dropping’ and ‘glossy’, the album’s name stems from The Great Gatsby, and the casual way in which Tom and Daisy discard Gatsby. The record was made while she was going through a break-up, and also falling in love afresh — ‘I was being careless, and caring too much, all at the same time. You’re very careless between the ages of 22 and 25.’ Now, while she wouldn’t call herself a grown-up, she enjoys thinking of herself as a woman, rather than ‘that girl’.

And so with her songs creeping into more and more people’s heads daily, she now has just one more problem to overcome: renting in London. After a stint out east in Limehouse, she’s currently back home in Blackburn living with her parents and older sister. Blackburn may be a little more chilled than the capital — ‘When I go home I can just unwind. It’s like being on a retreat, except with me drinking loads of wine’ — but she intends to be heading back very soon. ‘London is my favourite city in the world,’ she says, looking out of the window. ‘I feel like I grew up here. I feel like it’s my city.’

Charlotte OC’s debut album ‘Careless People’ is out now.