JADE on her initial fears of being placed in Little Mix: ‘I didn’t see myself as a conventional girl’s girl’
“But it turned out to be the best thing to ever happen to me for my confidence and understanding of sisterhood,” she told Rolling Stone UK
Jade Thirlwall – aka JADE – has told Rolling Stone UK of her initial fears of being placed in Little Mix.
JADE was named our Trailblazer at last week’s Rolling Stone UK Awards 2024, and also appears on the cover of The Awards Issue of Rolling Stone UK.
In the cover feature, JADE discusses how she believed she wasn’t “conventional” enough to fit in a girl band. She said: “I didn’t see myself as a conventional girl’s girl. I was nerdy and quiet. When they told me I was gonna be put in a girl group, I automatically thought of Pussycat Dolls. I thought, ‘Oh no, I’m not sexy — and if they’re bitchy, I’ll struggle because I’m not confrontational at all. I shrink at any drama.’”
In the end, Thirlwall said that it “turned out to be the best thing to ever happen to me for my confidence and understanding of sisterhood.”
Read the JADE cover feature in full here.
Elsewhere in the feature, she discussed her worries at being able to distinguish a solo career from her work with the band, saying: “I always associated Little Mix with my womanhood as I spent my whole adult life with the girls. I didn’t know how to be a woman in my own right. When we first stopped, I was lost because I was like, ‘Fuck, every decision I’ve made over the past decade hasn’t been my own.’ It took me a minute to get my independence back.”
JADE also discussed her mixed heritage and her initial hesitation to represent it in her work. In the cover feature, JADE – who is half Arab: one-quarter Yemeni, one-quarter Egyptian – discusses how she initially struggled to work out how to honour her heritage in her work, saying that she is now trying to make it a clearer part of her artistic identity.
“I’d only ever seen negative stereotypes of Arab people in the press, so I was scared to promote my heritage,” she told Rolling Stone UK. “I feel sad for my younger self that I could’ve been the representation I needed back then. I try to make up for that now.”
At the Rolling Stone UK Awards at London’s Roundhouse, JADE thanked ‘myself’ as she picked up The Trailblazer Award. In her acceptance speech, she said: “Being able to be brutally honest about my journey and my career, and for that to be well received is really amazing.”