A little under a year ago, when Girli was partway through a gig in Sheffield, a member of the audience walked to the front of the stage and handed her a note. It read, simply: “You’re shit.”
“At the time I was really sad about it,” she recalls now, picking at a cheese sandwich in a greasy spoon back home in London. She arrived via skateboard, breezily ignoring the double takes her neon pink hair and eyebrows inspired. “When it happened in the show I was like, ‘Ahhh, fuck you!’, but then afterwards … you know, it hurts.”
Still, Girli’s music is designed to provoke a reaction. The handful of songs she’s released – the newest is Girl I Met on the Internet – veer between PC Music, bubblegum pop, punk and rap, each one treading a line between catchy and deliberately discomforting. “You thought I was gonna do a ballad?” she asks mockingly, 30 seconds into So You Think You Can Fuck With Me Do Ya, as an electronic drumbeat kicks in over glitchy video game-style music. “Fuck off.” Easy listening this ain’t.
When the 18-year-old emerged on to the music scene last year, a vision of shocking pink singing about ASBOys and hypermasculinity, critics dubbed her music’s “bratpop”. It was a term she initially encouraged, then swiftly discarded. “I started realising, more and more, that people used the fact that I say what I think to say that I was a bit of a bitch, or call me a brat, and that really annoyed me. The word ‘brat’ is always used for women. If a guy speaks out he’s confident or rock’n’roll and rebellious. If a girl speaks out, she’s a brat or a bitch, or she’s spoilt. So I stopped calling it that.”
Blinded by her confrontational style, those who called Girli’s music bratpop also tended to ignore the social commentary scattered throughout it. While still at school, Girli – whose real name, though she hates it, is Milly Toomey – was a Young MP for Camden. She even made a speech to parliament about workers’ rights. Today, she breezes over her foray into politics with more mild embarrassment than pride, but a desire to change attitudes still remains. “What’s a girl, what’s a boy?” she asks in Girls Get Angry Too. “Why are there gender sections for toys?”
“I went to a school where if a boy even tried to wear makeup, he’d be fucking beaten up,” she says wearily. “You were taken the piss out of if people thought you were gay – and that was just a normal comprehensive school in London. Then I left and met different people and started doing music and started meeting creative people.”
That’s when everything changed. After spending six months playing coffee shops and seedy open mic nights while producing her own demos, Girli started getting people’s attention. She dropped out of college (though her mum made her carry on with English A-level) to pursue music full time, and now “it’s obviously taken over. This is my life.”
That’s not to say she’s got everything figured out just yet. “I’m still very confused about what I want. Some days I’ll be like, ‘I wanna be as successful as Taylor Swift and take over the world,’ and other days I’m like, ‘Actually no, I don’t want to be that big, I just want to keep my integrity and focus on making good music.’ I think part of me is scared that to be that widespread around the world, [I would] have to lose some bits of me that are more outspoken, and I just refuse to do that.”
It’s an ethos that’s working in her favour – though her candour still tends to alarm people. During a recent studio session, she wrote the tongue-in-cheek lyric “suck my clit”, only to be told by the man she was working with that she should probably take that line out. If it had said “suck my dick”, she says, no one would have batted an eyelid. The lyric stayed in. “I was like, ‘I’m gonna sing that.’ I want people to say what they actually mean in pop music. Especially because a lot of mainstream pop isn’t really written by the people who perform it, so it’s not really personal and it’s not really opinionated, it’s just kind of generic. I never wanted to be someone that everyone just liked, because if everyone likes you it means you’re inoffensive. All of the biggest legends are people who really divided opinion.”
And if that leads to more people passing her notes while she’s onstage? She’s ready for it now. “When I first started performing live, it was an act of like, ‘I don’t give a shit.’ Now I literally don’t. I could stand up right now and start singing to everyone in here. People can think what they want.”
- Girli plays at the Harley, Sheffield, on 28 September. Then touring in the UK until 3 October.
