I’ve watched Anne-Marie on stage belt out her hits, 2002, Ciao Adios and FRIENDS zipping around stage with the energy of a Duracell bunny. Then having interviewed her a few times, I have seen a different side to her, a vulnerable side, an Anne-Marie who has had to overcome and somehow learn to manage crippling anxiety.
WATCH: Anne-Marie emotionally recounts the depths of her anxiety in GLAMOUR UNFILTERED
But Anne-Marie is by definition a gusty kick-ass fighter, pouring her internal struggles into her lyrics and becoming all the more empowered for it. Now as she releases her YouTube documentary, How To Be Anne-Marie, the singer has finally managed to crack how to be truly herself by discussing childhood bullying openly for the first time and facing the demons she has long buried. It’s at times an emotional watch but ultimately an uplifting one.
Here the former GLAMOUR UK cover star opens up about the transformative experience of making the documentary, dealing with bullying IRL and online, how the sisterhood around her has kept her strong and revisit her cover interview from earlier this year…
The documentary is so emotional at times – what was the hardest thing for you to have to revisit and film?
All of it touched a nerve. I went into this thinking, ‘I want to show people the ins and outs of the music industry.’ Then it ended up being therapy for what I've been through in my life, what made me who I am today, and it was all tough questions. One big thing was school because I've never been back there since and I've never spoken to my parents about it. I told them a little while ago that I'd had a tough time and I didn't enjoy it very much, but I didn't tell them the reasoning behind it. It made me have a conversation with them and I was really nervous about it because I didn't want to. I didn't want to bring it up. I almost feel still scared about it as I did when I was at school.
That's a lot to do with therapy as well. Starting therapy has blown my mind, the dot-to-dot and putting these moments all together is crazy. This documentary basically started a new journey off because in life, you feel like you're getting closer and closer to being happy all the time. You're like, ‘Oh, I understand that now. Okay, next!’ But you never really think about it too much; you're just doing it. This documentary made me sit and think about it. So that was amazing but also really tough.
WATCH: Anne-Marie's emotional documentary here
Someone compared therapy to me like having a root canal, you have to get in there and find the root of the problem, which can be really painful before it can get better…
Absolutely – your analogy was completely perfect. I felt like my whole life I've been on the surface of life, finding stuff out about myself and not properly dealing with it. Then in lockdown I hit rock bottom and it was so tough, I was just lost. I didn't have music to get my mind off things. I didn't have anything distracting me. I had to go head-on with my problems, and it was horrible, but I am so glad that it happened. Otherwise I think my whole life, I would have just been bubbling.
What do you think you learned from that process of sitting with yourself?
That everything in my life is stemmed from something specific from my childhood. The fact that everything that you know now and core things like your morals are from your childhood is blown over. What I've had to learn is the things that I base myself on and the morals that I have aren't necessarily right. They're just what I've learned growing up with and I've had to strip back everything and reconnect new memories and new things. For example, trust is such an issue for me - it's a deep problem - and that comes from things that happened to me at school and not being able to talk about things. I always kept everything in. I never let anything out. And slowly understanding not everyone's an asshole is a really good realisation actually!
Does your experience of bullying at school make it harder to deal with the online bullies today?
I've only just come to grips with what happened at school now. But then, thinking back over the years of seeing bad comments, it does go into me and then you just automatically believe it because of what you've been through. Through therapy and it's going to be a different experience online now because before I've read bad comments and I believe them, that's the problem. I've actually believed what people are saying. Like reading, ‘Oh my God, her hair look sh*t,’ I would then think, ‘Oh, f**k it. I'm not going to do that hairstyle again.’ It's so stressful that and annoying that I've almost lived my life through other people's opinions and eyes. I'm definitely going to have days where I look online and someone goes, ‘Oh, she sounds rubbish.’ And I'm going to be like, ‘Oh yeah, I did.’ But I think that just knowing that you are through that situation is what makes it easier to read.
I love the amazing relationship you have with your manager Jazz in the documentary and the wonderful sisterhood you have around you. When have you leaned into that sisterhood the most?
Every single day. Everyone who works with me closely is a woman - I didn't even realize - but I must have subconsciously done it. Jazz is an incredible human and she has all of these amazing characteristics about her that I've always thought, ‘I really want that.’ She seems to just be really good at dealing with things and having the right thing to say all the time. I think the first thing was when I was really badly struggling with anxiety and I couldn't walk into a room or go to the shop. I'd spend time with her, and she'd just be so relaxed when she's speaking to strangers. That made me want to go on the journey of understanding and not just settling that I have anxiety and, ‘oh, I'm just going to live like this,’ because people that have anxiety need to understand that you don't have to just live with it. You have to deal with it and change to make it make sense for you. I didn't want to live my life not being able to walk to the shops. I think I'm 90% there now. I definitely understand and know myself more now out of lockdown and going through that situation and having to face everything head on than I have over the rest of my lifespan. I've learned more about myself in three months than I have in 13 years.
Do you feel like not having the ups and downs of going on stage has helped?
At some points I feel like the feelings I get on stage have almost dampened everything else I experience. The stuff that I used to be excited about, I don't get any pleasure from anymore and that's not physical pleasure or surface pleasure, it's like my brain actually doesn't spark. It's a weird feeling and it's scary because I want to be excited about everything. It is definitely a strange thing because it's addictive. It's definitely something that I think therapy is going to help with as I've also realized that I'm a very extreme person, that I don't really like being in the middle and that's what lockdown was really a lot of being in the middle. The problem is you have to be comfortable with being in the middle. Your life can't be from extreme to extreme all the time. That's something that I have to work on because the middle for me is not enjoyable, but it's important. So, I need to learn how to do that.
How To Be Anne-Marie is available now on YouTube and revisit our cover interview with Anne-Marie below
Anne-Marie’s GLAMOUR cover interview took place before the Coronavirus outbreak hit the UK, but her personal account of severe anxiety and how she has learnt to manage it is all the more powerful now. Here, the popstar opens up to GLAMOUR’s Josh Smith for our Mental Health Issue about how her negative thoughts almost prevented her meteoric rise, and she shows how, even in the darkest of times, we can – and will – get through it…
I first met Anne-Marie just over two years ago when I presented a video where I challenged (and she readily accepted) the then 26-year-old singer to imitate Kylie Jenner and prank call her long-time musical collaborators Rudimental. She also confessed that her best pal – and songwriting partner – Ed Sheeran had gifted her “the biggest dildo you could buy in shops”.
She was warm, energetic and refreshingly confident and didn’t seem to me to have anything on her mind except chart domination. Her debut album Speak Your Mind followed six months later and she went on to become the biggest selling breakthrough artist of 2018. Her songs, 2002 and Friends became two of the bestselling songs of the year and she has now been nominated for nine Brit Awards.
Despite diamond record sales and downloads, and her 5.8 million Instagram followers, behind the scenes Anne-Marie was suffering from severe anxiety that got to such an intense level as her success increased, that some days she struggled to even answer the phone. Her anxious thoughts – especially in relation to her own body image – started when she was a teenager growing up in Essex with her mum, dad and younger sister Samantha.
“I think I became conscious of how I looked at around 13 years old because of magazines and pictures online,” Anne-Marie reveals. “I started setting myself against others and thinking, ‘Oh, I don’t like myself anymore because I wish I had that, and I wish I had that.’ I formed hips when I was a teenager and I used to get picked on for them. The whole of my teenage years I’d think, ‘I'm not going to eat food because I don’t want to have big hips.’ But then when I got older, I was like, actually I do want hips cause they're sick.”
“Then I started munching loads of food – which was the opposite of what I was doing before,” she adds, shaking her head. “For me, it went from being, ‘Oh, I want to be thin, I want to be slim,’ to ‘I want to be thick. I want a big bum!’ At that point I realised when I’m skinny, I’m not healthy and when I’ve got too much weight on my body, I have no energy. I had to learn that you have what you have. My bones are the size they are, and I can only change the outside layer so much – this is how my body shape is meant to be and I am OK with that. I just need my body to be where it’s supposed to be. I don’t need to do anything to change anymore.”
Her anxiety and negative thoughts continued – albeit in a different form – once she started experiencing success as an artist. But today, sitting in a very pink south London café – which aptly complements her new pink bob and exclusively pink wardrobe (part of the campaign for her yet-to-be-named second album) – Anne-Marie has enough distance from those experiences to be able to open up completely about them.
"I realised when I’m skinny, I’m not healthy and when I’ve got too much weight on my body, I have no energy. I had to learn that you have what you have. My bones are the size they are, and I can only change the outside layer so much – this is how my body shape is meant to be and I am OK with that." (Anne-Marie on body image)
“If I look back at the last seven to 10 years of my life, I can’t remember them, that time in my life is gone,” she admits while looking down at her nails that are so heavily bejewelled, just lifting her hand could be deemed a workout.
“Anxiety almost blocked me from thinking normally and remembering things, because I was so anxious about everything,” she continues. “I thought I was going to die; I thought my family were going to die and that was mixed with a lot of things like OCD, which added to the anxiety as well. I regularly found it hard to leave the house.”
The anxiety Anne-Marie was experiencing almost toppled the success she had worked so hard for, since releasing her aptly named 2015 debut single Karate (she began practising martial arts aged nine and became a three-time Shotokan Karate black belt world champion). “In my worst moments, I’d think, ‘Well, how am I even going to go on stage? How am I going to do what I do when I’ve worked so hard and for so long to get to this point? And now I don’t even want to do it.’ That was hard,” she admits.
Going to therapy was Anne-Marie’s first step to managing her mental health, alongside, surprisingly, a good Google search. “I’ve literally done everything that you can do,” she says. “I tried therapy, hypnotherapy. Googling about anxiety helped a lot and listening to other people’s stories. I think hypnotherapy was really a big part of it. I guess talking and listening to other people helped.”
What were her lessons from therapy? “As soon as I say something I had been thinking, it makes it feel normal,” Anne-Marie replies. “In my head, the thoughts are so bad and then as soon as I say them out of my mouth, it’s 25% of how bad I thought it was going to be.”
“In my worst moments, I’d think, ‘Well, how am I even going to go on stage? How am I going to do what I do when I’ve worked so hard and for so long to get to this point? And now I don’t even want to do it.’ That was hard.” (Anne-Marie on the peak of her anxiety)
Being such a truthful songwriter helped her too. There’s a reason why Anne-Marie was recently named in PRs for Music’s prestigious 100 Most Influential Songwriters list, having penned deeply personal songs about everything from f*ck boys on her banger Ciao Adios to her physical ‘imperfections’ on Perfect To Me. “Writing it down really helped,” she says. “I’m so lucky that I’m able to write my thoughts in songs. I think without that I would have been a recluse. I don’t know what I would’ve done with my life, to be honest.
“I think the songwriting has helped me so much, so that’s why I say to people: if you’re too scared to go to someone or worried about what people are going to think about you, or [think that] are people judging you, just write a tweet, or write it on a piece of paper next to your bed. If you just write it down so it’s in existence, there in front of you rather than just in your brain, it really helps.”
The real turning point, however, came at an unexpected and very normal setting. “I think it was just one day around January 2019,” she says. “I woke up and sat in my living room, and I felt like I was actually here and actually experiencing my experiences. I think it was after the hypnotherapy, after the learning that there is never a straightforward answer to how you get over it.”
Did coming through this testing period of her life teach her a lot about your power as a person, I ask? “Honestly, I feel like I’ve not [fully] got myself out of it yet. I’ve relied on a lot of people to help me, which is why it’s so important to talk about it, because hopefully I’ll be that person to someone else, like how other people were there for me. Now I can actually walk into rooms first, before anyone else, which is great and I can answer the phone, which I never used to be able to do,” she says before conceding it still is, and always will be, an ongoing struggle. “I have bad days too. But at least it’s only a day now, whereas before it was all the time, so that is where the improvement is. It’s going to be a constant battle, but to know that it’ll be OK is the best feeling.”
Anne-Marie’s advice for those suffering from anxiety is all the more profound as the world locks down due to the Coronavirus outbreak and we all start to worry about our mental health. “With everything that is happening in the world at the moment – especially now – you think, ‘I’m not going to worry about my little thing.’ But you need to. My advice? Just try and help yourself as soon as possible and not let it get to a really bad place. Come to some realisations, talk to your friends and go to therapy when possible. I wish I would have talked about it sooner rather than let it get to a really extreme place,” she admits, her eyes filling with tears. ”I know that some people only start to deal with their problems when it gets to bad levels.”
“Writing it down really helped. I’m so lucky that I’m able to write my thoughts in songs. I think without that I would have been a recluse. I don’t know what I would’ve done with my life, to be honest.” (Anne-Marie on managing her anxiety)
For me, Anne-Marie is a symbol of positivity: proof that you can, and will, get through your current situation. And most importantly, that it’s OK not to be OK at times.
This newfound place of personal positivity is not a destination teenage Anne-Marie would have ever dreamed of arriving at. Yet it exudes from the lead single of her second album Birthday, with such lyrics as: ‘It’s my birthday/ I’m a do what I like/ I’m a eat what I like/ I’m a kiss who I like.’
Now, she is more comfortable in her skin than ever – although she laments the time it’s taken her to get to this point. “It’s taken too long, that’s what my issue is. If I just started this self-love journey a little bit sooner, I would’ve had all of my 20s to have fun. I feel like my 20s were a lot of learning and dealing with stuff that I should have dealt with earlier in my life.”
Preparing to slip back into popstar mode to pull some poses for her GLAMOUR cover shoot, Anne-Marie leans in to me and says, “I really needed that chat today.” And as she skips off to slip out of her tie-dye Prada shirt and into a full Diorlook, I can’t help thinking that she is just the kind of role model we need right now. One who talks openly and honestly about her experiences and one who encourages us all to do the same. In these times more than ever, Anne-Marie – her story and her empowering, fist-pumping lyrics – have never felt more important.
Anne-Marie’s new singleBirthday is out now and her second album is coming soon
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