Singer Becky Hill looks back: ‘Aside from the music I was making, I hated every minute of my 20s’
The Brit award winner on being scammed by a model agency, coming to terms with sexual assault, and wrestling with impostor syndrome
Born in Bromsgrove, Worcestershire, in 1994 and raised in Bewdley, Becky Hill is a singer and songwriter. She began making music at 14, performing in a band called Shaking Trees, before reaching the semifinals on the first series of The Voice UK. She has since had two top 10 albums and collaborated with David Guetta, Chase and Status, Joel Corry and Rudimental, and won the Brit award for best dance act in 2022 and 2023. Her latest album, Rebecca, is out on 13 November.
This was taken for a kids’ modelling agency, which we later discovered was a scam. Every stage of the process – getting pictures taken, sending them to the agency, getting them back – cost us more money. We’d wire over £100 and get nothing in return. Our family wasn’t rich, so Mum didn’t tell Dad what we were up to – he probably doesn’t even know about it to this day. As for my modelling ambitions, I never pursued it further. I was cute until the age of seven, then started to go on the turn.
I was a happy, chatty child, but my home life was quite dysfunctional. My parents were on their second marriages, I was their first baby together, and they had five children between the two of them – some lived with us, some didn’t. There was a lot of moving about – a lot of arguing, too, but I always, always felt loved. Everyone had their own taste in music: Mum listened to cassette tapes of Foreigner, Eric Clapton and the Eagles; my sister gave me her computer full of all her downloaded music; and my brother liked Eminem, Blink-182, Slipknot and drum’n’bass.
I was always a mummy’s girl, and she and I would go to acting, singing and dancing classes together. She wanted me to find something I was passionate about, as I was bullied at school. I kept my singing a secret mostly, but when I was 11 there was a talent show at school and I performed JoJo’s Leave (Get Out) in front of all the parents. I’ll never forget the feeling of singing that song and realising that everyone’s jaws were on the floor. I could see other parents turning around in their chairs and asking my mum and dad: “Did you know she could do this?”
On the car journey home, there was a conversation about my future. Dad asked Mum: “Do we send her to a stage school where her talent can be nurtured?” Mum knew we didn’t have the money or live in the right place. She said: “But if music is meant for her, music will find her,” which I thought was beautiful.
Luckily, I found some good support in Bewdley – from my music teacher and Andy Brown, a guy who was dating a friend’s mum. He had management experience and took me under his wing – buying me a guitar and paying for singing lessons and studio time. It was a rare taste of what it was like to be nurtured without expectation.
My teenage years were typically fraught – I got my braces off by the time I was 13, so at least my teeth were fixed, but I started smoking weed and was temporarily a bit of an angry kid. Discovering drum’n’bass was a real escape – when I was at a rave, I had music to focus on rather than the way I looked or felt. I remember going to [the London club] Fabric for the first time at 18, walking down the stairs and thinking, “I’m home.”
I was 17 when I entered The Voice. I was working two bar jobs and was depressed. I didn’t feel that I had much going for me, but I knew I wanted to get out of Bewdley. University wasn’t an option as I didn’t like hanging around with strangers, but The Voice ticked every box. The high pressure of the live competition each week didn’t bother me as I was so happy to be living in my own flat in London and grateful for this huge, strange experience. I didn’t win, but I came out with all the contacts I needed to start my career.
Aside from the music I was making, I hated every minute of my 20s. It was a decade of establishing myself as an artist, shaking off the stigma of coming from a TV show, as well as a lot of personal turbulence. In the same year, I got dropped by my label and raped by a friend. I was 21 and remember sitting in a writing session and telling these three men I was working with about the sexual assault that had just happened – trying to externalise some of the intensity of what I was feeling. A few hours later, I was being pulled into a meeting with my management team to be told I had no label.
Around this time, I also met the man who would become my husband – we broke up a few years later, then got back together again. I started having success on featured tracks, but I felt like it wasn’t my success – it was the producer’s. I was always fighting to be heard and seen.
After I signed my second record and publishing deal, I was finally able to take care of my parents. They were going through a lot of stress, and my mum’s parents had just died and she was struggling, so I said: “I’ll pay you not to work any more.” I bought them a house – which they have just paid me back for, even though I told them not to – and I’ve put some money into their pensions.
My brother’s family were living in a hovel, so I bought them a house, too. I was still renting my flat at the time and wasn’t on the property ladder, but it was important to me that my family was stable before I was. My brother even works with me now. He was in the Marines from the age of 16 and got shot in the head, but is now my security guy. He comes with me everywhere.
So far, I’m loving my 30s, but the landscape has changed for music, and I am probably not having the same level of success that I had in my 20s. At the start of my career, my ambition was to write songs that other people liked, whereas now I am writing songs about what I really want to say – the pressures of the job and of society. So I’m at peace if this new album isn’t as big as the others, because I’m proud of what I’ve made.
I’ve been in therapy since I was 22, and have done a decade of working on my internal voice – the impostor syndrome that still creeps in and is so hard to escape when you work in music. It’s hard to be gentle on yourself when you work in an industry that is so fickle and unpredictable. Even at the start of this year, I was panicking that my job was about to end and that I was going to have to work in McDonald’s or try to get a new qualification. I’ve always thought I would like to become an electrician, actually, but I know that I’d be electrocuted within the first five minutes.
Really, I can’t do anything else apart from what I’m doing now. So I am glad I am still here, and glad that I’m full of a new sense of kindness – something I lost in my 20s, and something that kid in the photo had an abundance of.