Madison Beer does what she wants these days, and what she wants right now is to please not sit in the tiny, iron-barred former strongroom set aside for our interview at the back of a pub in south London.
‘It’s like a prison cell,’ the New Yorker mutters, refusing to even set foot in the space. The pub is a converted 1960s post office, I explain. It’s supposed to be a trendy nook. ‘It’s not, it’s creepy,’ she corrects.
We find a less oppressive sofa and chairs nearby, on to which Beer flops backwards, burying her hands in the pockets of a huge pastel, faux-fur coat, and pulling it so far across her minuscule frame that only her head and long dark hair poke out. Once settled, she is very cold: is there heating on? She is not thirsty, thank you. Not even water, no. And can they turn the music down in here? It’s, like, really loud.
Beer is just 19 years old, but already in the early stages of her second run at becoming a world- famous pop star. The first began six years ago, when her idol, Justin Bieber, saw a YouTube video of her covering Etta James’s At Last and recommended it to his millions of acolytes on Twitter. ‘Wow,’ he wrote, ‘13 years old! She can sing. Great job. #futurestar.’
It was like being anointed by God. Within two weeks, Bieber, then the world’s biggest pop star, had got Beer signed to the world’s biggest record label, Universal, and given her the world’s most influential pop manager, Scooter Braun (both were also his own) to ensure she had the best chance of success. Beer quit school and moved to LA with her mother and brother. Bieber appeared in the video for her sickly sweet, terrible debut single, Melodies. And then, when that song wasn’t the global mega-hit everybody expected, Beer was simply ‘put on the shelf’. For three long, grim years. She left Universal by mutual consent at the age of just 16.
‘I think it was just wrong timing; if I was signed to them today, I’d be huge,’ she says, in an accent that’s so coast-to-coast, so Gen Z, that everything she says sounds as if it comes with a shrug. ‘They didn’t really know how to position me. People would expect me to be this ditzy, bubble- gum-pop girl. I was selling myself short. I would now rather be less successful, fame-wise, than be the biggest thing in the world and a lie.’
The whole experience could easily have put Beer off the music industry for life. After all, the received wisdom was that no label meant no chance, especially for female artists. She could have slipped back into the sea of anonymous wannabes as quickly as Bieber fished her out, and nobody would have blamed – or remembered – her at all. Only she didn’t do that. Instead, she realised the received wisdom was ‘bullshit’.
