NOT JUST ANOTHER pop star

Bebe Rexha made global news when she called out the fashion industry for size discrimination. Here, she bares all for the first time about that video, body positivity and the music industry’s #MeToo crisis

- NICOLA FAHEY

"Oh god, I think we need coffee.” Bebe Rexha’s Staten Island drawl carries over the early-morning hush of one of London’s oldest hotels. A waiter in a starched white waistcoat arrives with a silver pot, pouring us both a steaming cup. He turns to leave but she stops him. “Do you know what?” she says, beaming politely. “Can you just leave the entire pot?”

We’re in a private room the morning after Rexha landed from LA and, aside from the universal uniform of the jet-lagged (black hoodie, joggers, sliders, zero make-up), you’d have no idea that she’s battling through a fog of exhaustion. It’s 8 AM and she has a day-long photoshoot ahead of her, but she bounces between topics with the sort of energy you don’t normally get from musicians at this time in the morning. With her first cup of coffee gulped down, she ponders our old-fashioned surroundings. “I really hate the lighting in here. If my room wasn’t so messy, I’d say let’s go up there instead,” she starts out. “That’s growing into a woman for you – you know what you like.”

That’s who Bebe Rexha is now: a 30-year-old woman who knows exactly what she likes and, crucially, what she doesn’t. But it wasn’t always that way. Like many women in the public eye, and particularly those in the murky, cutthroat world of the music industry, she has had to learn the hard way what she will and won’t tolerate on the path to success and stardom.

Raised in New York by Albanian parents, she signed her first record deal with Warner Bros at 23 and flew out to LA alone. “I remember when I saw Britney [Spears] make it big for the first time, she was 17. So when I turned 18 I was like, ‘That’s it, I didn’t make it.’ I felt the same when I hit 21, and throughout my twenties. At 27 I had a breakdown.”