FEATURE: Spotlight: Revisited: Nieve Ella

FEATURE:

Spotlight: Revisited

PHOTO CREDIT: Bella Howard for CLASH

Nieve Ella

__________

MY next…

PHOTO CREDIT: Rachel Billings for NME

Spotlight: Revisited will be of a male artist. However, there are some great women that I included in my Spotlight series a while ago that I was keen to come back to. The amazing Nieve Ella was someone I spotlighted in 2023. She has gained a huge amount of press and love since then. Her incredible Watch It Ache and Bleed E.P. was released back in October. One of our very best artists, everyone need to listen to her. I want to bring in a few interviews with this incredible talent. I want to start out with a 2024 interview from NME. The Shropshire-raised artist captivated fans during lockdown with these amazing anthems. Now, there was this era of “unapologetic joy”:

“Hidden behind a faux telephone box in guitar manufacturer Gibson’s London office is a private bar – a Narnia-esque hideaway where Nieve Ella is taking a brief moment of respite. NME meets the musician born Nieve Ella Pickering amid a 19-date festival run, which will be immediately followed by a six-week tour with Girl In Red. There, she’ll play Wembley’s OVO Arena – ticking off a major bucket list goal at 21 years old.

Lounging on a distressed brown leather sofa, Pickering seems at ease in stillness. She’s given away only by a suitcase lying in the corner, slightly battered from the almost daily trips away from her home, a tiny village in Shropshire.

“It’s so weird going back and forth,” she says, widening her eyes. “There’s nothing at all to do with music at home. I mean, there’s nothing like bloody this.” She gestures to the purple walls around her, laden with shining guitars.

She’s planning to make London her permanent home this year, but the finality of the move weighs on Pickering, who is ambitious but hesitant to close the door on her childhood. It’s a theme that’s imbued much of her music to date – most of which was written on the bedroom floor that now exists solely as a crash pad between trips to the capital.

“My room is my sacred place; that’s where I’ve become who I am,” she says, pensively tracing one of the many silver chains hanging from her neck. Though Pickering’s bedroom clutter may be slightly more glamorous than her peers – it’s littered with guitars and outfits from her recent European tour with Irish rock band Inhaler – this seems to be a sentiment shared among a generation who came of age during lockdown.

In this way, Pickering’s music tells the story of British suburbia and its fleeting encounters with the culture brewing in the cities just out of reach. Her debut EP ‘Young & Naive’ encapsulated the frustration of existing within a society that eschews the needs of young people – evident in their lack of representation in recent election debates. Through a string of pop-inflected, indie-rock singles so far, she’s chronicled the feeling of wanting everything but having nothing, obsessing over pop stars (‘Blu Shirt Boy’ is written about Harry Styles) and daring to dream larger than the confines of rural England.

Even her introduction to music, via the X Factor’s gleaming portrayals of the industry, was informed by an upbringing on the outside. She recalls Alexandra Burke’s winner’s montage as a core memory: “I was so obsessed with the fact that she was a normal person, and then all of a sudden, she became this star. I was just so infatuated with the fact that that could happen.”

But it wasn’t until lockdown, when she picked up a guitar that had belonged to her late father for the first time, that she began to take music seriously. “The songs came out of me and then just didn’t stop,” she smiles.

In line with others whose musical careers were born in the pandemic, she later amassed a fanbase on TikTok. But though Pickering, born in 2003, is a digital native, it’s the hand of live music that’s guided her career.

One day, while on shift in her mum’s shop, she heard via the soft hum of the local radio that Sam Fender was performing in Birmingham that night. She left work early and convinced her friend to trek into the city with her, hoping to gain access to the sold-out gig. In the queue, they happened upon a man giving up his ticket, and then, at the box office, they managed to score another – the last one left. “It was already fate,” Pickering smiles. “And then, this guy that I really fancied at the time appeared.”

They ended up dancing with him and his friend all night at a gig she likens to a spiritual experience. The friend is now her touring drummer, and the guy ended up as the muse for her first EP. “I fully believe that whole day was supposed to happen. Even though he wasn’t the greatest and I’ve written pretty harsh songs about him,” she grins. “I wouldn’t be sitting here if it wasn’t for that day.”

Fender’s music, unsurprisingly, holds sentimental value for Pickering. It manifests in the shades of British indie rock that have moulded her sound – notably a scene that’s excluded women for decades.

The genre has evolved, but for Pickering, getting beyond the barrier has been an uphill battle. She recalls one early experience with an older male producer: “I came in wanting to write a rock song and he was like ‘Nah, that’s not you. You aren’t good for that. You need to write girly pop music’”.

There are a few really interesting articles/interviews that I want to move onto. CLASH spotlighted Nieve Ella in their Next Wave feature recently. I discovered her music a while ago, but the rise and new attention she has accrued in the past year has been amazing to see! A tremendous artist that is going to be a global superstar very soon. She has the talent and passion to be one of the world’s biggest artists:

“Nieve Ella is a force of nature. Coming of age on transitional EP ‘Watch It Ache And Bleed’ – a melange of caustic lyricism and indie-pop anthemics – the West Midlands-bred, London-based singer-songwriter is intransigent about her art. “I don’t want to release an EP again. I just want to release an album now; I want to release a project that I can really make a whole world around,” she tells CLASH.

Nieve Ella isn’t working on something specific just yet, even though she’s writing all the time. “I just need to keep going, I need to keep making art. If I don’t write about how I feel, I’ll literally go crazy!” She feels, she writes, she releases, and repeats; in both a figurative and a literal sense, with a steady stream of singles and EPs chronicling the last few years of her life in real time.

Between 18 and 22, though, you change quite a lot. Most people’s progress is tucked away in a camera roll, a notebook, a finsta, but Nieve’s belongs to other people now, on their playlists – maybe even lyrics copied down into other people’s diaries. “I thrive for that change,” she says. “I look back and think it’s so cool that I did that. I’m so proud of myself, even though some songs cringe me out! I’ve always said I’m never playing ‘Blu Shirt Boy’ [a song written about Harry Styles] again, but I’m coming to a realisation what songs mean to the fans is so much more important.”

“I remember demoing it. I was having fun. I was 18, and I was just so happy I was writing songs,” she continues. “We’re going to rehearsals next week and I want to see what [Blu Shirt Boy] feels like – if we can change some stuff that makes it feel a bit more like me. Or it might not change at all. It’s a normal thing that happens, right? You lose interest in parts of you that were you when you were 18.”

When you write so personally, it can be hard to find people who get you enough to write with you. “I wrote with Will and Nick from Flyte a couple years ago, and they’re my songwriting heroes. It was amazing, it was the best experience but I know it won’t always be like that.” Who does Nieve dream of writing with now? “For me, it was always Sam Fender,” she says, then doubles back. “But Sam Fender writes from his own life, and that’s not my life”.

PHOTO CREDIT: Ed Miles for DIY

There are a couple of other pieces to include. DIY are big fans of her music and inducted Nieve Ella in their Class of 2025 in February. This Gen Z icon-in-the-making discussed her Sam Fender appreciation to making a statement with her music, this is an artist who is connecting with a generation of fans. People who can relate to her and connect. She is an idol to many:

“The 22-year-old says she “can understand so much” why Chappell Roan told fans in August that she needed “to draw lines” between herself and an increasingly large and demanding fanbase. “I’m not at the level where people are coming up to me every single day, so when they do I’m like, ‘Let’s have a conversation. You wanna take a photo? Let’s do it’,” she says. “But if that happened to me everywhere I went, I probably would feel the exact same as her.”

Nieve grapples with her growing profile on ‘Sugarcoated’: a driving highlight from her third and most recent EP, ‘Watch It Ache and Bleed’. Released in October, the eight-song set cements her status as Gen Z’s real and relatable indie queen. When she sings, “I’m burning the candle at both its ends / How can you handle a thousand friends?”, it’s a reference to the whiplash she felt as she embarked on nationwide headline tours and support slots with the likes of DYLAN and girl in red. In September, she opened for the latter at London’s 12,500-capacity Wembley Arena.

“I was so fed up and frustrated when I wrote that song,” Nieve says. “I felt like people on the internet and at shows thought I was this happy, sweet person. And I AM happy and I CAN be sweet, but I’m also so sensitive.” The Shropshire-born musician adores performing, but still struggles with the idea of having “thousands of people staring” at her on stage. “And when you’ve got people on the internet wondering where you’ve been because you haven’t posted on TikTok for three days, that’s just mind-boggling,” she adds.

Social media also evokes mixed feelings in the singer. On the one hand, she likes to unwind by watching Instagram Reels of “people cooking food or giving birth”. But on the other, posting can feel like homework. A week after she created a second, more low-key TikTok account – “It’s not private,” she says, “but I don’t share it anywhere” – it had already attracted 7,000 followers. That’s a fraction of her main account’s 114,000, but it still heaps pressure on her. “When I started my new TikTok, I felt like I could post whatever I wanted,” she says. “But now there’s more people on there, I’m like, ‘Oh crap, I need to post something before people start asking what’s going on’.’’

Of course, TikTok has been integral to Nieve’s rise from the start. She built a fanbase on the app during the pandemic, first by posting covers, then her own indie pop originals. When lockdown gripped the country in 2020, Nieve Ella Pickering (to use her full name) picked up a guitar belonging to her late father and learned to play from online tutorials. Songwriting came naturally – “I don’t actually know how I taught myself,” she says – and a Sam Fender gig proved formative. When she made the 30-mile trip from her “tiny” Shropshire village to the bright lights of Birmingham, her hero didn’t disappoint. “I was pretty drunk, but the way he used instruments with lyrics that are so deep-cutting, it just blew my mind,” she says.

TikTok also introduced her to Finn Marlow, her guitarist, songwriting partner and “best friend in the world”. Nieve recently moved to London, but today she’s speaking to DIY over Zoom from Maidenhead in neighbouring Berkshire, where she and “the boys” – Marlow and her producers – are working on new material. Over the last four days, they’ve written “seven or eight songs”, and the creative rush spills over into her conversation. Candid and chatty, she says she’s “not a worldly person” and confides that she initially struggled with “finding the right words to use in lyrics” – an insecurity that stems from “always being in the lowest sets for English” at school. But both in person and in her songwriting, Nieve is a born communicator.

Nieve has “big dreams” of teaching herself to produce her own music. She also wants to expand her palette of collaborators so it isn’t just “the boys” downstairs. “Maybe in LA there are way more female producers and writers, but I feel like I don’t experience that a lot here,” she says. “My goal is to be that woman producer who brings in younger women and makes them feel comfortable [in the studio].” Having been in songwriting sessions with older men she didn’t gel with, she knows first-hand how stifling this dynamic can be. “It’s really difficult to open up to anyone about your feelings – even the people I write with now, who are my best friends,” she says.

Building a musical community is clearly important to the singer. Before she moved to the capital a couple of months ago, her London base was the family home of fellow indie wunderkind Fred Roberts. “We’re two musicians who found each other at the right time. We make different music but have the same dreams and goals, which is so inspiring,” she says. Nieve also appreciates that she was lucky to have somewhere to crash when money was tight early on. “If I ever win an award, they’ll be the ones I thank,” she notes”.

I am going to end with another feature from CLASH. Writing in February, they observed how her Koko show (in London) felt like a moment. Since then, Nieve Ella has a run of incredible gigs coming up. She is playing Count Bestival, Reading & Leeds, and Isle of Wight. I wonder when she will be asked to appear at Glastonbury on their Other Stage. That cannot be too far away:

“Opening for her on this tour, Fred Roberts is charmingly overwhelmed.

“This is a pretty cool thing to do on a Wednesday,” says he, his low speaking voice then translating into mellow sung vocals. Accompanied by lead guitarist Rosie, Roberts works through a confident half-hour, including a dreamy, slowed-down cover of Sabrina Carpenter’s ‘Taste’ which works well to get the packed venue singing along – it’s obvious Roberts has plenty of fans of his own in the house tonight.

Another highlight is Roberts’ rendition of his first-ever single ‘Runaway’. “Let’s get hyped!” he urges here – a bit more at this level of energy would have been good, but it’s a warmly-received and accomplished support set.

It’s Nieve Ella’s turn now and she wastes no time showing us how thrilled she is to be on this stage – her biggest headline show to date. Backed with her rock star look and mellow, pop-inflected sound, the dramatic build of ‘Anything’ makes for a thrilling opener. ‘The Things We Say’ follows: this emotive and heart-torn song delivered with a grin which Nieve cannot suppress.

PHOTO CREDIT: Mollie McKay

The first huge singalong of the evening comes in old-favourite ‘Blu Shirt Boy’, before Nieve and her band are joined by a special vocal quartet on stage to add ad-libbed harmonies to ‘Sweet Nothings’. The unreleased ‘Good Grace’, described as “Ganni Top’s little sister” is forceful, sexy and fun, and precedes a slowed-down section of the set during which Nieve covers Role Model’s ‘Look At That Woman’, duets (seated and embracing) with Fred Roberts on ‘The Reason’, and showcases her vocal abilities, hitting long soaring notes in ‘Glasshouses’.

Energy restored, Nieve powers through the remainder of her main set. ‘Lucky Girl’ is casually dropped in: “this is a treat for you” says Nieve, introducing the live debut of what proves to be an intense rock ballad, sung with hoarse passion. ‘Ganni Top (She Gets What She Needs)’ feels like the pinnacle of it all, the rolling, rock-and-roll riffs and pounding backbeat easing – after the inevitable “Screeaaam!” – into the raucous chants of the pre-chorus.

‘Meet You In The Middle’ takes us smoothly and euphorically to the “end” of the show. “Brace for what’s coming… I’m tired of being silenced / Won’t forever hold my peace”… This feels like something of a catharsis and triumph for Nieve: a solo statement of female power, strength and resilience.

Having packed 14 songs into about an hour, Nieve disappears off-stage for barely a minute before returning to play a musical interlude and then a three-song encore (plus a ‘Happy Birthday’ to bassist Fran). It all culminates in a wondrous, pogoing ‘Sugar Coated’, ending the show in a wave of good feeling.

It’s been an impressive and confident performance – and it’s obvious Nieve has been having a lot of fun. She’s at that level where new experiences and achievements are coming thick and fast; she’s rolling with it, finding new levels of skill and strength – and also, refreshingly, remaining a little bit in awe of what’s happening”.

One of our most special artists, there is no telling how far Nieve Ella can go in years to come. Many will look ahead to a debut album. There will be huge global stages in her future. Some big U.S. dates. I am pumped to see where she heads. Someone whose music I have loved for years now, I think he rest of this year is going to provide so many terrific memories. If you do not currently know Nieve Ella then go and…