Live at Electric Brixton in London: Meek

Let’s let her take up the tale. The experience at Ku-Bar was expedient and immediately

readable. “I jumped up on the bar and started lip-syncing along,” she says. “I did half of

the first intro and then everyone – literally everyone in the bar - was screaming, ‘I’m so

fucking fabulous.’” Fabulous is one of those tunes that lodges in the brain not just on

first listen, but during the first four bars. Propulsive, energised pop majesty. “The whole

place went fucking nuts, it was so fun.” In terms of road-testing your material, there can

be no more stringent acid test than trying it out, loud in a neighbourhood gay disco,

while high-kicking on the bar. “I knew the song was instant,” she adds. “I just didn’t know

how instant.”

How did MEEK get here? Like everyone that wants to shout to be heard, Meek comes

from a mixture of an ordinariness she had to reject hard and a deep trauma she couldn’t

help but process. She is the only daughter of a wedding dress shop assistant mother,

from Ripley, an estate outside of Guildford and a father who dropped dead (“Literally out

of nowhere”) when she was 16, leaving the prodigiously gifted Georgia in loco parentis

to her two younger brothers. “And all that entailed.” By 18, she was studying music at

BIMM, while living with a physically and emotionally abusive boyfriend she’d met online,

to fill the horrific loneliness gap arriving in the capital, knowing nobody and having

recently buried one parent, while becoming estranged from the other (don’t worry, things

are good with mum, now. “She’s my biggest fan”) can sometimes result in. “I wanted to

understand everything,” she says, “and I knew that if I wanted to really do this, I would

have to do it all by myself.”

Incrementally, during a Production Masters (“More women should do production. I don’t

want to be at the will of a load of blokes in a storage unit in East Acton.”) and

self-schooling with the ride-or-die female friends and gay buddies who helped her out of

her domestic violence nightmares, her songwriting fire began to catch attention. Instead

of looking to her immediate surroundings, checking out charts and streaming stats,

Georgie widened her influence to the classics, the greats. “I love these outcast

characters that came from nothing and invented themselves. I just always found that so

inspiring. They gave me a lot of hope, when there was pretty much none.”

All the while, disillusioned by the music industry and the relentless service jobs keeping

her afloat; she knew a true goal was in sight. To become the voice of the disaffected:

loud, unashamed, a clarion call of working-class virtue and vice. “I want to reach people

who have felt marginalised, different, uncool, weird. We, as a people, are the most

influential people on the planet. We’re the army.”

MEEK is not a work in progress. She is fully formed, earned her stripes, comes from

nothing, nepo-baby baiting execution of timeless pop brilliance. While sounding directly

descended from the DNA of famed countercultural misfits and bona fide pop aces, all

strewn across the decades, her music is a no messing, straight shoot for the top.

Georgia Meek understands that people like her only get one chance to make a first

impression. Frequently, her songs will open out with a stringent big note, a walloping

guitar figure, the best hook in her almanac of songwriter-ly resources. Because they

have to. “I’ve never had the option to ask,” she says. “I’ve always had to take. I’ve

always had to force my way through closed doors. That’s what shapes my sound. Yes,

we will start with a huge vocal note to make people turn around and listen. Yes, I will say

in the studio, give me some hair-raising guitar windmills. Let’s do that. You waste thirty

seconds and you’ve lost it.”

Alongside Fabulous, there is a whole battalion of one-shot pop genius songwriting

magic hidden up MEEK’s sleeve. Songs that intimate the Sparks back catalogue were

definitely meant for a shop assistant’s kid from the Home Counties. There is Poor Face,

the Common People for a generation of privileged try-hards (“fuck them”). As Gay As It

Gets, the long awaited anthemic tribute to the relationship between women and their

gay best friends (“a relationship, a love affair really, as old as time, yet not one with a

song attached to it? What?”). Or Even The Rich Die Young, a reminder to all the pretty

people, well, “that we all look the same in the grave”, she laughs. MEEK’s raucous

laugh is about to become a very familiar pop trope. Mordant humour is her thing.

Equally, MEEK’s visual aesthetic is once seen, never forgotten. She wants to reclaim

dressing up for everyone, not just those that can afford to indulge in the monied whimsy

of high fashion. “I have a clear visual thing for myself, which is basically prom outfits for

poor people.” She’s the Cinderella who flipped a finger at the Ugly Sisters, then invited

them along to join in the fun, too. “It’s about being absolute glam-trash and owning it.

That pink tulle over a stained Adidas jacket? Throw it on. I just want it to feel like

something anybody can put together themselves, a sustainable way to look fucking wild.

Why not?”

You know that moment you realised Lady Gaga was named after a Queen song? MEEK

is kind of the musical and stylistic culmination of that connecting glue, the secret

chemical equation that bonds them. She is walking class war, musical defiance and the

return of glam rock at its most instantly and commercially appealing. She’s dancing on

the gay bar bar-top with a sparkler fizzing in your cocktail.

Yet underneath all this big thinking, high concept, broad talking pop philosophising is a

distinct, almost tear-jerking moral issue that should sit comfortably, refreshingly against

the societal injustices of a cost-of-living crisis that refuses to disappear. “I don’t think

having no money should mean you look plain. I don’t think it means you shouldn’t have

access to brilliant entertainment. I don’t think class should dignify expression.”

The best thing about MEEK? There is a point to her. She is as if the comedy queen,

Daisy May Cooper stumbled into a charity shop, found a bunch of glittering second

hand couture, dolled herself up shamelessly in it, injected the raw spirit of Freddie

Mercury and emerged, Mr Ben style, as a fully-fledged MEGASTAR in the making out of

the changing rooms, then lead a troubadour of misfits singing down the high street.

There is not what you might call a shortage of self-confidence in MEEK. As she sings

herself, on a calling card anthem which is sure to become the earworm of the nation

once unleashed upon its airwaves: “I’m so fucking fabulous.”