{"id":630579,"date":"2026-09-20T15:18:11","date_gmt":"2026-09-20T15:18:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/630579\/"},"modified":"2026-09-20T15:18:11","modified_gmt":"2026-09-20T15:18:11","slug":"singer-becky-hill-looks-back-aside-from-the-music-i-was-making-i-hated-every-minute-of-my-20s-becky-hill","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/630579\/","title":{"rendered":"Singer Becky Hill looks back: \u2018Aside from the music I was making, I hated every minute of my 20s\u2019 | Becky Hill"},"content":{"rendered":"

Becky Hill in a sleeveless lilac dress and with a comical smile in 2001 and 2026, aged seven and 32, respectively<\/a>Becky Hill in 2001 and 2026. Later photograph: P\u00e5l Hansen. Styling: Andie Redman. Hair and makeup: Wendy Turner. Archive photograph: courtesy of Becky Hill<\/p>\n

Born in Bromsgrove, Worcestershire, in 1994 and raised in Bewdley, Becky Hill<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

This was taken for a kids\u2019 modelling agency, which we later discovered was a scam. Every stage of the process \u2013\u00a0getting pictures taken, sending them to the agency, getting them back \u2013 cost us more money.\u00a0We\u2019d wire over \u00a3100 and get nothing in return. Our family wasn\u2019t rich, so Mum didn\u2019t tell Dad what we\u00a0were up to \u2013 he probably doesn\u2019t even know about it to this day. As for my modelling ambitions, I never pursued it further. I was cute until the\u00a0age of seven, then started to go on\u00a0the turn.<\/p>\n

I was a happy, chatty child, but my\u00a0home life was quite dysfunctional. My\u00a0parents were on their second marriages, I was their first baby together, and they had five children between the two of them \u2013 some lived\u00a0with us, some didn\u2019t. There was\u00a0a\u00a0lot of moving about \u2013 a lot of arguing, too, but I always, always felt\u00a0loved. Everyone had their own taste in music: Mum listened to cassette tapes of\u00a0Foreigner, 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\u00a0drum\u2019n\u2019bass.<\/p>\n

I was always a mummy\u2019s girl, and\u00a0she\u00a0and 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\u2019s Leave (Get Out) in front of all the parents. I\u2019ll\u00a0never forget the feeling of singing that song and realising that everyone\u2019s jaws were on the floor. I could see other parents turning around in their chairs and asking my mum and dad: \u201cDid you know she could do this?\u201d<\/p>\n

On the car journey home, there was a conversation about my future. Dad asked Mum: \u201cDo we send her to a\u00a0stage school where her talent can be nurtured?\u201d Mum knew we didn\u2019t have the money or live in the right place. She said: \u201cBut if music is meant for her, music will find her,\u201d which I thought was beautiful.<\/p>\n

Luckily, I found some good support in Bewdley \u2013 from my music teacher and Andy Brown, a guy who was dating a friend\u2019s mum. He had management experience and took me\u00a0under his wing \u2013 buying me a guitar and paying for singing lessons and studio time. It was a rare taste of\u00a0what it was like to be nurtured without expectation.<\/p>\n

My teenage years were typically fraught \u2013 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\u2019n\u2019bass was a real escape \u2013 when I was at a rave, I had music to focus on rather than the way I\u00a0looked or felt. I remember going to [the London club] Fabric for the first time at 18,\u00a0walking down the stairs and thinking, \u201cI\u2019m\u00a0home.\u201d<\/p>\n

double quotation markIt\u2019s hard to be gentle on yourself in this industry \u2013 but I\u2019ve regained the kindness that kid had in abundance<\/p>\n

I was 17 when I entered The Voice. I was working two bar jobs and was depressed. I didn\u2019t feel that I had much going for me, but I knew I wanted to get out of Bewdley. University wasn\u2019t an option as I didn\u2019t like hanging around with strangers, but The Voice ticked every box. The high pressure of the live competition each week didn\u2019t 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\u2019t win, but I came out with all the contacts I needed to start my career.<\/p>\n

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 \u2013 trying to externalise some of the intensity of\u00a0what I was feeling. A few hours later, I was being pulled into a meeting with\u00a0my management team to be told I\u00a0had no label.<\/p>\n

Around this time, I also met the man who would become my husband \u2013\u00a0we broke up a few years later, then got back together again. I started having success on featured tracks, but I felt like it wasn\u2019t my success \u2013 it was the producer\u2019s. I was always fighting to be heard and seen.<\/p>\n

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After I signed my second record and\u00a0publishing deal, I was finally able\u00a0to take care of my parents. They\u00a0were going through a lot of stress, and my mum\u2019s parents had just\u00a0died and she was struggling, so\u00a0I\u00a0said: \u201cI\u2019ll pay you not to work any\u00a0more.\u201d I bought them a\u00a0house \u2013 which they have just paid me back for, even though I told them not to \u2013 and I\u2019ve put some money into their\u00a0pensions.<\/p>\n

My brother\u2019s family were living in\u00a0a\u00a0hovel, so I bought them a house, too. I was still renting my flat at the time and wasn\u2019t on the property ladder, but\u00a0it was important to me that my family was stable before I was. My\u00a0brother even works with me now. He was in the Marines from the age of\u00a016\u00a0and got shot in the head, but is\u00a0now\u00a0my security guy. He comes with\u00a0me everywhere.<\/p>\n

So far, I\u2019m 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 \u2013 the pressures of the job and of society. So I\u2019m at peace if this new album isn\u2019t as big as the others, because I\u2019m proud of\u00a0what I\u2019ve made.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve been in therapy since I was 22, and have done a decade of working on my internal voice \u2013 the impostor syndrome that still creeps in and is so hard to escape when you work in music. It\u2019s 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\u2019s or try to get a new qualification. I\u2019ve always thought I would like to become an electrician, actually, but I know that I\u2019d be electrocuted within the first five\u00a0minutes.<\/p>\n

Really, I can\u2019t do anything else apart from what I\u2019m doing now. So I\u00a0am glad I am still here, and glad that I\u2019m full of a new sense of kindness \u2013\u00a0something I\u00a0lost in my 20s, and something that kid in the photo had an\u00a0abundance of.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Becky Hill in a sleeveless lilac dress and with a comical smile in 2001 and 2026, aged seven…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":630580,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[321,93,61,60],"class_list":["post-630579","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-celebrities","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-ireland"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/630579","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=630579"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/630579\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/630580"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=630579"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=630579"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=630579"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}