Brighton-born singer Maisie Peters chats to Grant Tucker about her latest single ‘John Hughes Movie’, life after lockdown and being mistaken for Daisy Edgar-Jones.
Maisie Peters by Lillie Eiger
When I sat down to chat with Maisie Peters over Zoom, she was still replying to the 1400 text messages she received on Valentine’s Day. “A big upgrade from the zero that I’ve had every other year,” she assured me.
The 20-year-old singer-songwriter had bought a burner phone and encouraged her fans to message her. “I felt like a drug dealer lady. I was like ‘text me if love got you down’, not really thinking it through. So I’m very slowly working my way through everyone’s love problems. I want to do personal responses because these are personal issues. It calls for a light touch, but 1400 is quite a lot of light touches.”
The Brighton-born musician has a very intimate relationship with her fans. A relationship which feels very generation Z, cultivated during an age of social media and instant communication. Peters regularly retweets memes from fans desperate for her first album, has hopped on Zoom calls with devotees, and set up a lockdown book club.
She first created her YouTube channel in 2015 at the age 15, and has grown up with an ever increasing legion of loyal followers. “One messaged me the other day and said ‘Your lyrics still mean as much to me as they did when I was in school. I feel like I’ve grown up with you.’ It blew my mind because I’m only 20. But I’ve been on the internet making music for the past five, six years now.”
Her songs have amassed a quarter of a billion global streams and she has delighted fans (and critics) with two EPs ‘Dressed Too Nice For A Jacket’ in 2018 and ‘It’s Your Bed Babe, It’s Your Funeral’ in 2019. Taylor Swift is also a fan, commenting on a recent video: “My ears have been blessed”.
Peters’s enthusiasm is as infectious as her ridiculously catchy pop bops. Her latest is ‘John Hughes Movie’, the first single from her soon to be announced debut album, from Atlantic Records. It’s a song about unrequited love that she first wrote when she was 17. “It was after some house party, where some boy from class didn’t like me back. It sounds like and feels so poignantly 17. It would be impossible for me to make it now, because of the natural cynicism of age. It’s a literal time capsule of that time, which is why I’ve always loved it. ” she said.
My ears have been blessed on this fine Tuesday ???
— Taylor Swift (@taylorswift13) July 28, 2020
While the lyrics embody the emotional, melodramatic world of teenage love, the music video gives all the nostalgic eighties vibe you could wish for from an actual John Hughes movie (her favourite is Ferris Bueller’s Day Off), but it has a certain Maisie Peters fiery edge. Mean Girls’ Regina George had a Burn Book. Peters has a Kill Book.
I ask what 17-year-old Maisie was like. “She was spice,” laughs Peters. “When I hear the song. I can just see me then at a houseparty, in my small town, the straw in the wine bottle, and the high heels through the muddy fields.”
Is the unrequited love in the song based on anyone in particular? “I mean there were many crushes. Patrick Dempsey in Grey’s Anatomy season one is always a good choice…but there was one specific boy in my chemistry class. And that feeling of being like ‘oh, you’re going to chemistry and it’s like the one time a week that you see each other’. I’d spend the whole week being like, ‘how will I do my hair?’ And then you get there and they ignore you.”
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Chemistry boy is lucky he didn’t get the same treatment as her love interest in ‘John Hughes Movie’. It’s not pretty.
In the video, she wears a glamorous ball gown. Something which not many people have had an excuse to put on in the last 12 months. I wondered whether her fashion style had become as relaxed as the rest of us during lockdown.
“I basically decided this year that my catchphrase is, ‘I’m doing popstar shit and knitwear’. So I got 15 different knitted jumpers, and I just recycle them.” Harry Styles and his knitted tank tops better watch out. “I’m not gonna say I did knitwear first but I did knitwear first,” she joked. “We can share. I don’t mind.”
Peters has even been mistaken for another iconic wooly wearer: Normal People’s Marianne. She hasn’t seen the BBC series yet, but thought the book was “amazing”. She added: “Paul Mescal is very, very hot. So is Marianne, played by Daisy. For a while people were following and messaging me thinking I was her. Daisy, Maisie, fringe. There ends the likeness.”
Perhaps a Zooey Deschanel/Katy Perry-style mashup is on the horizon? “That would be iconic. Maybe we should do a music video together one day. I’m putting into the atmosphere one day me and Daisy will do that.”
A healthy repression does the trick
2020 should have been a packed year of gigs for Peters. Her songs had been played on Love Island and her track Smile featured in superhero movie Birds of Prey. She was also due to support Niall Horan on a European tour that never happened. Missing out on a year of fun is hard to process at any age, nevermind someone so young.
“That was a bit of a sad one,” she said sounding despondent for the first time during our interview. “It feels like another world now. Luckily I’m a get-over-things-and-move-on-to-the-next-thing kind of person. A healthy repression does the trick. But it wasn’t ideal.”
Maisie has been mistaken for Normal People’s Marianne, who also has a penchant for jumpers.
She has concentrated on the positives of lockdown, particularly a new skincare regime aided by her housemate (“When I put my first drop of moisturiser on my skin I could hear it cry it was so happy”) and more time to work on her first album which is rumoured for release later this year.
I ask whether she channeled any lockdown melancholy into the album. She said: “There are not any songs explicitly about the pandemic in the album. But I think music has definitely shifted tone.” She does make one promise: “There will be no pandemic pop!”
With vaccine passports being debated, and the prospect of outdoor music gigs on the horizon, Peters is already planning her first night out after lockdown.
“I would metaphorically run out and play a show. But logistically speaking, you can’t just run out and play a show,” she said. “So what will actually happen is on that day, I will go to the pub and stay there for about three days. And then come home, make some more music and stay in my bedroom.”
“That’s gonna be the irony. I’ll probably still spend loads of time in my bedroom.”
