“Delusional” is the word Leigh-Anne Pinnock uses to describe herself when she first appeared on The X Factor, aged 19. When I mention that I had just been watching the Little Mix star’s audition video to prep for this interview, she cuts in: “Oh Jesus Christ.”
It’s a bit different from the clips of, say, Harry Styles or Leona Lewis, who walk out slightly shy or unsure of themselves. Pinnock, who worked at Pizza Hut at the time, stridently declares: “I wanna be the next big thing. I want to be a pop icon,” before launching into Rihanna’s “Only Girl in the World”, in which she belts, jumps and marches around the stage.
“I had so much energy,” she tells me today, with the clearer, gentler tone that comes with over a decade’s experience in the industry. Her voice is still bright and upbeat, and she speaks informally. “I was just so determined.”
Hindsight is, of course, kind to Pinnock. After she was placed in Little Mix during The X Factor in 2011, the girl group went on to become one of the most successful in history. They amassed a dizzying number of accolades: first group to win The X Factor, first female group to win a group award at The Brit Awards, seven MTV Europe awards, the most awarded act at the Global Awards, five UK No 1s, billions of views on their YouTube videos over the course of 10 years.
Leigh-Anne Pinnock, headlining last year’s Manchester Pride, is now releasing her first solo album (Photo: Shirlaine Forrest/WireImage)
The pop group, made up of Pinnock, Perrie Edwards, Jade Thirlwall and Jesy Nelson, quickly achieved a kind of millennial omnipresence – with “Shout out to My Ex” blaring through the airwaves and the nation’s clubs for the best part of 2017.
But Pinnock’s confidence was a source of tension for her in childhood. Growing up in the small Buckinghamshire town of High Wycombe, she had initially been painfully shy. “I would literally hide behind my dad’s legs and say I hated people – that’s how shy I was,” she says. Her camera is turned off on our video call, which she is joining from Brazil, so I turn mine off too to be polite.
“As I got a bit older, I realised that I wanted to sing, and [thought], how can I be a singer if I am so shy?” Pinnock struggled to look at the crowd while singing, looking at the floor, with the backing track playing too loud. She started singing in talent shows, debating in class and standing up for her friends more.
“I think I developed some haters from standing up for my friends, and then all of a sudden their beef was my beef.” To make matters worse, Pinnock was telling everyone she was going to be a pop star. She recalls singing in a youth group in her local theatre, the Wycombe Swan, and being heckled during her solo. “A girl in the audience just went: ‘dead!’” she cries out. “[It was] a girl that I was having some trouble with.” She wonders whether people saw her newfound confidence as arrogant: “Maybe people might have thought, ‘Oh, she thinks she’s too nice.’”
These reflections around confidence, and what it means to stick your head above the parapet, are returning for Pinnock as she breaks away from Little Mix to go solo. The group has been on indefinite hiatus since 2022, two years after band member Jesy Nelson quit, citing struggles with her mental health. Since then, each of the stars has released solo material, and Pinnock, Edwards and Thirlwall have been followed by speculation surrounding Nelson’s departure – with the star claiming in a documentary last week that she was not supported by the band members, and that another member had wanted to leave before her.
As the only black member of Little Mix, Leigh Anne Pinnock (second left) says she struggled to find her place (Photo: Jo Hale / Redferns)
Pinnock will be the third to release a full-length album, provocatively titled: My Ego Told Me To. The journey to getting it released has not been straightforward – Pinnock fell out with Warner Records during production and parted ways with them in 2025. They’d been working on “Most Wanted”, a dancehall-infused song, which ultimately features Jamaican artists Valiant and Rvssian. Partially written in her grandfather’s homeland of Jamaica, lots of the album feels Caribbean, but this song particularly so, with patois lyrics and an energetic beat.
After lots of back and forth on the song, Pinnock says the label ghosted her. “They just kept making me do versions and it was taking the essence out of the song,” she says. “I hadn’t had a single out in a year and was getting really worried… and then all of a sudden they’re ghosting us, and nothing’s moving forward.
“I just don’t understand how people can treat humans like that. Like this is my career, it’s my life and you’re just making me feel disposable,” she says gravely. “Yes it’s a business, but we are still humans… it’s just not cool.”
After that, she went to Amsterdam and worked with producers Clarence “Coffee” Jr and Owen Cutts. Writing in a “rage”, she made “Dead and Gone”, “Look Into My Eyes” and “Revival” – three other songs with reggae, dancehall and lovers’ rock samples and references. “All of these tracks have this kind of assurance and… attitude about them,” she tells me. “I’ve never really had that in a song before… it just felt really unique… everything felt like mine.”
Pinnock was excited that she’d finally found her sound, and felt that Warner would be happier with the result. But the label said no. “They said they don’t think it’s going to do what I think it’s going to do.” Pinnock went independent: “I was like, ‘Cool, all right, bye, I need to get out of here… it’s just crazy at this point.’”
She tells me: “I feel like a lot of labels don’t put trust in mixed black women that are doing black music… I think that’s something that needs to be spoken about.”
In Little Mix, Pinnock had struggled to find her place. “I went through a stage [of]: ‘Oh, should I be the sexy one? Should I wear the snapbacks?’” she says. “I don’t know, it didn’t really ever feel like it was right.”
This search for identity and individuality is a well-trodden path for girl band members, but Pinnock’s was complicated by her position as the only black member of the band. At public appearances, she says fans would chant other band members’ names, and just walk past her. It got to the point where she’d make self-deprecating jokes about herself: “They don’t care about me anyway.”
She says that, in hindsight, it’s obvious that it was to do with race. But, again, unsure of herself, Pinnock felt she needed to change. “I was still thinking, ‘Oh God, maybe I just need to improve. Maybe I don’t talk enough in interviews.’ I tried everything,” she says. “I got extra vocal lessons, I was trying to be funnier… It was crazy. I was picking myself apart.”
In 2021, following the global Black Lives Matter protests, Pinnock made a BBC documentary Race, Pop and Power, in which she uncovered shared experiences with other black singers like Alexandra Burke and Sugababes’ Keisha Buchanan. She also talked about it to bandmate Jade, who is mixed Egyptian, Yemeni and English. Pinnock was on a journey: the documentary features clips of her watching videos about anti-racism while furiously notetaking. She tells me that reading Reni Eddo-Lodge’s bestseller Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race was a turning point for her.
Certain experiences from The X Factor started to fall into place. “I remember a couple of times my lines got taken away,” she tells me, recounting another moment when she felt she was being made to audition again. For her makeover on the show, the producers shaved the side of her head and dyed the rest of her hair red, to mimic Rihanna. She wrote in her 2023 memoir Believe: “Rather than encourage me to be myself… they tried to simply copy and paste an identity from somewhere else.”
Discussions about race have a complicated gravitational pull. Sometimes you want to talk about it and you’re silenced, other times you don’t want to talk about it and you’re made to. At one point, when Pinnock and I are getting deep into the subject of race, her PR representative moves us on, asking if we could talk about the music, and I wonder what kind of instance this one might be.
We move on, but it’s all there mixed up in the music: Pinnock trying to find her own identity as a mixed-race black person – but within that, being a unique individual in her own right. Songs on My Ego Told Me To oscillate between a tender uncertainty and unabashed confidence, perhaps best summed up by the mid-album lyric “I’m fighting for the best version of me”. On the album cover, Pinnock has returned to her fiery red X Factor hair.
Despite her distance from speculation surrounding Little Mix, Pinnock proudly claims the fallout with her label as an exercise in self-determination, a callback to her younger self. “Where is that younger version who wouldn’t take no for an answer, [who] would stand up for herself and wouldn’t let doubts creep in?” she asks me. “She was that delusional, determined, fierce girl. I just felt like I needed to bring that back.”
‘My Ego Told Me To’ is out now
Your next read
