Like Chappell Roan before her, UK musician Georgia Meek has had people comment on how fast her career has taken off, like it’s an overnight viral moment rather than a yearslong process.
Under the stage moniker MEEK—a perfect misnomer for the bold, straight-shooting Brit—the singer is on the cusp of breaking it big, the culmination of years of playing, studying, writing music in bands, for other artists, and for herself. Her song “Fabulous,” an anthemic pop single about personal style as a salve for hard times, is a hit. She’s topped the Spotify Viral and Shazam Charts, and soundtracked the first trailer for the upcoming Elle Fanning AppleTV+ dramedy, Margot’s Got Money Troubles. MEEK sat front row at London Fashion Week and had a showcase at SXSW. In April, she’ll play her first headline show, at London’s iconic venue The Garage.
“I'm like, hello, I've been in training for this,” she tells Teen Vogue on a video call from Austin, where she’ll perform four shows around SXSW. “All I needed was for somebody to open the runway and I was like, ‘Let’s f*cking fly.'”
Meek, who is 31, says she’s recently been told by some people to lie about her age: “I'm like, ‘No, man. I think that's so sh*t.’ Also," she continues, "it's a disservice to other working-class kids, I think. It f*cking takes time. It takes so much time and so much rejection. There's no point in trying to pull the wool over people's eyes and be like, ‘I'm 25.’”
She grew up “on the edge” of a council estate—British public housing—in a village in the middle of nowhere, she says. Her mom and grandmother owned a local dress shop that sold wedding dresses, which created a sort of “fantasy world” of beautiful, extravagant gowns in her mind, a contrast to her life as a working-class kid going through “horrible stuff.” Her dad passed away when she was 16 years old. She had family members who struggled with substance abuse and went to prison. “I just was, honestly, always this weird kid with their head in the clouds that was just trying to get by,” Meek recalls.
At 14, she started working as a waitress at a local restaurant. Later, when she began releasing music professionally in her late teens and early 20s, she worked multiple jobs to support her career. “I was making music that was getting onto Radio 1, but I was still doing a shift at Costa Coffee at 5:00 a.m. and then going to the studio,” she remembers. “When I finished at the studio, I'd go and work behind the bar at a music venue in North London. It was constant. When you grow up like that, it's not something you realize you have to do, it's something that is instilled in you.”
But the music part always came naturally. When she was 11 or 12, Meek entered herself in a talent show for kids, which her mom fully expected to be like that scene in About a Boy when Hugh Grant has to go in and save Nicholas Hoult’s character from a tragic performance.
“At this point, I had a small ginger Afro and Harry Potter spectacles,” she says. “My mom was thinking she was going to have to pick up the pieces from this thing for years to come.” Instead, young Georgia sang Dido’s “White Flag” and kind of killed it. “It's the first time I'd ever got up on a stage. After that, I just kind of ran with it.”
When she was 15, she started playing with a band of “nerdy but cool” boys who called themselves Clockwork City. Playing Paramore and Busted covers unlocked something in her. At 18, she moved to London and studied music performance, writing songs and learning to produce. She tried being in a DJ duo. She joined a band with two girls who were in a relationship. (“It was the f*cking worst situation ever,” she says with a laugh. “They would just fall out and I'd be like, ‘Guys, can we play a gig?’”)
She did get a record deal and a manager and released a few songs under her full name, but says the fit just wasn’t right; however, the experience did make her want to learn the business side of the industry. She interned in music PR. She learned contracts. She taught herself how to be her own sound engineer, booker, and promoter. She then got a master’s degree in production (and was the only woman in her cohort of about 30). When her current deal came along, she was ready.
“Every different thing I've thrown at the wall and hasn't stuck has got [me] a little closer every time,” she says. “As I've come through my 20s, each iteration of what I am and what I've been creating has become more authentic and less afraid, I suppose, and less narrated by other people around me. Because you do start to go, ‘F*ck off,’ don't you? When you get into your late 20s, you're like, ‘I just don't care what anybody thinks.’”
And that brings her to “Fabulous,” and the album she’s spent the past two years developing (no release date just yet, but she promises more is coming). She released the song under the name MEEK to mark an evolution of her music from what she was making previously. She went blonder. Now she goes out of her way to look completely herself, as she is at this moment. She has long been inspired by Lady Gaga, David Bowie, and Beyoncé, artists who fully commit to who they are and what they want to create. “Normal” is a dirty word for her. The pop-star package, she says, is really about finally having the time and resources to create what she’s wanted since she was a kid in her mom’s dress shop.
“It's having a team come in and be like, ‘We believe in you. Run,’” Meek says. This record marks the first time she was able to make music without also working other jobs. “I owe it to myself to make this the best thing anyone's ever seen, the best version of myself, the most incredible thing.’"
In the music video for “Fabulous,” MEEK sings about loving Vivienne Westwood while wearing something of an homage to the famous British designer. “I love everything British, post-punk, safety pins and tartans and leathers and graphic and hand-blown prints,” she says.
But the clothing she wears was largely pulled from her family’s shop, not from a runway. “It's still proper thrifty, all of it,” she notes. “I don't think you need to have loads of money to look fabulous. I think you just need to be creative and think out of the box and get your hands on stuff.”
At LFW, she bonded with Munroe Bergdorf at Patrick McDowell and realized that, though she hasn’t been going to these shows all her life, she’ll always find a group of “naughty, gay, loud, creative people” to cackle with in the corner of the spaces she never thought she’d be in.
“Anybody looking at somebody like me going around Fashion Week who maybe does come from a working-class background or isn't a skinny girl or isn't quiet, I just hope anybody that sees this just knows that there is absolutely always room for you," Meek says, "no matter who you are.” She met McDowell after the show, and the first thing he said to her was, “I love ‘Fabulous.’”
