Charli XCX has suffered “nerve damage” from her ‘Brat Tour’.
The ‘Guess’ hitmaker’s live performance are highly energetic with the 32-year-old pop superstar twerking and thrusting herself all over the stage during her high-octane performances – including gyrating under pouring rain – and she has now revealed she’s caused herself a lot of “physical” harm in the process of delighting her fans.
She told Variety’s Hitmakers issue: “I’ve done a lot of physical damage to my body from performing.
“Genuinely, physically, I have nerve damage in my neck from things that I’ve done onstage.
“For me to give a performance that I feel is good enough, I have to really physically throw myself around — and that makes me very upset when I do it.”
Charli – who is known for being a party girl – admits she doesn’t get much shuteye these days.
She quipped: “But I also don’t really sleep these days. 2020… um, what year is it?
“2024 has not been a very restful year, for sure.”
Elsewhere, the ‘360’ hitmaker admitted she resolved a “tricky situation” by collaborating with New Zealand pop star Lorde – whose real name is Ella Yelich – on a remix of her viral ‘Brat’ album’s track ‘Girl, So Confusing’ after years of comparing herself to the ‘Royals’ hitmaker.
She said: “For Girl, So Confusing, the second I wrote it I was like, ‘I need Ella [Lorde] to be on a remix of this song.’ But I didn’t know how to approach it because obviously it’s a tricky situation.
And when I finally did, she actually suggested, ‘Maybe I should do a verse.’ Within 24 or 48 hours she came back with that incredible verse, which made me really, really emotional.”
The song includes the lyrics: “Sometimes I think I might hate you / Maybe you just wanna be me and ‘People say we’re alike / They say we’ve got the same hair / We talk about making music / But I don’t know if it’s honest.”
The ‘Blame It On Your Love’ singer previously admitted she feared Lorde would “hate” her for not telling her the song was about her.
Charli previously admitted she was “jealous” of Lorde for her success with her debut single ‘Royals’, which came out in 2013, the same year Charli released her debut album ‘True Romance’, which failed to reach the Top 40.
In a candid interview with Rolling Stone UK, Charli said: “When ‘Royals’ came out, I was super jealous of the success that that song got, and that Ella got. You piece all this stuff together in your brain, like: ‘She was into my music. She had big hair; I had big hair. She wore black lipstick; I once wore black lipstick.’ You create these parallels and think, ‘Well, that could have been me.’ But it couldn’t have because we’re completely different people. I wasn’t making music that sounded anything like ‘Royals’. I think you just read what you want into it because you’re feeling insecure about your own work.”