Charlotte Church was “made to feel like a product” of the music industry.
The 38-year-old soprano was discovered as something of a child prodigy in the late 1990s and released the multi-million-selling operatic album ‘Voice of an Angel’ at the age of 12 but admitted that now she wishes she had more “confidence” in her own creativity.
She told Britain’s OK! Magazine: “I look back and I wish I would have had enough confidence in myself, my creativity and my convictions to have been a bit more confident in my voice and my music and my choices rather than being made to feel like a product.”
Charlotte went on to release a further three albums centred around the classical genre before turning to a short-lived pop career with tracks like ‘Crazy Chick’ but reflected that because she had just been “plucked” from a small town in Wales, her entire life since has been a “process” of adjusting to global fame.
She said: “But my family and I were really inexperienced – we were just totally plucked out of working class Wales and put on this global stage so it’s been a process of shedding the stuff that didn’t work for us and for me – being a product.”
Charlotte has not released an album since 2010’s ‘Back to Scratch’ and now wants to focus on the stories of the working class with her new BBC Sounds podcast ‘Kicking Back with the Cardiffians’.
She said: “Our culture is constantly reflecting back at us the lives of the super wealthy and super privileged but actually the working class experience is what the vast majority of us are having.“
“I felt those real working class stories just aren’t being told enough but it’s so important we see ourselves in other people – it helps us understand who we are.”