Perrie Edwards experienced “excitement mixed with nervousness mixed with sheer dread” when she went solo.
Little Mix went on hiatus in 2022 following Jesy Nelson’s departure in December 2020 and the remaining three members, Perri, Leigh-Anne Pinnock and Jade Thirlwall, all decided to release their own music.
Perrie’s first three solo singles, ‘Forget About Us’, ‘Tears’ and ‘You Go Your Way’, have been well received but she was riddled with angst about stepping out on her own.
Speaking to the Metro newspaper, she said: “The emotions were crazy. It’s excitement mixed with nervousness mixed with sheer dread.
“I’m the worst person at stepping out of my comfort zone. It’s something that I don’t ever choose to do.. I used to sit back quite a lot in the group with decision-making and things like that… I’ve had to step up.”
Perrie, 31, and her Little Mix bandmates were formed on Simon Cowell’s TV talent show ‘The X Factor’ in 2011.
And she has now shared her thoughts on the influence of TikTok on the music industry and she thinks the social media platform has been a damaging force.
The pop star is a regular poster on the platform and she has 1.5 million followers but has bemoaned how it has shortened people’s attention spans to the point that music bosses asked her to make her latest single ‘You Go Your Way’ only two minutes long to appeal to TikTok users.
Perrie told Euphoria magazine: “I think it’s absolutely effing up everyone’s attention spans.
“People don’t want to hold a conversation for longer than five seconds because they’d rather swipe to the next thing.
“It’s kind of killing the music industry. I’m gonna be honest.
“Someone asked me whether we should crunch ‘You Go Your Way’ down and make it shorter and I was, ‘No. It’s long because there’s so much music going on.’ Music is art. Why are we trying to do it quickly?”
Perrie has also reflected on how the promotion of music has changed since Little Mix were crowned the winners of ‘The X Factor’.
She said: “It’s a different time. When we first came out, we were in HMV every other week doing signings.
“People were buying our albums, buying our songs. Streaming wasn’t even a thing. When we release a song now, we sit there for the week twiddling our thumbs making TikToks.”