When Mae Muller was seven years old, she wrote a song. No, not the song that would eventually represent the UK in the 2023 Eurovision Song Contest, but a Florence and the Machine-esque ballad about her childhood crush. “I found the diary I wrote it in and it’s hilarious,” she tells me from a hotel room in Liverpool where she will soon take the stage in front of millions. “I thought I was embodying Florence and I was writing about my ‘boyfriend’ that would turn into a werewolf in the middle of the night.” She may have been a child, but Muller understood the importance of artistic licence even then. “Who had a boyfriend at seven years old? Definitely not me.”
Besides that ode-to-a-werewolf from her youth, Muller wasn’t your average stroppy teen channelling angst into songwriting. In fact, the north Londoner has said she was a relatively “late bloomer”, only beginning to set her thoughts to music when she was 19, releasing demos on SoundCloud while pulling pints in a pub. It was another six years before she penned “I Wrote A Song”, the uber-catchy dance-pop hit she hopes will take the UK to Eurovision victory on Saturday night. Hear it, with its Dua Lipa-like melodies and resolutely buoyant chorus, and you’ll never cry over a cheating ex again. Or at least for a while.
