It has generally been the case that members of boy bands have to say they are single, even when they aren’t, to increase their desirability among their ravenous fanbase. The singledom of Sussex’s Maisie Peters has a different kind of value to the young women who occupy the vast majority of the floorspace at her concerts. She’s dodging the same romantic bear traps as they are, and expressing the thrills and the pain more succinctly, inevitably with a singalong chorus to boot.
An aspiring teen novelist before she went the YouTuber route instead, and now in her early twenties, she has reached a level where she can play the Pyramid stage at Glastonbury on June 23, support Ed Sheeran in stadiums and headline Wembley Arena in the autumn. As she releases her second album she still hasn’t had a top 40 single, but well over half a million TikTok followers is a better indicator of her sway with the kids.
