Born in Bromsgrove, Worcestershire, in 1994 and raised in Bewdley, Becky Hill is a singer and songwriter. She began making music at 14, performing in a band called Shaking Trees, before reaching the semifinals on the first series of The Voice UK. She has since had two top 10 albums and collaborated with David Guetta, Chase and Status, Joel Corry and Rudimental, and won the Brit award for best dance act in 2022 and 2023.
Her latest album, Rebecca, is out on 13 November. This was taken for a kids’ modelling agency, which we later discovered was a scam. Every stage of the process – getting pictures taken, sending them to the agency, getting them back – cost us more money.
We’d wire over £100 and get nothing in return. Our family wasn’t rich, so Mum didn’t tell Dad what we were up to – he probably doesn’t even know about it to this day. As for my modelling ambitions, I never pursued it further.
I was cute until the age of seven, then started to go on the turn. I was a happy, chatty child, but my home life was quite dysfunctional. My parents were on their second marriages, I was their first baby together, and they had five children between the two of them – some lived with us, some didn’t.
There was a lot of moving about – a lot of arguing, too, but I always, always felt loved. Everyone had their own taste in music: Mum listened to cassette tapes of Foreigner, Eric Clapton and the Eagles; my sister gave me her computer full of all her downloaded music; and my brother liked Eminem, Blink-182, Slipknot and drum’n’bass. I was always a mummy’s girl, and she and I would go to acting, singing and dancing classes together.
She wanted me to find something I was passionate about, as I was bullied at school. I kept my singing a secret mostly, but when I was 11 there was a talent show at school and I performed JoJo’s Leave (Get Out) in front of all the parents. I’ll never forget the feeling of singing that song and realising that everyone’s jaws were on the floor.
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