‘I was so self-assured in my early 20s. Then my frontal lobe hit’: Rachel Chinouriri, every pop star’s favourite UK pop star

​She faced racist bullying as a child – then pigeonholing as an artist.

Now following up a hit debut album championed by the A-list, the Croydon singer-songwriter says she finally understands who she really is In October 2017, Rachel Chinouriri had her first panic attack. It couldn’t have come at a worse time.

She’d just landed her first major gig as a professional musician, supporting Celeste at the London members’ club Laylow.

Out of nowhere, she began to spiral. “I don’t know what happened,” she says. “I just started having a mental breakdown.” Her manager told her to go home, try again next time.

But that only made things worse. “I started feeling like I was wasting everyone’s time,” she says. “I started feeling ashamed.” It would be better, she decided, to go on stage and sing, “half crying”.

Tears were already a familiar response to Chinouriri’s performance anxiety: the first time she sang in front of her classmates at the Brit school – the performing arts institution that trained Adele, Amy Winehouse and more – she burst into sobs afterwards.

A rather inconvenient habit for an aspiring pop star, but at least she front-loaded the humiliation at the start of her career. “That

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  ‘I was so self-assured in my early 20s. Then my frontal lobe hit’: Rachel Chinouriri, every pop star’s favourite UK pop star