She’s Amy Winehouse’s best friend and has seen the dark side of extreme fame
at first hand. This has made the singer-songwriter Remi Nicole cautious,
particularly now, as she stands poised to relaunch herself into the
limelight. Nicole’s first album bombed. If you do know her name, it is most
likely because, as well as Winehouse, she counts Nick Grimshaw, Agyness Deyn
and Alexa Chung, friends garnered from her first roll of the celebrity dice,
among her closest cohorts. But it frustrates her that she is best known for
her “celebrity friends” , and on the eve of the release of her second album,
it’s not doing her any favours. “I feel I’ve made a really good album, and
because of the people I hang out with, it’s being overshadowed,” she says,
with a north London schoolgirl inflection. Signed to Island Records off the
back of a song she wrote “because I was young and bored”, and offered a
“huge” publishing deal (which she spent on a three-bedroom house in a
converted church in Highbury), her first album, My Conscience and I, got
lost, with Lily Allen, Winehouse, Adele and Duffy emerging around the same
time. “I let a lot of people down. And I felt guilty for taking all that
money and not delivering,” she says. Luckily for Nicole, Island has given
her a second chance.
» full story
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