The musician exhibits a natural songwriting ability that matures as she experiments. Dean doesn’t feel like she has to box herself into a certain genre this early on in her career. “I think that’s boring,” she explains. This summer she even toyed with soundtracking sports tournaments with the anthemic official Lioness track for the World Cup.
“Usually I write for myself, which is really small and personal and specific. But this needed to be for everybody. I want primary school girls to sing in the playground, and people to chant this in the park or the stadium,” she explains.
While that might have seemed like a random partnership, Dean is really into football herself. A key way of bonding with her Dad in childhood was going to West Ham games, and when England plays she loves hosting people at her house. The rise of the Lionesses was also something that inspired Dean. “When I was younger, there wasn’t such a public facing women’s football team. A young girl seeing that on the TV doesn’t need to think ‘oh I can do that’, she just needs to know that she can,” she says. Clearly despite not sharing the same craft the team’s determination to show that young women can achieve the same as their male counterparts is a story that resonates.
While she is a stellar recording artist, performing in front of a live audience is what really drives Dean’s passion for music. At school she felt “annoying”. “I was that kid that always wanted to sing in assembly,” she says. Then she was accepted by the Brit school, and found that being in a performing arts environment where everyone is the “same type of annoying” really transformed her into a less muted version of herself. “I realised I wasn’t lame, I just like entertaining people.” While its alumni include Adele, Tom Holland, and Amy Winehouse could be intimidating but she found it encouraging.
Being in a performance art environment means that in lockdown when gigs were impossible in enclosed spaces, Olivia drove round the country in an old milk truck to do a string of free shows for a nation deprived of live music. “I felt very lucky because live music makes people feel good,” she says. “Plus concerts are getting expensive, Jesus Christ.”
BRIT also gave her the confidence to go on a journey of re-evaluating her self image. It was around the time that she attended the school that she stopped straightening her hair everyday, which she had felt was the only way to feel beautiful. “I was so irritated by my hair and didn’t know how to style it, how to look after it. I felt like the odd one out and just frustrated,” she says.
Now she enjoys wearing it naturally large and even experimenting with sculptural looks created by her hair stylist. “I suddenly just fell in love with how versatile my hair was,” she says. “I haven’t straightened my hair for four or five years. I would never again, actually, as an act of rebellion.” Olivia caveats that women can experiment with their look as part of their own journey towards defining how they want to look but because her choice came from a place of not loving her truest form she’s ready to let the process of “sizzling” her tresses go.