L Devine: "Young girls need to hear another young girl talking about the fact that she's horny and owning it"

It's a tale as old as time: a girl moving to the big city to follow her dreams. Dreams that every parent eyes with suspicion because they are simply too big, because the chance of them actually coming true is one in a million. But here is a girl who followed through, who's making her dreams reality. A girl whose third live performance was a slot at BBC's Big Weekend. L Devine. Newcastle's coolest pop star and Charli XCX's vision of ‘The Motherfucking Future'.

Ever since releasing her second EP 'Peer Pressure', L Devine has been on a steady rise. "It's still very surreal. You're always onto the next thing, and everything goes by so quick. I was so overwhelmed by the show the other night, and now I'm like ‘right, when's the next one?' Get my thinking cap on and try to top it, but it's unbelievable. I'm so happy with how everything's going, and I'm just really excited."

And she has every reason to be excited: sold out headline shows in Newcastle and London and a slot at this year's Big Weekend in Middlesbrough mark the start of her journey as a live performer. A start that most artist can only dream of. Talking about her Middlesbrough adventure, she says: "It was definitely a bucket list moment, just to be on the line-up next to those huge names like Miley Cyrus and Billie Eilish. And if you look at other artists who have played the BBC Introducing Stage in the past years, it's so cool to be recognised by the BBC."

But let's start at the beginning. As she puts it, Liv got into music by copying a friend. "I always thought he was really cool, and he picked up the guitar so I thought I should do it, too. Then I just kinda got the bug for it, and I got really into writing music. I'm pretty impatient. I didn't want to spend all my days looking at YouTube tutorials on how to learn other people's songs, so I just made my own up." Growing up in Whitley Bay, by Newcastle, Liv was surrounded by a culture that was very big on alternative and indie music, but her first songs were all very singer-songwriter. "That was all I had. Me and my guitar in my bedroom. Then I realised that I listened to so much music and I would get tired pretty quickly sticking to just one genre. That's when I became interested in production and a lot of electronic music. Because I had been playing guitar so much, I was so excited about weird sounds and unique beats. I guess I got into pop music, not because I listen to it more than other genres, but because pop music is the one you can bend the most. It doesn't really have any boundaries. You can constantly reinvent what it is and what it means to you."