‘I accomplished my dream. Why did I feel invisible?’: Leigh-Anne Pinnock on Little Mix, racism in pop, and going solo

Leigh-Anne Pinnock sits across from me in her manager’s office, curls piled in a half-bun on top of her head, dressed from head to toe in green. It’s Pinnock’s favourite colour – one of the many details shared in her memoir, Believe, written in collaboration with author Natalie Morris. For the last decade, Pinnock has enjoyed phenomenal success as a member of Little Mix, the girl group formed on The X Factor in 2011. From the outset, Little Mix were underdogs, expected to exit the competition in the first week. Against all odds, they became the first band (and only girl group) to win. Against even greater odds, the four-piece went on to stake their claim in the pop history books as one of the UK’s biggest ever girl bands, racking up billions of streams, five chart-topping singles and three Brit awards, including best British group in 2021 – the first ever win for a girl group in that category. Pinnock’s life story, a working-class-to-riches yarn about a young girl whose dreams of pop superstardom came true, reads like a fairytale. And indeed there are touches of magic sprinkled through the pages of Believe. But in every fairytale there are malevolent forces at work,