It’s now been four years since Jesy Nelson shocked fans as she decided to quit Little Mix, the girl group she had formed with bandmates Leigh-Anne Pinnock, Jade Thirlwall and Perrie Edwards.
The foursome had auditioned separately for the 2011 series of The X Factor, but were eventually brought together as a band by the show’s judges.
They went on to sell an estimated 60 million records worldwide, also landing five UK number one singles and seven UK top 10 albums.
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After Nelson’s departure in 2020, the remaining bandmates decided to continue initially, only to announce their hiatus in 2022.
In recent years, various reports suggested Nelson was no longer on good terms with her former Little Mix friends, having apparently taken a swipe at the others during an online chat with Nicki Minaj.
Now Edwards, 31, has spoken out about where things stand now, admitting she hasn’t spoken to Nelson for ‘a long time’.
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In a new interview with Cosmopolitan, the star recalled how the band’s hiatus came around the same time that her own priorities changed, having welcomed her first child with partner Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain – a son named Axel – nine months beforehand.
“Myself and Leigh-Anne [who welcomed twins just days before Edwards in 2021] found it really hard at first,” she said.
Ever since, the Little Mix gang have all been supportive of one another’s solo projects, with Edwards saying: “We still message each other in our group chat, and that’s important to me. They were like sisters for 10 years, and I looked up to them a lot.
“Jade and I are on the same record label, and the release dates for my second single and her first single were meant to be on the same day. So I went straight to her to ask, ‘Babe, what’s the craic? This is your moment.’
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“If I’m doing promo, it doesn’t seem right, so I’d rather go quiet – I didn’t want it to look like I was maliciously releasing a song on her debut. It’s important to me that we don’t have that kind of overlap.”
However, there is, of course, one exception.
Speaking about where her relationship with Nelson stands now, Edwards admitted: “We don’t talk, and haven’t done for a long time.
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“It’s really sad, it’s heartbreaking. But sometimes these things happen and people decide they want to part ways, and that’s absolutely fine. I would rather it went differently, but you can’t control how things go.”
In spite of their more recent dynamic, she said the decade the band spent together as some ‘the happiest time’ of her life.
"All we did was laugh together, banter together, cry together,” Edwards added.
“It was so much fun. Yes we went through a lot in those 10 years, but we had each other.”
Topics: Celebrity, Jesy Nelson, Little Mix, Music
Jess Hardiman