When Georgia Meek was 18, she moved away from her parents for the first time to share a place with her boyfriend.  

“I was totally naive, didn’t know right from wrong really at the time and this guy was just awful,” the singer, now 23, tells me. “I was literally just trapped for two years in this absolute hell.”

What should have been an exciting step into young adulthood quickly turned into a nightmare when Meek’s boyfriend began being emotionally and physically abusive towards her. The singer-songwriter’s new single, a pop ballad called Bare, details this time with raw, uncomfortable honesty. 

Meek reveals that the lyrics: “You can call me fat and ugly but it won’t ever damage my esteem / You can hit my head again against a surface but you’ll never hurt me”, are drawn directly from her own experience. 

“He grabbed the back of my head and hit it against my kitchen side,” she recalls. “The cuff that I was wearing on my ear dug so far into my ear that my friend had to take me to A&E to have it cut out.”

Meek’s sound is reminiscent of Adele and Bare’s powerful chorus shares the haunting quality of many of the star’s hits. The character in the song’s video is shown escaping from her live-in boyfriend, just as Meek herself did two years after moving away from home. The singer, whose previous tracks Black Dog and Anti Social received play on Radio 1, says that as the song gathers traction, she knows that her ex could end up hearing it. 

“He would know it was about him but we haven’t spoken,” she says. “I basically, in the middle of the night, up and left and never looked back so I don’t know where he is now.”

“I phoned my friends to come and rescue me,” she continues. “That’s it, I have to just pack a bag, everything I need. Screw it, the bed sheets, the decorations, they can all stay, have them, they’re worth a lot less than my own self-esteem and my own life.”

Meek says it was important to her not to sugar-coat the reality of what she lived through at the hands of her ex. 

“I didn’t want to put too many metaphors in it or beat around the bush,” she explains. “This is something that is actually brutal and is happening every day all over London, why are we not speaking frankly about this like we do about everything else?”

Ultimately, Meek hopes her story will inspire others who feel like “they are not worth more than the situation that they’ve found themselves in”.

“It’s a song of liberation - no matter what happens or how dark things get or what you go through, you can always come out of the other side,” she says. “You do always deserve more.” 

Check out Georgia Meeks’ Soundcloud here.

Contact the 24-hour Domestic Violence Freephone Helpline on 0808 2000 247 or visit Women’s Aid for information and advice. 

Stylist’s Visible Women campaign is dedicated to raising awareness of women who’ve made a difference, celebrating their success, and empowering future generations to follow their lead. See more from Visible Women here.

Images: Futureproof Promotions