Trending 13th November 2018 by Cara Croke

Simon Cowell Has Responded To Claims That Little Mix Were Told To ‘Flirt’ With Industry Figures By His Record Label

The girl group recently left Simon's record label Syco.

Over the weekend news broke that Little Mix have ditched Simon Cowell’s record label Syco and moved to fellow Sony label RCA. The Sun reported that the girl gang cut ties with the label over disagreements with their original X Factor mentor Simon Cowell. The girls also told The Sun about their negative experiences in the industry as women.

Opening up about their experiences in the US, Jade Thirlwall said: “We went to a radio event in America, full of VIPs. Someone from the label said, ‘Go and flirt with all those important men.’

“I was like, ‘F*** off. Why have I got to go in and flirt to get my song on the radio?’”

The girlband are signed in the States by Columbia Records but did not specify the details of who asked them to flirt.

Jade continued: “In the beginning, we were told we shouldn’t be involved in our music videos. One producer told us we shouldn’t be writing, we should just be given songs.

“We realised we — as women — have to work ten times as hard, which is really bloody annoying cos we do write songs.”

In an interview with ASOS Magazine the band revealed that they also experienced sexism while on The X Factor in 2011.

“We weren’t even going to go through to live shows on X Factor, they didn’t believe a girlband could do it,” Leigh-Anne said.
The comments come after reports said Little Mix were unhappy with Syco as a label and expressed their concerns in a strongly worded email to Simon – which led to an epic row between him and their management firm Modes. Ultimately, the resulted in him cutting all ties with the company.
In response to the reports, Simon Cowell told The Sun that the row was actually over a songwriting credit on Little Mix’s latest single Woman Like Me.

“It was just embarrassing but, funnily enough, I was more annoyed, again, not about me, but about the fact people who had worked so hard in my company were being misrepresented.

“Why do artists think they’re more important than staff members? They’re not. They’re the same.

“The irony was the record they were arguing about, which is Woman Like Me, they didn’t want to record. This was one of those ironic times that we were having a hit and nobody was happy.”

Simon explained: “It wasn’t down to money. Basically, they said we’d done a terrible job. I had agreed not to talk about this publicly because I thought it was a private matter. I said, ‘We can’t work with the management, it’s as simple as that’.

“Everyone’s like, ‘There must have been something massive and that’s why it collapsed’. Well, I can show you all the correspondence between me and the girls over the years, there’s never been an instance when we’ve fallen out.”

He then continued to say:

“As I said in my email to them, I stand by the fact they are the hardest working bunch of girls I’ve ever worked with. They deserve everything they’ve got.”

In response to the flirting claims made by the girls, Simon said, “If we’d have known about that at the time, whoever said that, he or she would have been fired.”
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