The meteoric rise of Billie Eilish

may be the most talked-about teenager in the world right now. Acknowledged as an extraordinary talent by everyone from Elton John to Thom Yorke, the 17-year-old has no fewer than 14 songs in the US singles chart, and last weekend performed her explosive, genre-defying music to a huge crowd at Glastonbury (backed by her brother and collaborator Finneas O’Connell). Astonishingly creative and fortified by an impregnable self-belief, she is “by a long way the coolest human being I have ever met”, said Decca Aitkenhead in The Sunday Times. She is also a child, who still lives with her parents in their modest house in LA. Her mother worries about her constantly – and even Eilish admits that fame isn’t what she imagined. Eighteen months ago, she had lots of friends; now she has only “one or two” left and has started going to therapy to have someone to talk to. She owns more Nike trainers than she could have dreamt of, but can’t leave the house without a security team; and she certainly doesn’t dare express herself online. Everything in her life is different. “Something people say is, ‘I’m still the same me.’ I feel like, no, you’re not. You really are not. How could you be? You know when you see stories about little kids who’ve had past lives? I feel like that. I remember everything about who I was, but I don’t recognise that person any more. Around when I turned 16, I died, and I got reincarnated as Billie Eilish.”