Maisi

Maisi
Maisi performing in London, 2024
Background information
Birth name	Maisie Harriet Brand Bourke
Born	South-east London
Occupations	Singer songwriter social media personality
Member of	Loud LDN

Maisie Harriet Brand Bourke, known professionally as Maisi, is a British musician and social media personality from south-east London. The daughter of Jo Brand, she co-founded Loud LDN, a collective of women and non-binary musicians, and has released several singles and supported Piri & Tommy on their Froge.tour. She has also gone viral on TikTok for her attempts at addressing her boyfriend's restrictive eating.

Maisie Harriet Brand Bourke^[1] was born in King's College Hospital^[2] to comedian Jo Brand and Bernie Bourke, both former psychiatric nurses.^[3] She grew up in south-east London^[4] and has a younger sister,^[5] Eliza.^[2] She started writing songs when she was eleven^[6] and initially wanted to be a songwriter,^[4] however after attending the London branch of British and Irish Modern Music Institute,^[7] she found herself surrounded by others interested in performing and realised she also wanted to perform.^[4] In the first week of the course in 2019, she met Alfie Richer,^[8] an Essex-based musician who performs as Essex Blonde;^[9] she later started dating him.^[8]

At the start of 2022, after seeing that Piri had moved from Manchester to London, Bourke reached out to her as she felt she would benefit from having local friends.^[10] After discovering Coupdekat via TikTok,^[11] she met her for brunch, where they discussed the loneliness of being a woman in the music industry and how they were often pitted against each other.^[4] This prompted the pair to set up a group chat^[11] on WhatsApp^[12] called Ladies Making Noise in London for the women and non-binary musicians they knew at that time.^[11] Initially starting with ten musicians including Piri^[11] and Matilda Cole,^[13] the adding of other members caused the member list to grow to forty people, prompting them to set up an Instagram page, Loud LDN.^[4] Coupdekat used a June 2023 interview to note that the chat had "120 members", and that it had moved to Discord.^[14]

By May 2022, she had released two songs, "Guess I'm In Love" and "Yellow Line"; that month, Kent and Sussex Courier reported that they had been streamed "nearly 60,000" and "over 50,000" times respectively.^[6] "Yellow Line" was a reference to road markings and explored the regret Bourke felt after only saying a quick goodbye to Richer at a train platform on 23 March 2020, the day before the pair were prohibited from seeing each other by the territory's Health Protection (Coronavirus, Restrictions) (England) Regulations 2020.^[7]

In June 2022, she released the single "Quick Fixes", a song about cosmetic adverts she had seen online for expensive skin care, diets, health food, and facial fillers, and was her attempt at conveying their superfluity.^[15] On 8 November 2022,^[16] she supported Piri & Tommy on the Scala leg of their Froge.tour.^[10] By August 2023, she had released "123", which had seen use in over 3,000 TikTok videos.^[10] That month, she and Piri released "Head",^[17] a drum and bass song written about their feelings about success going to artists' heads, and which was promoted with a video directed, produced, and edited by Maisi.^[10] That November, she supported Piri on her "Extra Hot" tour.^[18]

Bourke maintains a TikTok account, "yoitsmaisi", on which Brand^[6] and Piri sometimes feature.^[10] She went viral in January 2023^[19] after a video from her "Teaching My BF to Eat" TikTok series,^[20] in which she attempted to diversify Richer's meals beyond chicken nuggets and chips, was viewed over 1,000,000 times;^[19] the series attracted coverage from the Daily Mail, The Sun and the Daily Mirror. By August 2023, her restrictive eating series had been viewed over 20,000,000 times,^[10] and by April 2024, she had 160,000 followers.^[5] In 2022, she and Richer ran that year's Maldon mud race for Macmillan Cancer Support, following the deaths from cancer of her uncle and Sean Lock;^[21] Maldon Nub noted in May 2023 that they had raised "more than £2,200".^[22] The pair ran the race again in 2023; on both occasions, the race was started by Brand,^[22] who had attempted to run the race with Lock in 2010.^[21]

Bourke has cited lyrical inspiration from Lily Allen and Baby Queen, and musical inspiration from Charli XCX, Baby Queen, Dylan, and Mimi Webb.^[7] In a February 2022 interview with Fred Perry, she named Amy Winehouse as a "massive songwriting and artistic inspiration", specifically how candid her lyrics were, and how she was as a person. She also stated that she had taken inspiration from the Lorde lyric "They'll hang us in the Louvre, down the back, but who cares-still the Louvre" from "The Louvre", and that goth culture had influenced her "a bit" when she was younger, as she had wanted to mimic Lorde after hearing her album Pure Heroine.^[23] "Yellow Line" was inspired by Baby Queen's EP Medicine, which she had discovered shortly before recording the track, as well as several Charli XCX tracks.^[23]